[Marxism] Thomas Piketty Interview: Economist Discusses His Distaste for Marx | New Republic
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117655/thomas-piketty-interview-economist-discusses-his-distaste-marx Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Israeli Soldier Who Cocked Gun at West Bank Teens Sparks IDF Rebellion | VICE News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == https://news.vice.com/article/israeli-soldier-who-cocked-gun-at-west-bank-teens-sparks-idf-rebellion Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Alan Guth: What made the Big Bang bang - Magazine - The Boston Globe
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == How did something come out of nothing? http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/05/02/alan-guth-what-made-big-bang-bang/RmI4s9yCI56jKF6ddMiF4L/story.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Australian Socialist Alliance edges into the Putinite camp
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/6/14 9:30 AM, Nick Fredman wrote: For one thing a lot of Internet discussion has moved to Facebook, for good or ill. Really? Why don't you point me in the right direction since both the Links and Greenleft FB groups are pretty much the same thing as the Green Left Mailing list on Yahoo, a place for Terry to send out links to Links and Greenleft articles. I'd love to see some discussion about Ukraine on the Yahoo mailing list. From the looks of things there, Ilitis, Clarke, Annis and Kagarlitsky speak for your membership. I only hope that you people put the Borotba statement on Links for informational purposes since it is really toxic. Just about all the evidence it puts forward originated from Russia. I expect that Annis and Ilitis take this garbage seriously but anybody who hasn't drunk Putin's Kool-Aid would not. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Bandera and Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/6/14 9:33 AM, Paul Flewers wrote: I know Chris Ford well and readily acknowledge his expertise on the history of Ukraine, but I'm surprised that he wrote that 'put simply without Stalinism there would have been no Bandera'. The hard-line Ukrainian nationalism -- 'integralism', as it was often called -- that Bandera espoused was around well before Stalin's taking over the reins in Moscow, and the integralist OUN, of which Bandera became a major leader, was formed in 1929, that is, just as Stalin took over and some years before the famine in Soviet Ukraine, and Bandera had become its chief propaganda officer in 1931. No doubt the famine in Soviet Ukraine reinforced Bandera in his views, but he was an integralist well before it happened. Yes, in fact it was during the heroic days of the Comintern that hostility to communism--or at least a distorted form--took root. Let me refer to that FI article that I scanned in to remind you of the circumstances: http://louisproyect.org/2014/04/20/lenins-party-great-russian-chauvinism-and-the-betrayal-of-ukrainian-national-aspirations/ Skrypnyk, a personal friend of Lenin, and a realist always studying the relationship of forces, was seeking a minimum of Ukrainian federation with Russia and a maximum of national independence. In his opinion, it was the international extension of the revolution which would make it possible to resist in the most effective fashion the centralising Greater Russian pressure. At the head of the first Bolshevik government in the Ukraine he had had some very bitter experiences: the chauvinist behaviour of Muraviev, the commander of the Red Army who took Kiev, the refusal to recognize his government and the sabotage of his work by another commander, Antonov-Ovseyenko, for whom the existence of such a government was the product of fantasies about an Ukrainian nationality. In addition, Skrypnyk was obliged to fight bitterly for Ukrainian unity against the Russian Bolsheviks who, in several regions, proclaimed Soviet republics, fragmenting the country. The integration of Galicia into the Ukraine did not interest them either. The national aspiration to sobornist’, the unity of the country, was thus openly flouted. It was with the “Katerynoslavian” right wing of the party that there was the most serious confrontation. It formed a Soviet republic in the mining and industrial region of Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, including the Donbas, with the aim of incorporating it into Russia. This republic, its leaders proclaimed, was that of, a Russian proletariat “which does not want to hear anything about some so-called Ukraine and has nothing in common with it”. This attempted secession could count on some support in Moscow. The Skrypnyk government had to fight against these tendencies of its Russian comrades, for the sobornist’ of the Soviet Ukraine within the national borders set, through the Central Rada, by the national movement of the masses. The first congress of the CP(B) of the Ukraine took place in Moscow. For Lenin and the leadership of the Russian CP(B) the decision of Tahanrih had the flavour of a nationalist deviation. They were not ready to accept an independent Bolshevik party in the Ukraine or a Ukrainian section of the Komintern. The CP(B) of the Ukraine could only be a regional organization of the pan-Russian CP(B), according to the thesis “one country, one party”. Is the Ukraine not a country? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Steal This E-Book? : The New Yorker
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Marx died in 1883. Last month, the problem he described reappeared in digital form. The volunteers who manage the Marxists Internet Archive, a free online repository of Marxist writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, received a letter from Lawrence Wishart, a London publishing house, asking them to remove several hundred early texts by Marx and Engels from their site. Lawrence Wishart has partial ownership of the rights to the only complete English translation of the Marx Engels Collected Works, a set of fifty volumes representing a thirty-year effort by translators. The copyright is shared with International Publishers, based in New York, and a long-defunct Soviet publishing house called Progress Press. full: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/05/steal-this-e-book.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Bandera and Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/6/14 9:56 AM, Louis Proyect wrote: e it happened. Yes, in fact it was during the heroic days of the Comintern that hostility to communism--or at least a distorted form--took root. Let me refer to that FI article that I scanned in to remind you of the circumstances: Correction. Andrew Pollack scanned it, I did the OCR. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Golden Dawn on the crisis in Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (A new anti-imperialist movement in the offing? Golden Dawn et al, the Syrian Baathists, Counterfire, Seumas Milne, RT.com and George Galloway.) Ukraine is Washington’s pretext for a conflict with Russia. The threat of conflict is evident from the flood of propaganda in the Zionist media. Putin is demonized daily as Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi were earlier, while known Zionist newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, present daily 'evidence' Russian troops are ready to invade Ukraine. The only things missing are the weapons of mass destruction in order to have a complete repeat. The events in Ukraine demonstrate clearly that American imperialism has launched a strategy, the first unsuccessful steps which were Syria and Iran, weakening and elimination of Russia as a Great Power. Russia is the most serious obstacle to the American imperialism to assert its hegemony in the Middle East, East Mediterranean, and Eurasia. https://news.vice.com/article/i-know-you-are-a-fascist-but-what-am-i Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] In South Africa, A.N.C. Is Counting on the Past
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, May 6 2014 In South Africa, A.N.C. Is Counting on the Past By NORIMITSU ONISHI ALEXANDRA, South Africa — In this poor black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the campaign posters exhorting voters to return the African National Congress to power in Wednesday’s election reached deep into the party’s glorious past. “Do it for Madiba,” said one poster, referring to Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, by his clan name. “Do it for Chris Hani,” another poster declared, referring to the firebrand A.N.C. leader assassinated in 1993. The posters, put up by the South African Communist Party, the A.N.C.’s partner in government since the end of white rule in 1994, avoided mentioning the country’s current president, Jacob Zuma, who is beset by scandal. But the misdirection was not fooling Nomakwezi Buya. “They are just abusing the names of Mandela and Chris Hani because they are dead people,” said Ms. Buya, 59, who is a former A.N.C. loyalist who says she will vote for a breakaway party this time. “They are not keeping their legacy alive.” Five months after the death of Mr. Mandela, the party is counting on its dead heroes to keep its current, sullied leadership in power. It is likely to work: The A.N.C. is poised to win overwhelmingly in this nation’s fifth democratic election, granting a second term to Mr. Zuma, 72, whose popularity was further eroded by a recent report detailing the misuse of $23 million in public funds to upgrade his private home. But a projected decline in support is expected to chip away at what has effectively been a one-party state since the end of apartheid 20 years ago. By how much remains the key question. In recent months, young men have looted shops, burned tires and hurled rocks in townships surrounding Johannesburg and Pretoria, in what are called “service delivery protests” aimed at the A.N.C. Dissident veterans of the party are urging voters to spoil their ballots in a “Vote No” campaign. The Economic Freedom Fighters, a new party that is led by the former leader of the A.N.C.’s youth wing and is calling for the nationalization of mines and banks without compensation, is attracting the young and angry. Traditional A.N.C. allies like the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, the nation’s biggest trade union, have also broken away. Their message — that the party that freed South Africa is now led by a corrupt class that has failed to raise the standard of living of the average black South African — resonates here in this traditional A.N.C. stronghold. Still, the absence of a clear alternative for the black majority, as well as older black voters’ enduring loyalty to the figures who liberated them, has given the A.N.C. an insurmountable lead in the polls. “The people that go to vote are our grannies, our parents, because they came with the A.N.C. from far,” said Tshidiso Nonyane, 25, who voted for the party in the past but has not registered for this election. “The A.N.C. is going to win because of those people. If there was another party that would truly bring jobs, better housing and stuff like that, that would be better.” A college graduate with a degree in marketing, he is now working at a McDonald’s. “The youth is not voting because there’s no point in voting,” he said. “Even on that day, we won’t even be watching the news to check who is winning or what because we know the A.N.C. is going to win. So the A.N.C. is only winning for the wrong reasons.” Nevertheless, this election, the most competitive in South Africa’s post-apartheid history, offers some hints of the forces that could loosen the A.N.C.’s grip on power in the years ahead. The Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party traditionally associated with white South Africans, has attracted middle-class blacks and begun widely campaigning in black townships like Alexandra with the message of “Together for jobs.” “For the first time, the A.N.C. is not taking electoral victory for granted,” said Steven Friedman, a political analyst at the University of Johannesburg. “Even if the competition is being hyped up, the A.N.C. is taking it seriously, and that is politically significant.” As an example, Mr. Friedman said, the party had directed its lawmakers to pass only legislation popular among voters in the run-up to the election — the first time it had bothered to do so. Here in Alexandra, Ms. Buya was planning to vote for the Congress of the People, a party started by dissident A.N.C. members in 2008. Asked why, she waved her arms inside her small shack where she lives with her two daughters and two grandchildren under a thin roof made of corrugated metal. “We still live here after
[Marxism] Despite the narrative, Syria’s rebels may be gaining ground | The National
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == One of the recent changes in the conflict has been that the rebels are becoming more organised and more effective. Infighting is still common, but they are learning to coordinate operations. It is safe to say that the Free Syrian Army, in particular, is back after months of being eclipsed by Salafist and jihadist groups. A process of consolidating rebel factions under a common leadership is underway. According to rebel sources, the FSA is winning back armed factions, previously acquired by religious groups. These factions are joining the FSA for several reasons, not least because the FSA is increasingly better funded and as supplies to extremist forces are no longer steady as was the case in the past – unless such forces control resources inside Syria, such as oilfields. Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/despite-the-narrative-syrias-rebels-may-be-gaining-ground#ixzz30xuGpeba Follow us: @TheNationalUAE on Twitter | thenational.ae on Facebook full: http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/despite-the-narrative-syrias-rebels-may-be-gaining-ground Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Ukraine: The Only Way to Peace by Anatol Lieven | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == By Anatol Levien, a long-time observer and writer on Ukraine. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/05/ukraine-only-way-to-peace/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Anti-Gay Republican Outed as Former Drag Queen | Issue Hawk
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[Marxism] Who can police the post-superpower capitalist world order? | Slavoj Žižek | Comment is free | The Guardian
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Re: [Marxism] What Vladimir Putin chooses not to know about Russian history - latimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/5/14 1:22 AM, h0ost wrote: I won't even speak to the points about food and goods being in less supply, but this is the most absurd mis-characterization of Odessa's recent history, or Soviet policies, I've ever read. Odessa is a horrible town. It's common knowledge. Instead of saying a great difference, people them say two great differences, and tuda i syuda they pronounce tudoyu i syudoyu! And yet I feel that there are quite a few good things one can say about this important town, the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half the population is made up of Jews, and Jews are a people who have learned a few simple truths along the way. Jews get married so as not to be done, love so as to live through the centuries, hoard money no they can buy houses and give their wives astrakhn jackets, love children because, let's face it, it is good and important to love one's children. The poor Odessa Jews get very confused when it comes to officials and regulations, but it isn't all that easy to get thorn to budge in their opinions, their very antiquated opinions. You might not be able to budge these Jews, but there's a whole lot you can learn from them.To a large extent it is because of them that Odessa has this light and easy atmosphere. Isaac Babel, Odessa From Collected Stories at http://books.google.com/books?id=y8XBQp0rsfECprintsec=frontcoversource=gbs_ge_summary_rcad=0#v=onepageqf=false Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Smoke and Mirrors: The Roots of Russian Revanchism | The Smirking Chimp
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This is the rotten foundation upon which the increasingly ugly regime of Vladimir Putin is built. A culture, a country, a people savaged over and over through a century of unprecedented upheaval and violence were once again subjected to a firestorm of chaos that killed 3 million innocent people and left millions more stripped of hope, of opportunity, of meaning. Now Putin, who emerged from the dark nexus of power blocs that saved Yeltsin, fills this moonscape with empty symbols that play upon the fears and resentments of a battered people: hysterical nationalism, cartoon history, blustering machismo, fake religiosity, and traditional values more aligned with American Tea Party tropes than anything that has actually existed in Russian culture. He rails against the West but he rules a mirror image of it: a violent, militarized crony-capitalist pigsty that degrades and deceives its own people while directing their anger and confusion toward outsiders. In many ways, it's the American Cold Warriors’ dream come true: we have finally turned the Russians into us. full: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/55694/smoke-and-mirrors-the-roots-of-russian-revanchism Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] ▶ Chris Ford (Debatte / IWGB) on Crisis in the Ukraine (ISN Meeting) - YouTube
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0uzDtdIzBE Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Dolphinarium: Bandera and Ukraine: A reply from Chris Ford
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I do not agree with the comparison of Bandera to the revolution of 1648 at which Khmelnytsky was a leader, the events of that year were phenomenal and full of paradox. The military democracy of the Cossacks led a mass peasant revolt which overthrew the Polish colonial overlords who had introduced serfdom where it had never existed. Ukraine as a nation in many ways crystallized then, the peasants were betrayed by the elite, everything unraveled, there were vicious pogroms and it culminated in an alliance with Muscovy who slowly integrated Ukraine and turned it into a colony. Bandera was a very different phenomena and put simply without Stalinism there would have been no Bandera. full: http://dolphinarium.blogspot.com/2010/02/bandera-and-ukraine-reply-from-chris.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Comradely Update: No Copyright for Marx Engels
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Original Message Subject:Comradely Update: No Copyright for Marx Engels Date: Mon, 05 May 2014 16:35:16 + From: Ammar Aziz m...@change.org Reply-To: Change.org no-re...@change.org To: l...@panix.com Dear comrades, Red Greetings! The petition against Lawrence Wishart - that was started only a few days ago, to condemn their copyright claim on Marx-Engels Collected Works - has now been signed around 5000 people from all over the world, including all of you! It has certainly created a lot of pressure on the publishers who have responded to our campaign [http://goo.gl/iHsskq], calling it 'an online abuse'. However, according to the New York Times, Lawrence Wishart has been losing the argument online. [http://goo.gl/HjOOpa]. The issue has been widely highlighted in the international media which has strengthened our viewpoint and the seriousness of the matter. I wholeheartedly thank you all for signing it and making it possible. Whether or not they take back their decision, the works have been downloaded by thousands of people during the last few days who're spreading them for free! You can also download the volumes 1-49 from, in full text printers' PDFs, from here! : http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/04/29/copyright-controversy-over-marx-engels-collected-works/ Moreover, sadly, I've been receiving some racist / discriminatory emails with reference to my country, Pakistan. And I've been asked to close down the petition. In one of such mails, somebody wrote: 'Why are you so bothered about our country's issues? Deal with your own mess Paki!' In another email someone else wrote, 'Stop your bigotry against the white people you commie terrorist...' Little do the haters know that we Marxists are free from the boundaries of religion and petty notions of nationalism. Long Live Internationalism! Long Live Marxism-Leninism! Long Live Workers' International Movement! In solidarity, Ammar Aziz https://twitter.com/Ammar_Aziz ammar_a...@hotmail.com This message was sent by Ammar Aziz using the Change.org system. You received this email because you signed a petition started by Ammar Aziz on Change.org: Lawrence Wishart: No Copyright for Marx Engels Collected Works. Change.org does not endorse contents of this message. View the petition http://www.change.org/petitions/lawrence-wishart-no-copyright-for-marx-engels-collected-works?utm_source=supporter_messageutm_medium=emailutm_campaign=supporter_message Unsubscribe from updates about this petition http://www.change.org/account_settings/petition_updates_opt_out?email_id=OVBTODXCLOAOBPCEYKOKevent_id=1500375ue=emnutm_source=supporter_messageutm_medium=emailutm_campaign=supporter_message Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Gary Becker on the Family
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[Marxism] Socialist electoralism: from spectating to participation | spreadtheinfestation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == If we are following Socialist Alternative’s original vision of a hundred Sawants – or preferably, a thousand Sawants – by encouraging people to run for office, then we need to understand that it’s going to be utter chaos. Some people will run and have no idea what they’re doing. Others will run with somewhat bizarre platforms that maybe we don’t entirely like, or want to be associated with. Still others may run in small-town, suburban conditions which we don’t know much about. Some will run with the support of various socialist groups, others will have to build their support entirely on their own. Every attempt is both an opportunity and a danger – if people have a tough time and we leave them in the dark, they’ll just burn out and wander away more cynical than they started. But in trying, people learn. So not only are we at the historical stage where we should be encouraging everyone and their brother to make electoral attempts, but we should also be connecting with them, and connecting them with others. This way people are sharing information about how to do it successfully. They are helping stabilize each other’s emotional swings (“this is awesome!,” “this is pointless!”) into a steady consciousness that they are part of a larger movement that is trying to make things work, and learning through trial by error… …lots of error. But if those errors are part of a larger movement, and a collective learning process, they are not discouraging. They are the building blocks to getting where we eventually want to go – a mass party that can wreak serious havoc on capitalist business as usual. full: http://spreadtheinfestation.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/socialist-electoralism-from-spectating-to-participation/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Theneeds - Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes, review
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.theneeds.com/read/n3720831/Eleanor-Marx-A-Life-by-Rachel-Holmes-TheTelegraph Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Syria minister sees 'prosperous tourist season' in Homs | News , Middle East | THE DAILY STAR
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2014/May-05/255431-syria-minister-sees-prosperous-tourist-season-in-homs.ashx Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Darkness in May. A socialist eye-witness in Odessa | People and Nature
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/darkness-in-may-a-socialist-eye-witness-in-odessa/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] These are our peeps, not Putin
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZekOdJU1Y Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Australian Socialist Alliance edges into the Putinite camp
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Over the past nearly 20 years since I have cohabited with these people on Marxmail and the mailing list that preceded it, I have gotten used to their reticence. There was a time when they were still gung-ho on Leninism that they were more outspoken. I distinctly remember Peter Boyle (the activist, not the comic actor) once making the case that Leninism was revolutionary factionalism. Of course, that was a long time ago and my memory might be fading. Have to increase the fish oil intake, I guess. The only member of this group that seems to have a mind of his own is Michael Karadjis who I had some battle royales with during the war in Kosovo. I only wish that I could turn the clock back and have distinguished myself more from Jared Israel. Oh well, live and learn. Michael is sort of their Richard Seymour, an outlier who has the odd notion that membership in a Bolshevik group has some relationship to the historic Bolshevik Party where members were expected to think and speak for themselves. What a quaint notion. As should be obvious from Links posting Borotba's call (http://links.org.au/node/3837) for an anti-fascist (ie., pro-Russian) protest in Ukraine and Kagarlitsky's addled musings, as well as kindred expressions from Renfrey Clarke and Tony Ilitis in Green Left Weekly, our friends are moving rapidly toward the John Rees orientation. Borotba's statement is really quite an eye-opener, filled with formulations that probably wouldn't pass muster in Counterfire and--unbelievably--a citation from RT.com. Frankly, you would think at this stage of the game that serious political people would avoid citing RT.com, especially on the Ukraine. For me, quoting RT.com on the Ukraine is like putting on a red rubber nose, grease-paint and squirting people with a seltzer bottle. But even more puzzling is the absence of debate on their own mailing list on Yahoo or here about all this. I have trouble figuring out whether this is a function of the sort of disdain for the petty-bourgeois Internet shared by the ISO and the SWP or instead a pronounced tendency in their ranks toward allowing an orientation to be determined by specialists like Renfrey Clarke. I only wish that I had the guts when I was an SWP member to challenge someone like Frank Lovell back in 1977 when he told a convention that the working class of the USA was more radicalized than any time in the 20th century. Having lived through that experience, I resolved to make up my own mind about everything. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Statement of left and anarchist organizations about “Borotba” organization (English, German, Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian) | Автономна спілка трудящих
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://avtonomia.net/2014/03/03/statement-left-anarchist-organizations-borotba-organization/ Наші дії, Статті / Бер. 03, 2014 / 20 Коментарі Statement of left and anarchist organizations about “Borotba” organization (English, German, Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian) We, the collectives and members of Ukrainian leftist and anarchist organizations, announce that “Borotba” Union is not a part of our movement. During the whole time of this political project’s existence, its members tended to be committed to the most discredited, conservative and authoritarian “leftist” regimes and ideologies, which do not represent the interests of working classes in any way. ”Borotba” has proved itself an organization with a non-transparent funding mechanism and unscrupulous principles of cooperation. It uses hired workers, who are not even the members of the organization. The local cells of “Borotba” took part in the protest actions together with PSPU (Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, which is an anti-Semitic, racist, and clerical party, and has no relation to the world socialist movement) and with Kharkiv pro-government, anti-Semitic and homophobic group “Oplot”; and are known for their linkage with an infamous journalist O.Chalenko, who openly stands for Russian chauvinism. Recent events demonstrate that the leadership of this union, following the example of the “Communist” Party of Ukraine, have been overtly defending the interests of president Yanukovych, justifying the use of weapons by security forces and denying the acts of unjustified violence and cruelty on their part, the use of tortures and other forms of political terror. The representatives of “Borotba” take an extremely biased stance concerning the composition of protest movement, which is represented both on their own web resources and in the media commentaries. According to them, the Maidan protests are supported exclusively by nationalists and radical right, and were aimed only at a coup d’etat (“fascist putsch”). We stand on antifascist positions, and our activists have often been victims of radical rightists’ attacks. We do not support some of the Maidan’s ideas, and are against the bourgeois opposition. We also condemn conservative, nationalist, and radical right sentiments, which are tolerated in the protesters’ circles nowadays. However, we emphasize that labeling all active citizens as “fascists” is not only false, but also dangerous. This one-sidedness is fueling chauvinist hysteria and divides society, which is only favourable for the ruling class. On January 24th, the region council deputy and “Borotba” representative Oleksiy Albu participated in the protection of Odesa region administration building against “Nazis”, accompanied by Russian Cossacks and nationalists (“Slavic Unity”) and the members of ruling Party of Regions and Communist Party. In his later interview, he admitted his cooperation with the Security Service of Ukraine. On March 1st, “Borotba” activists together with pro-Putin organizations took part in the assault on Kharkiv region state administration, which resulted in raising of a Russian flag and severe beating of many Kharkiv Maidan activists, including a leftist poet Serhiy Zhadan. The members of “Borotba” call all of this “an antifascist action” and claim that these violent actions were aimed against radical rightists. Therefore, we conclude that the leadership of “Borotba” union not only support the authoritarian Soviet past, but also consciously manipulate public opinion, and are acting as “pocket revolutionaries” of the ruling elites. Their activity at the moment does not have anything in common with leftist politics and class struggle, and is aimed at the support of pro-Putinist forces behind the mask of “antifascism” and “communism”. Thus, the actions of this organization are discrediting both its name (which is derived from revolutionaries-“borotbists” of the beginning of the XXth century) and all the modern Ukrainian left in general. Moreover, “Borotba” does not disdain overt lies and fact manipulations, deceiving foreign leftists and antifascists. We urge all the conscious revolutionaries, who are still the members of “Borotba”, to leave this treacherous, pro-bourgeois union and to cease all the political relations with its leadership. We also hope that European and Russian left will reconsider their attitude to “Borotba.” The organization of this kind should be isolated. No gods, no masters, no nations, no borders! Workers of all countries – unite! Autonomous Workers Union Independent Student Union “Direct Action “ Journal of literature and social critique ProStory Editorial board of Tovaryshka.info
Re: [Marxism] Bandera and Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/5/14 9:25 PM, Stiofan OBuadhaigh wrote: Bandera's followers believed that Jews were not Ukrainians and were to blame for the suffering of the Ukrainian people and the lack of a Ukrainian state. It also has a lot to do with the tendency of Jews, who lived in urban areas, to back the Bolsheviks against the largely peasant supporters of the Ukrainian Rada in 1918. Subeltny covers this in some detail. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stephen F. Cohen is not the man he used to be
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/3/14 10:10 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: 1. The Euromaidan politicians have always been gung-ho to join NATO Except when it got in the way of horse-trading after the fashion of Clinton cutting deals with Republicans. Mr. Yushchenko, a strong supporter of NATO, has been embroiled in a bitter political standoff with Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who in recent weeks has been cultivating closer ties with Russia and signaling her own presidential ambitions. They have clashed more since coming together in the Orange Revolution that brought Mr. Yushchenko to power in 2004. --NY Times, October 10 2008 Mr. Yanukovich and Ms. Tymoshenko have both indicated that they will try to smooth relations with Russia while continuing to court Europe. Neither has called for Ukraine to join NATO. --NY Times, January 17 2010 Plus, both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko did not find Yanukovych's opposition to NATO a stumbling block to forming a coalition government in 2008. Nor did Yanukovych's orientation to Russia prevent him from coming close to a deal with EU for that matter. Positions taken by bourgeois politicians in Ukraine would embarrass Machiavelli. In any case, even if Tymoshenko had not demonstrated such pliability when it came to NATO, she certainly would have remained Putin's favorite. While much of the left was going bat-shit over her phone conversation about the need to go to war with Russia, Putin had her figured out better than they did: Putin's Shrewd Endorsement of Tymoshenko: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/putins-shrewd-endorsement-of-tymoshenko/495908.html --Moscow Times, March 11 2014 Speaking of positions, despite the fact that someone like Tymoshenko has the reputation of being the neoliberal as opposed to the old-school Party of Regions that organizes rallies at Lenin statues, her economic proposals were considered leftist when she was riding high: --Thanks to efforts by Yulia Tymoshenko and her team, the Black Sea shelf was returned to state ownership. This shelf contains strategic oil and gas reserves for Ukraine that Yanukovych’s and Yushchenko’s circles had their eye on. --At the same time, during the global financial crisis, a program was carried out to nationalize banks to ensure that deposits were returned to individual depositors. Yanukovych’s circle was involved in the bankruptcy of several commercial banks (Nadra Bank, Rodovid Bank, Ukrprombank, Ukrhazbank, and others). As a result of the government’s actions, 2 million depositors obtained state guarantees for the return of their savings. http://www.tymoshenko.ua/en/page/achievements Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Wallerstein versus Brenner
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This comment just turned up on my blog: I have read Brenner and Wallerstein. I think that both said important things about capitalism. While Brenner was right in asserting that one of the “conditions” for capitalism was the separation of the direct producers from the direct access (extra-market) to the means of production/subsistence, I think that this conditions is not sufficient to explayn the appearance of capitalism. In the first place, what is prior to that structural condition for the appearance of capitalism? I think that when Brenner says that capitalism was the outcome of the UNINTENDED consequences of the feudal lords in defending “feudal social property relations” it implicitly means that he has no theory for, it cannot be explained only by resorting to Marx’s condition, the appearance of capitalism (or a theory of social change at grand scale) and that it can only be settled with historical research. I think that it is a tautology to say that capitalism arose from the structural condition already mentioned. I think that Wallerstein is far more “dialectical” than Brenner, and if you read volume I of “The modern world-system” he incorporates into the picture almost the same elements that Marx said about “primitive accumulation” in volume I of “Capital”: national debts, colonization of the Americas, the “price revolution” promoted with the plunder of the american gold, the mercantilist system, etc. By the way, Brenner accused (in his 1977 article) Wallerstein of being ahistorical and for his “homo economicus” account for the rise of capitalism, but when you read Brenner’s “The social basis of economic development” (in the book “Analytical marxism”) he adopts a kind of argument that resembles a “homo economicus” when he says that it was not in the interest of the feudal lord to separate the peasants from the means of production/subsistence because he was first to reproduce himself individually and as a member of a class: “Indeed, because there was no class of economic actors devoid of the means of reproduction (subsistence) to take up the lords’ land as exploited tenants or to work the lords’ land as exploited wage workers, the individual lords did not, as a rule, find it in their self-interest to expropriate their own peasants” (1986: 27). I don’t have a problem with that kind of assertions, but I think that Brenner’s account on capitalism is, at some times, a tautology because it does not explain what did lead first to the expropriation of the direct producers. On the other hand, perhaps Brenner is textually more attached to Marx than Wallerstein, I think that world-systems analysis pays far more attention than Brenner to the consequences in the “longue durée” of the law of accumulation and the increasing appearance of the “laboral/industrial reserve army” because of the “eficience of production” (the increment or productivity of labor expelling labor force from the labor-process). And Wallerstein makes the case in his short text “Cities in socialist theory and capitalist praxis” (1984). He first exposes the typical marxist explanation for the appearance of capitalism “The argument seems to be threefold: 1) To have a surplus that may be appropriated by bourgeois owners, there must be workers to be exploited; but workers would only permit themselves to be so exploited if they were compelled by lack of alternative means to provide for their livelihood (that is, if they did not own the means of production for their subsistence). 2) To have a significant total surplus, and through it an ‘industrial revolution’, there must be very large numbers of workers available who are propertyless and thereby dependent upon wage employment. 3) To prevent these propertyless workes from bidding up wages, there must be a greater supply of them than there is demand. That is, there must be an ‘industrial reserve army’ which os created by expropriation and whose existence is thereafter assured by the increasing organic composition of capital” (p. 66-67). And then Wallerstein says: “The empirical validity of each of these propositions may be challenged. 1) There have always been and continue to be ways of compelling the production of a surplus other than depriving the worker of the ownership of the means of production. 2) It is not clear empirically that the expansion of industrial enterprise -in particular countries or in the world as a whole- has been regularly preceded or even accompanied by the creation of masses of propertyless workers. 3) Members of the industrial reserve army must eat enough to survive, or they are of little use as a weapon of capitalists against wage workers. By what means have they been getting the income
[Marxism] Giving Kagarlitsky a piece of his or her mind
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A comment on the article that appears at: http://links.org.au/node/3838 Is this supposed to be Marxist analysis? By the logic of his analysis, which seems to assume the so called Donetsk Republic has some sort of legitimacy, Mr. Karglitsky would no doubt have supported the grass roots popular initiatives against the Algerian rebels in the 1950s and praised the settler-colonist based legitimate OAS. By his logic he should have supported the Protestants and the UDF in the legitimate Northern Ireland, and the AWB in the legitimate White South Africa. He talks about double standards but then fails to make the elemental distinction between violence used by a colonized nationality to attain national and social liberation, and the violence of the settler-colonizer minority-- that he terms rebellious masses-- backed by the imperial metropole against that national-liberation movement. Karglitsky can even go so far as to think the mass support that Putin's aggression in Ukraine enjoys in Russia is somehow unrelated to the fact the mass of Russians have no access to any non Kremlin controlled media. That 30% of the population that does use internet, moreover, thanks to the new recent laws, will soon have their access severely restricted. Indeed, he seems to be criticizing the Russian Putinist ruling class for not being more imperialist and showing more support for the puppet Donets Republic. Has Karglitsky forgotten that Lenin dismissed the Kryvoi Rog republic as a colonialist joke and ordered it dissolved? Mr Karglitsky makes some vague assertions about the middle class and then writes: the task of the left is to work toward the formation of a broad social bloc in which the middle class with the majority of society, and above all with the working class. Otherwise, the political agenda of the middle class becomes reactionary, and the left, in serving this agenda, not only finishes up misleading and confusing its comrades, but objectively (and not only objectively) furthers the interests of reaction. But this superficial assertion ignores the role of the middle class and the left in national and colonial question and what the leftists in these countries should do about the problem of national liberation. Should he be surprised that the right monopolizes the national liberation issue in Ukraine, if what there is of an independent radical left in the country, like him, also totally ignore the national-colonial question? Moreover, in so far as the middle class does monopolize the national liberation issue at the moment should not the radical left support it? Did not Trotsky distinguish the pre 1917 Russian bourgeoisie from the Chinese because the latter was a colonized dominated class, while the former was a ruling imperialist class? Did not Marx condone such a temporary alliance? Specifically, with respect to Ukraine, Karglitsky seems to think Ukraine is actually independent as he makes no mention of Putin's revived Russian imperialism in Ukraine nor his vile exploitation of a part of the Russian population and their very real socio-economic grievances as a fifth column. He offers no analysis of this numerical but politically and culturally still dominant minority and does not tell us if it is a creole type separatist or loyalist imperialist sort, or if both exist and are now at odds with each other -- as some reports from Luhansk seem to suggest. There is no analysis or mention of any extremist pro- Russian groups, whose ideological roots go back to the early 20th century Black Hundreds, whose financial roots come from the Kremlin's RUSSYI MIR and whose advisors come now, as they did then, from the Russian Secret Police. Karglitsky's account of the popular masses in eastern Ukraine fails to reveal, in how own words: who played the dominant role within the crowd, exercising ideological and political hegemony. If Mr. Karglitsky has any doubts about the still dominant position of Russians in Ukraine let him compare the status of the 3-4 million declared Ukrainians in Russia with that of the declared Russians in Ukraine. How many schools, churches, journals, media hours, civil associations, political parties and audio visual products do the former have in Russia and the latter in Ukraine? Last but not least, he does not mention loyal Russians and Russian speakers who support Ukrainian national independence and the present transition government whose socio-economic position, moreover, is not better than those of who do not. These patriotic Ukrainian-Russians, unlike the masses of the Donets Republic do not think their rights include things like not having to learn or use Ukrainian in Ukraine.
[Marxism] These People Are Still Being Held by Armed Separatists in Ukraine | VICE News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == So how does a People's Republic justify abducting people? I don't remember Marx writing about this in Class Struggles in France. https://news.vice.com/article/these-people-are-still-being-held-by-armed-separatists-in-ukraine Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Al Qaeda Chief Ayman Al-Zawahri Urges Militants To Leave 'Political Disaster' In Syria
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/03/ayman-al-zawahri-syria-disaster_n_5258130.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Is Britain fanning the flames of war in Syria?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mr. Ian Sinclair, In your article that appears on ZNet today, you back up your claim by referring your readers to Seymour Hersh's batty LRB article: According to Seymour Hersh’s latest expose in the London Review of Books, from early 2012 MI6 was helping the CIA transfer weapons from Libya to the Syrian rebels. Funding for this ‘rat line’ came from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. After the September 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi (likely targeted because of its role in these arms transfers), Hersh notes that the US – and presumably Britain – ended its involvement, although the rat line continued without them. Aren't you aware that Hersh's article is entirely based on unnamed sources? And that one of them is most likely a character named Michael Maloof? In other words, you have written an article based on the findings of the very man who Judith Miller relied upon for her NY Times articles on WMD's that preceded the invasion of Iraq. In a June 7, 2004 article New York Magazine article on Miller’s reporting, Franklin Foer described the Miller-Maloof connection: Miller is said to have depended on a controversial neocon in Feith’s office named Michael Maloof. At one point, in December 2001, Maloof’s security clearance was revoked. In April, Risen reported in the Times, “Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies.” While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle. Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access. full article: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] These People Are Still Being Held by Armed Separatists in Ukraine | VICE News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/4/14 11:47 AM, Shane Mage wrote: But in fact Marx did write about the Commune abducting people (including the Archbishop of Paris) and executing them. He even criticized the Commune for this--that is, for *not* executing them until the very end! Shane, you are hilarious. The taking of hostages was not initiated by the Communards but by the Prussians. The Communards resorted to this tactic after the fashion of the Red Army in the civil war in 1918 in the same way that capital punishment was reinstituted on a temporary basis. What this has to do with Vice reporter Simon Ostrovsky being abducted in Donetsk and beaten for nearly a week is anybody's guess. I understand that you are fairly cynical in making such an argument but there are other people who take their Marx seriously who see through your sophistry. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] These People Are Still Being Held by Armed Separatists in Ukraine | VICE News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/4/14 3:30 PM, Paul Flewers wrote: Hopefully these people are alive and hopefully they will be released without harm. Unfortunately, the several dozen people killed the other day in a union building in Odessa that was attacked by the Ukrainian ultra-rightists will not be going home. I don't advocate burning buildings down but *some* of the people who died were just as violent as *some* of those on the other side as this Telegraph article would indicate: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10806656/Ukraine-crisis-death-by-fire-in-Odessa-as-country-suffers-bloodiest-day-since-the-revolution.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] These People Are Still Being Held by Armed Separatists in Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/4/14 3:55 PM, Anthony Hartin wrote: Seriously? You're quoting the Torygraph in order to justify the murder of *some* people sheltering in a trade's union building? The Guardian has the same basic report. I don't know if Tony has been following events in the east but every peaceful protest has been violently attacked. In Odessa, the Maidan side this time included men from a football club who were prepared to fight back. People on the roof of the building were throwing molotov cocktails and shooting guns at those outside. The pro-Russia activists have been using violence for weeks now. This was a calamity that might have been prevented if the rights of peaceful protest had been respected. Here is a video of what happened to a Maidan protest in Donetsk to remind you of the background: http://www.itv.com/news/2014-04-28/violence-in-city-of-donetsk-reveals-divisions-tearing-apart-eastern-ukraine/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Indian Film Festival 2014: four narrative films | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Starting tomorrow, New Yorkers will be able to see some of the finest new films in the world courtesy of the annual Indian Film Festival that runs from May 5th through the 9th. I had an opportunity to preview four narrative films as well as the documentaries that I reported on in the latest Counterpunch. All are exceptional and one in particular is a work of genius. Titled “Sniffer”, it is the story of a private eye who has more in common with a Truffaut character than Dick Tracy. Watching the film, it dawned on me that the New Wave is still going strong in India even if that great generation celebrated in Cahiers du Cinema is long gone. In a conversation with the festival’s executive director Aroon Shivdasani a couple of weeks ago at an opening ceremony party she hosted, she stressed the social and political agenda that many of the films share. Ignoring the typical Bollywood film, not without their insouciant charm, the curators select uncompromising independent films that are geared to the art house market and leading edge film festivals. Since I am the ideal viewer for such films (I told Ms. Shivdasani that I live for films such as these), my assumption is that my regular readers will drive, take trains, fly, run or crawl to the theaters that are part of the festival venue. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/05/04/indian-film-festival-2014-four-narrative-films/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The settlers/colonizers of Eastern Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/4/14 6:06 PM, Stiofan OBuadhaigh wrote: Lou, given that you believe the Russian speaking regions of Ukraine were created by a policy of colonization and that those populations in Ukraine that speak Russian are settlers, when did this policy of social engineering take place? Given the mix of peoples and cultures in Eastern Europe, I am having a difficult time seeing the populations of SE Ukraine as analagous to the French in Algeria, the Scots-Irish in Ulster, or the Boers of South Africa. I actually disagree with the Links commenter's characterization of the Donetsk pro-Russian segment of the population as anything like Pied Noirs or the Ulster Protestants. But the analogy with Ireland holds on all other grounds. Here's Lenin: What are you, Kerensky, Tsereteli, Chernov, Skobelev, if not “tamed socialists”? Did you raise the question of the Russian Ireland and the Russian Algeria, i.e., of Turkestan, Armenia, Ukraine, Finland, etc., before the government of the “Russian bourgeoisie now in power”? When did you raise this question? Why don’t you tell the Russian “people” about it? Why don’t you qualify as “sleight of hand” the Russian Narodniks’ and Mensheviks’ blather about “peace without annexations” in the Soviet, in the government and before the people, without raising, clearly and unambiguously, the question of all Russian annexations of the same type as Ireland and Algeria? http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/01b.htm Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Gerry Adams, Leader of Sinn Fein, Is Released Without Charges - NYTimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/world/europe/leader-of-sinn-fein-is-released-without-charges.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What Vladimir Putin chooses not to know about Russian history - latimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-herlihy-russia-ukraine-odessa-20140501,0,1564808.story Patricia Herlihy May 1, 2014, 5:04 p.m. KGB agents are apparently not taught history, or so it would seem from Vladimir Putin's recent statement that only God knows how a portion of southeastern Ukraine ever became part of that country. The Russian president refers to the region as New Russia, an old idea that has always been — and remains — an aspiration rather than a fact. Luhansk, Donetsk, Odessa and other New Russian cities have been a part of Ukraine for nearly a century. And even before that, they were never truly Russian. It was Empress Catherine II who first articulated the ambition that this territory, which she acquired from the Ottoman Turks in the latter half of the 18th century, would become Novorossiia. Catherine wanted her subjects to settle the new, mostly vacant land, and she did her best to lure Russian nobles into the area. But few were willing to take chances on the wild fields, no matter what kind of deals she offered. Next, she posted fliers in Europe promising cheap land, religious freedom and exemption from taxes and military service to those who would settle in the area. Mennonite and Catholic Germans, Italians, Jews, and some Swiss, among other nationalities, accepted the invitation. Later, Catherine's grandson, Czar Alexander I, recruited dissidents from the Ottoman Empire — Albanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Greeks, Armenians and even some Turks — to settle in New Russia as an anchor against any Ottoman attempts to reclaim it. Some of the pockets of foreign settlement were even exempted from Russian czarist rule and allowed to preserve their national languages and customs. In the end, Catherine's New Russia became home to many more non-Russians than Russians. The area's major cities also had distinctly non-Russian roots. Luhansk was founded in the late 1700s by an Englishman, and Donetsk was established in 1865 by a Welsh entrepreneur, who built a steel mill and opened coal mines. For almost a century after its founding, the settlement was known as Yuzkovo (as close to the name of its founder, John Hughes, as the residents could manage) before being changed to Donetsk in 1961. Early European governors of Odessa, New Russia's largest Black Sea port, helped by the czars, did much to develop its economy and welfare. But by the mid-19th century, Russia was suspicious of the city because of its foreign population. Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles and Ukrainians formed secret societies. Jews made up an increasing percentage of the population. And Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855, called Odessa a nest of conspirators. Fearing the perceived lawlessness and tumult of this cosmopolitan city, Russian czars began to appoint military governors to oversee the area, and they quit paying for infrastructure there, turning instead to other Black Sea ports. Had Odessa been more Russian, it might have fared better. Even in Soviet times, Odessa was a city low on the pecking order. Again, as in czarist days, its residents weren't given to taking edicts from the Russian government all that seriously. One never could be quite sure of Odessa's Marxist orthodoxy — after all, this was where Leon Trotsky had gone to school and where Mensheviks flourished before 1917. After the 1917 revolution, it took several years for the Bolsheviks to subdue the city. The Soviet regime increased Russian presence in the region, but Odessa never fully embraced Moscow, and it remained a poor cousin to other Soviet cities. Food and goods were in shorter supply than elsewhere, and first-rate opera and ballet companies rarely played the gorgeous Opera House designed by Austrians in the 1880s. On Easter Sunday this year, a Russian Orthodox group in Odessa proclaimed the formation of a Novorossiia Republic centered in Odessa. The small band named Valery Kaurov, head of the Union of Orthodox Citizens of Ukraine, president of this imaginary, religion-based republic. Taking refuge in Moscow because Ukrainian authorities have launched a criminal investigation of him, Kaurov addressed the group assembled in Odessa by Skype, imploring them to promote this historical name, to say and write that … our land is Novorossiia — an important part of the Holy Russia. Ironically, in the 19th century when there actually was a Novorossiia, Odessa was known for its ungodly ways. There were fewer Orthodox Churches per capita there than in any other large city in the Russian empire. And the members of a Jewish synagogue there shocked more pious Jews by installing a pipe organ. A Yiddish expression held that the fires of hell burned around the city
[Marxism] Stephen Cohen Is Wrong on Russia Ukraine America | New Republic
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Re: [Marxism] Stephen Cohen Is Wrong on Russia Ukraine America | New Republic
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/4/14 8:42 PM, Michael Smith wrote Quomodo ceciderunt potestates! Louis, I'm dismayed to see you citing The Bananas Republic. What's next, a press release from AIPAC? Why don't you comment on the substance of the article rather than its origin. I posted an article from the Wall Street Journal yesterday whose provenance is further to the right than New Republic but the reporting struck me as sound. More to the point, Cohen is a disgusting stooge. He told Amy Goodman that Every time a journalist breaks a leg, they say the Kremlin did it.” In the 1930s, the Nation applauded the Moscow Trials. It seems that it is returning to form. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Boris Kagarlitsky: Fate of Donetsk is being decided in Kharkov | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/3/14 2:53 AM, glparramatta wrote: By *Boris Kagarlitsky*, translated by *Renfrey Clarke* for /Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ May 3, 2014 -- The preliminary outcome of the revolt in south-eastern Ukraine can be described as an unstable equilibrium. Attempting to crush the Donetsk republic with the help of their armed forces, the Kiev authorities have met with defeat. The army, as expected, has refused steadfastly to wage war on its own people, and the forces of the Right Sector and National Guard have clearly been insufficient to cope even with the militia, not to speak of the mass of protestors. Full article at http://links.org.au/node/3832 Why doesn't Boris take a trip to Donetsk to see the revolt with his own eyes? Or at least he can watch the videos on Vice News, which are becoming sine qua non for those following events in Ukraine. Here's dispatch #32 that shows a mob assaulting the prosecutor's office. https://news.vice.com/video/russian-roulette-the-invasion-of-ukraine-dispatch-thirty-two Toward the end, you hear one of the rebels yelling out get the faggots. Boris has convinced himself that the Donetsk revolt has a progressive dynamic because the protesters march on May Day and rally around a Lenin statue. This is no different than what we can expect from the CP of Ukraine or Russia for that matter. If this is what a leading Russian Marxist academic is capable of nowadays, then maybe we should reconsider Bakunin. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Lawrence and Wishart volumes on the Wayback website.
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[Marxism] The improving economy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, May 3 2014 Jump in Payrolls Is Seen as a Sign of New Optimism By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ After a frustrating series of false starts since the economic recovery began five years ago, American businesses appear to be increasingly confident about hiring new workers. In the best monthly showing in more than two years, employers added 288,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said on Friday, representing three consecutive months in which payrolls grew by more than 200,000. The report, combined with other recent data, suggests the economy is poised to expand at a faster pace in the coming months, after a slow start in the depths of winter. Despite the big jump in payrolls, wages did not grow at all in April, illustrating why so many Americans remain doubtful that they will benefit from what both the Federal Reserve and the White House see as evidence of a resurgent economy. Even a sharp drop in the nation’s unemployment rate, to 6.3 percent from March’s 6.7 percent, provided little cause for celebration, since it was primarily because of a large decline in the number of people participating in the labor force rather than an increase in the number of Americans telling government survey workers that they had found a new job. As a result, even as President Obama sought to seize on the upswing in the job market as evidence that his policies are working, he continues to struggle to capitalize politically on the improving economy. Although the unemployment rate is at the lowest level of Mr. Obama’s presidency, his job approval rating is also near a record low. (clip) The feeble participation rate, which reflects the share of all working-age adults with a job or actively looking for one, suggests a sizable amount of slack remains in the labor force, helping keep wage gains modest because employers know they can appeal to a wide range of applicants when they have new jobs to offer. But many companies draw from a relatively specialized pool, which is good for those with appropriate skills but limits the possibilities for those who are out of work. Take the case of Synchronoss Technologies, a maker of software for cloud computing and mobile communication. The company, based in Bridgewater, N.J., is looking to hire roughly 150 workers in the next few months, many of them in positions like software development and engineering that start at $75,000 to $100,000. More senior positions pay $150,000 to $200,000. Most of those jobs require specialized skills and usually go to people with extensive experience who are nearly all currently employed or to college students and former interns. “We could get 50 résumés for a position and two to four of those people will be brought in for interviews,” said Stephen Waldis, Synchronoss’s founder and chief executive. “If we’re lucky, that might yield one hire.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stephen F. Cohen is not the man he used to be
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/3/14 11:43 AM, turb...@aol.com wrote: I don't believe Cohen ever said that the Kievan rebellion was instigated by the West, only that they took full advantage of it to futher their designs. Cohen says that the Ukrainians had legitimate grievances. This formula can be found in anything that John Rees has written about Ukraine or Syria as well. It is strictly a pro forma cover-your-ass statement sugar-coating designed to make the real message palatable, namely that the world is divided between imperialist and anti-imperialist blocs. The Sam Marcy estate should sue Rees for plagiarism (and the CPGB while they are at it.) What is your explanation for the fact that Poland, the Czech Republic and other eastern European countries have been brought into NATO? Or the fact that Washington is now attempting to conclude military and trade alliances against China in Asia (the pivot toward Asia) despite the fact that China is even more open to foreign investment than Russia, and unions there are brutally repressed? What is your analysis? Is your dismissal of geopolitics a declaration of your determination to be oblivious to them? Eastern European nations probably signed up for NATO because Russian tanks invaded them in the past using the same kinds of excuses found in Counterfire and the Weakly Worker. It follows the same logic as the Irish nationalists seeking alliances with the Kaiser in WWI and then with Hitler. Nothing has changed in the Ukraine over the past 90 years unfortunately. In 1918 they sought ties with the West since the Bolsheviks, like the Czars before them, saw Ukraine in exactly the same way that China saw Tibet or Xinjiang. Or, for that matter, the way that the US saw Cuba or Puerto Rico. If the Euromaidan politicians were so gung-ho to join NATO, they would have done so when Orange Revolution politicians like Yushchenko or Tymoshenko were heads of state. For that matter, when Yanukovych was in power, they never voted against bills that kept Ukraine unaligned. This hysteria about NATO is manufactured. It is an attempt to turn the victim into the criminal, as Malcolm X once put it. Lenin equated Ukraine with Ireland under British rule. In 1920 the Ukrainians had a legislature that Christian Rakovsky deemed unacceptable. It was dissolved because the Ukrainians were not a “real nation”, the same garbage heard from the Maoist Alain Badiou. Despite all the left rhetoric, those who follow the Kremlin are no different from Stalin. If Lenin hadn’t died, he would have launched a fight against Stalin over the treatment of Ukraine. It was the Great Russian chauvinism of Stalin’s secret faction that was the initial symptom of bureaucratic degeneration. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Only about 28% of people in the Donetsk region want to become part of Russia.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2014 7:30 p.m. ET Ukraine's Divisions Extend to East Itself History Helps Explain Country's Dichotomy, but Doesn't Necessarily Mean People Living Near Russia Want to Secede By James Marson And Paul Sonne DONETSK, Ukraine—With young men standing guard over barricades of tires, and speeches and music blaring over loudspeakers, the pro-Russia camp that has taken over the regional assembly here could be an answer to the pro-Europe movement that emerged late last year in Kiev. But Donetsk, one of the largest cities in eastern Ukraine, is missing one element that proved vital to the success of the Kiev protests in toppling Ukraine's pro-Russian president: people. Thousands of activists lived on Kiev's central square for three months, rising to tens of thousands at weekend rallies in the capital. By contrast, the movement here has never attracted more than a few thousand. Nowadays, the square in front of the assembly building often has only a few dozen stragglers. The disparity reflects the differences between Ukraine's west and east that are at the center of the current crisis, as well as the mixed feelings in Donetsk itself. Western Ukraine was only absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1939 after centuries under Polish or Austrian rule. It was long a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism that has translated into strident political activism, particularly against Russian influence. Many people there work, study or travel in Western and Central Europe. Hotspots Along the Border The eastern heartland of Donbas was long part of the Russian empire and adapted quickly to Soviet centralized rule, where big steel mills, factories and coal mines took care of most every element of life. Few have traveled West, relying as before on Russia for trade and jobs. The west is predominantly Ukrainian-speaking and idolizes nationalists who fought against the Soviets, at one point alongside the Nazis. In the east, where Russian is the main language, statues of Lenin still stand in town squares and the western heroes are seen as traitors. The west was the driving force behind Kiev protests that led to the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, a Donetsk native, in February. The majority in Donetsk reject the new government and want closer economic and cultural ties with Russia. But that doesn't mean they want to become Russian. A recent poll showed that only about 28% of people in the Donetsk region want to become part of Russia. Just 18% supported the seizure of the regional assembly, according to the survey, which the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, one of the country's most respected, independent pollsters, conducted from April 8-16. Asked about the low headcount outside the building, Kirill Rudenko, a spokesman for the protesters, said it was overflowing with people this month but that after Kiev began what it calls an antiterrorist operation last week, many went home to the outskirts. The time for protests is already over, he said. Still, Russian television has given them blanket coverage, depicting the occupation as backed by the majority and claiming equivalence with the Kiev demonstrations, which it portrays as engineered by the West. View Slideshow A member of the Ukrainian special forces takes position at an abandoned roadblock in the eastern city of Slovyansk. AFP/Getty Images That has prompted Moscow to suggest Ukraine's regions are too diverse to be governed from Kiev, and to push for a federal structure. Ukrainian officials view that as an attempt to increase Moscow's sway and hobble the government's attempt to reorient the former Soviet republic westward. Kiev has instead offered more power to the regions over economic and cultural matters. The Donetsk protesters themselves are at odds over what they want. They demand a referendum, but when they are pressed on what question will be posed, few can answer. Compared with Kiev, it is more difficult to mobilize protesters of any political stripe in Donetsk, a less-youthful and more working-class city buttressed by surrounding steel mills, coal mines and factories, said Serhiy Harmash, a journalist and activist who organized a pro-Ukraine rally in the city last week. Here, people are more apolitical, Mr. Harmash said. There is a lot more paternalism. If Moscow were to send troops, more than 10% of people in the region would welcome them, but more than half would stay home and do nothing, according to the KIIS poll. Many simply feel they have no influence on events controlled by elites and vested interests. When they decide something somewhere up above, that's when something will happen, said Irina Kiriyenko, a 17-year-old Donetsk
[Marxism] Plying Social Media, Chinese Workers Grow Bolder in Exerting Clout
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, May 3 2014 Plying Social Media, Chinese Workers Grow Bolder in Exerting Clout By DAN LEVIN DONGGUAN, China — The call to action, carried by social media to thousands of smartphones across this bleak factory town, roused the workers from their jobs making Nike and Adidas sneakers. Their Taiwanese employer, Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings, the world’s largest manufacturer of branded athletic shoes, had for years underpaid the social security contributions that employees were counting on for retirement. News of the shortfall, discovered and disseminated by a newly retired worker, stirred familiar resentments. But it was the company’s refusal to make amends that led to one of China’s largest strikes in recent memory, involving 40,000 workers who stayed off assembly lines for two weeks and cost Yue Yuen about $27 million in losses. Last week, after government officials stepped in to resolve the impasse, the company announced it would make up the missing payments and start fully funding worker pensions as required by Chinese law. Although played down by the state-run news media, the mass walkout illustrates the growing might of Chinese workers amid a shrinking labor pool, a slowing economy and the Communist Party’s fears of social unrest. The strike also highlights the increasing potency of social media despite the government’s best efforts to limit news and information that might inspire workers to stand up to employers who can fire troublemakers at will — or call on the police to jail labor organizers. “Chinese workers now have greater bargaining power, and they know how to use this power,” said Geoffrey Crothall, communications director at China Labor Bulletin, an advocacy group in Hong Kong. The proletariat may be a vaunted pillar of Mao’s Communist revolution, but the workaday reality for China’s low-wage army of factory workers long ago eclipsed their hallowed status. On paper, Chinese workers are afforded generous rights and protections, but since the introduction of market reforms in the 1980s, factory owners, many of them multinational companies from Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong, have often set the terms of employment. Independent trade unions are illegal in China, and government-backed unions are more interested in quickly defusing labor disputes than delivering on worker grievances. For years, a seemingly limitless supply of pliable young workers, many of them uneducated migrants from China’s rural hinterland, ensured that the factory owners could dictate wages and work hours. But that power dynamic has begun to shift, fueled in part by increasing opportunities in the country’s expanding service sector and a shrinking work force. The mounting labor shortage has strengthened the hand of Chinese workers, who increasingly demand better work conditions, higher pay and perks like days off. Last year, China’s 269 million migrant workers earned an average of $410 a month, an increase of nearly 14 percent from 2012 and almost twice the growth rate in the nation’s gross domestic product. These gains do not come easily. In recent years, workers across the country have been turning their aspirations into action, staging more than 1,100 strikes and protests between June 2011 and the end of 2013, according to China Labor Bulletin. In a sign that labor unrest is rising, there have been more than 200 strikes, including 85 in the manufacturing sector, in the past two months alone, the group said. Technology is aiding that trend. Better educated than their parents and as nimble on a computer as they are on an assembly line, blue-collar workers have become well versed in labor law, less tolerant of onerous schedules and more willing to share complaints beyond their immediate circle of co-workers. Perhaps most worrisome to Chinese authorities, during the Yue Yuen strike, workers and administrative staff joined together largely without the help of protest leaders, who can be easily neutralized by the police. Employees turned to social media and spread messages faster than censors could stop them. Their most effective weapon was the popular mobile messaging program Weixin, which has nearly 300 million users in China and is also known by its English name, WeChat. “Before, we were naïve and always getting tricked,” said Xiao Zhixiong, 30, a migrant from China’s central Hunan Province who makes sneaker molds. “Now, we’re learning to be smart.” Sprawled along a fetid river that winds through Gaobu township, the No. 3 Yue Yuen complex includes factories, dormitories and a basketball court. Just beyond the gates, fruit vendors and noodle restaurants compete for workers’ hard-earned cash, as does a sleek Footzone shoe store
[Marxism] A Syrian novelist driving a cab in Chicago
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, May 3 2014 Taking Fares, and Writing in Between Osama Alomar Pursues His Literary Ambitions in Exile By LARRY ROHTER CHICAGO — In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company. Up to a dozen hours a day, six days a week, Mr. Alomar cruises the northwest suburbs around O’Hare Airport in his bright blue cab, dictionaries and a volume of Khalil Gibran piled beside him. When parked in line waiting for a fare to appear, he pulls out a notebook and tries to write. “Driving a cab is hard work and very hard psychologically, because it takes me away from writing,” Mr. Alomar, who turns 46 on Saturday, said in an interview here recently at a coffee shop and in his cab. “It is a kind of spiritual exile to go with my physical exile. But I have to be strong. I have to be patient.” On Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Alomar, whose first book to be translated into English, “Fullblood Arabian,” was recently published by New Directions, will take a brief respite from that grueling routine to attend the PEN World Voices literary festival in New York. He is scheduled to take part in two panels: “Creativity and Craft in Asylum,” on Saturday, and a Sunday afternoon conversation with the American writer Lydia Davis, who has emerged as his biggest champion, and the Icelandic writer Sjon. Mr. Alomar’s super-short stories “are very imaginative and vivid and exhilarating,” said Ms. Davis, whose own work often occupies a terrain similar to Mr. Alomar’s in terms of length and tone. “Some are dark and angry, while others are funny. They are compact stylistically, wasting no words, and they go quickly from one moment to the next and on to the end. So they have density, but also are sort of explosive, with an aftershock, because they seem to tell one story at the same time they are telling another.” Mr. Alomar sees himself as an heir of a literary form, now called al-qissa al-qasira jiddan, or very short story, that in the Arab world dates back more than a millennium and contains elements of poetry, philosophy, folk tale and allegory. “Fullblood Arabian” was, in fact, issued as part of a poetry series that includes work by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Hilda Doolittle, and the stories in the book run no longer than three pages, with the shortest being only one sentence. Muhsin al-Musawi, a Columbia University professor and literary critic who is also the editor of The Journal of Arabic Literature, described the genre Mr. Alomar has embraced as “similar to the riddle or puzzle,” but requiring “a high level of prose.” As such, he added, “it offers a way out of many restrictions and constraints without being very explicit.” Certainly, many of Mr. Alomar’s stories make use of ambiguities, especially in relation to the political scene. Here, in its entirety, is “Tongue-Tie,” the title piece of one of his three collections published in Arabic: “Before leaving for work I tied my tongue into a great tie. My colleagues congratulated me on my elegance. They praised me to our boss, who expressed admiration and ordered all employees to follow my example.” C. J. Collins, Mr. Alomar’s translator, remembers meeting the writer for the first time in Damascus in 2007. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had eased some restrictions on private gatherings, and Mr. Alomar was a regular at salons that had then sprung up, where invited speakers would address political, cultural and social topics, but steer clear of directly criticizing the dictatorship. “In the discussions that would come afterward, Osama’s stories would come up spontaneously as a way of driving home an intellectual point in a poetic fashion,” Mr. Collins recalled, adding, “In the States, it is putting literature down to call it utilitarian, but for me it was quite striking to see his work put to this really concrete use.” Mr. Alomar was born in 1968 in Damascus, where his father was a philosophy professor and his mother an elementary school teacher. He read widely from his parents’ library, studied Arabic literature in college and sang and played guitar in a pop band. When the BBC’s Arabic service broadcast a poem he had submitted, he became convinced that he had a future as a writer. Thanks in part to that upbringing, “I’m very interested in social and political movements,” he said. “Especially in my own country, but in the Middle East in general. As a secular person, I believe in democracy and individual freedom. There is a lot of persecution and
[Marxism] East Supplants West (On Film, At Least) » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == New York Indian Film Festival 2014 East Supplants West (On Film, At Least) by LOUIS PROYECT In 1998 Andre Gunder Frank’s highly controversial “ReOrient” appeared. It argued that “the East” (mainly China and India) would eventually supplant “the West” as hegemonic powers, thus reestablishing the relationships that existed before 1492 when all of Columbus’s fleet could be put on the deck of the flagship of Zheng He’s fleet that made multiple voyages to the east coast of Africa in the early 15th century. I have my doubts about Frank’s overall thesis but on one level it is surely borne out by Indian cinema that now makes most American films look crude and amateurish by comparison. To see Indian cinema at its best, I urge New Yorkers to make it to the New York Indian Film Festival that runs from May 5th to the 10th. It can only be described as an embarrassment of riches. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/east-supplants-west-on-film-at-least/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Russia moves against critical media outlets
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In March, the editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru, a privately owned independent news website, was fired after the government issued the station with a warning because she'd interviewed a controversial Ukrainian political figure and ultra-nationalist. The editor was then replaced with a Kremlin ally. TV Rain, Russia's only independent television station, was openly criticized by Putin's office for publishing a controversial poll about World War II. Some cable operators then dropped the channel and TV Rain abruptly lost its lease; it's in the process of being evicted from its headquarters. In February, the general director of Echo of Moscow, the only independent radio station in all of Russia, was replaced by Yekaterina Pavlova, the former head of the Kremlin-operated Voice of Russia. Pavlova's husband, Alexei Pavlov, is the Deputy Chief of the Presidential Press and Information Office. The station had also had its website blocked inside Russia; it was only unblocked when Echo of Moscow agreed to ban opposition leaders like Boris Nemtsov and Alexey Navalny from blogging. Both men have also had their personal blogs blocked by government censors. And so, in less than three months, the Kremlin effectively destroyed or hijacked much of Russia's last remaining independent media. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has reorganized some key Russian state-owned outlets to exert greater control over messaging, meaning Russian-language programming (TV, radio, internet, and print) is now dominated by Kremlin-controlled outlets. full: https://news.vice.com/articles/how-russia-conquered-eastern-ukraine-without-firing-a-shot Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A history of land ownership
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == London Review of Books Vol. 36 No. 9 · 8 May 2014 That Disturbing Devil Ferdinand Mount Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater Bloomsbury, 482 pp, £20.00, January, ISBN 978 1 4088 1574 8 In this case, the elephant is the room. There can be few enormous subjects more often dodged than the space we occupy on the surface of the earth. Land ownership – its many modes, its distribution, its history – is the great ignored in politics today, gingerly taken up if at all and quickly put down again in favour of more fashionable topics: capitalism, urbanisation, democracy, industrialisation, the role of the state. The question ‘Who owns the land?’ has a musty aroma to it. Andro Linklater tells us at the end of his ambitious odyssey that he was aware that his focus on land ownership ‘might seem old-fashioned to the point of eccentricity’. Certainly that is the reputation which has stuck to his best-known predecessor, Henry George. In his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty, George set out the same thumping principle which inspires Linklater: ‘The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.’ In his day, George had quite a following. Progress and Poverty sold more than three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages. George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the same, George and Georgism remain outliers on the landscape of politics. Yet George’s marginality gave him an unrivalled view of the emerging world. The second of ten children of a struggling publisher of religious texts, he left school at 14 and sailed before the mast to Melbourne and Calcutta, turned to typesetting when he came home, then lit out for the gold mines of British Columbia, before drifting into journalism and finishing up as managing editor of the San Francisco Times. In roaming the frontiers, he saw how land that was valueless yesterday could become worth many dollars an acre after it was cleared, surveyed, settled and, above all, owned. Andro Linklater did not live quite the hand-to-mouth life of Henry George, but he too was an outlier. Raised in the Orkneys, the younger son of Eric Linklater, he had something of his father’s unpigeonholeable talent as a writer and the same indifference to the opinion of others. He lived with the headhunters of Sarawak, completed Eric’s history of the Black Watch, taught in a tough London school, lived on an almost uninhabited Hebridean island for five years, never to be tied down to a career, nor a search for recognition, let alone celebrity, though capable of charming the birds off the trees if there had been any trees in the desolate regions he preferred. It is typical of his ornery nature that he should have died of a heart attack the week before Owning the Earth was first published in New York, because he was on another Hebridean island and there was a fatal delay before he could get medical treatment. Unlike George, Linklater sets out to provide a historical framework for his argument. He begins with the rude irruption of European adventurers into the New World. In the royal charter that Queen Elizabeth conferred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, she granted him full power over the soil of ‘those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida … to dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of the laws of England’. That raffish, bisexual gallant, Raleigh’s half-brother, was to control the freehold of the Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for Native Americans, of course). This arrogation was all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before Gilbert set sail and now in the British Library, shows a rich mixture of strip-fields, commons and orchards, as well as the large number of fields already enclosed by the landowner and dotted with sheep and cattle. But Gilbertia – as the new country might perhaps have been named if Sir Humphrey’s frigate, the Squirrel, had not gone down in a storm on the return journey – was to be freehold from the start,
[Marxism] The Lamentable Demise of the Brecht Forum » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-lamentable-demise-of-the-brecht-forum/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Is Bitcoin the Future of Money? | The Nation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == By Doug Henwood http://www.thenation.com/article/179620/bitcoin-future-money Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stephen F. Cohen is not the man he used to be | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/2/14 5:42 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: Deschytsia added that Ukraine supports an intensive dialogue with NATO and is discussing different forms and ways of cooperation. So when are the Right Sector pogroms against the Jews happening in Ukraine that you were warning about, Marvin? It turned out that I was right and you were wrong. Maybe you'd have a better track record if you spent less time trawling Global Research and RT.com as I suspect you do. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] [Pen-l] Stephen F. Cohen is not the man he used to be | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/2/14 6:10 PM, Michael Smith wrote: Oh well, that settles*that*! Kieva locuta, causa finita. Do you actually have an analysis of why NATO needs to close in on Russia? During the Cold War, the motive was to open up Russia for foreign investment. Right now Russia is the 3rd largest recipient in the world after the USA and China. Exxon and BP just met with their Russian partners to tell them that nothing has changed. Moscow is filled with Gucci shops and Mercedes-Benz dealerships while the Marxist left gets harassed by the cops as if Michael Bloomberg was mayor. Where does all this identification with Putin come from? I can understand why Michael would have become a Maoist when he was young. If you are going to show your parents and American society that you are a rebel, there's no better stance to take than raising the Red Book even if by that point Mao was working on a deal to meet with Nixon and Kissinger. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] [Pen-l] Stephen F. Cohen is not the man he used to be | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/2/14 7:27 PM, Michael Smith wrote: There was an earlier Crimean War, you know. That's true but there was a war between France and Prussia around the same time, as well as one between Russia and Japan in 1905. Russia only became a permanent bogeyman after 1917. Under Czardom, it made alliances on an ad hoc basis depending on which state served its immediate strategic goals. It aligned itself with Britain in 1914 despite what took place beforehand in Crimea. The other thing to keep in mind is that Putin doesn't care about American bases on his doorstep as long as they are used to keep the jihadists at bay. It is only when they threaten his control over the Ukraine, a nationality that never really existed according to Badiou, that he gets all hot and bothered. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-putin-wants-us-bases-in-afghanistan/480087.html Why Putin Wants U.S. Bases in Afghanistan By Michael Bohm On May 9, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced he would allow the U.S. to keep nine military bases in Afghanistan after direct U.S. participation in the Afghan war ends in 2014. How has President Vladimir Putin responded to the possibility that Afghanistan may turn into “one giant U.S. aircraft carrier,” as Kremlin-friendly political analyst Yury Krupnov recently put it? After Karzai’s announcement, you might have expected the Kremlin to offer its usual bluster about how the U.S. and NATO are trying to create a suffocating “Anaconda ring” around Russia — from the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Georgia and Turkey to Afghanistan, South Korea and Japan. You might even have expected a dose of the anti-U.S. demagoguery about the U.S. government using Afghan bases to run a lucrative narcotics-export business, including daily flights of U.S. cargo aircraft filled with heroin destined for Russia and Europe. Or that U.S. bases in Afghanistan could be used for an attack on Russia. After all, Yury Krupnov and other conservative, pro-Kremlin analysts are particularly fond of reminding Russians that a U.S. nuclear missile could reach Moscow from the U.S. airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan, in less than 20 minutes. Yet the Kremlin was conspicuously silent about Karzai’s recent announcement on U.S. bases. At the same time, however, this restraint was consistent with Putin’s general position on Afghan security, which he first articulated in February 2012 during a speech in Ulyanovsk, the home of a joint U.S.-Russian transit center to transport U.S. war materiel out of Afghanistan. During his speech — given to a group of elite Russian paratroopers, no less — Putin offered clear support for the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan. “We have a strong interest in our southern borders being calm,” Putin said. “We need to help them [U.S. and coalition forces]. Let them fight. … This is in Russia’s national interests.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, May 1 2014 (How appropriate) Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely By NOAM COHEN The Marxist Internet Archive, a website devoted to radical writers and thinkers, recently received an email: It must take down hundreds of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or face legal consequences. The warning didn’t come from a multinational media conglomerate but from a small, leftist publisher, Lawrence Wishart, which asserted copyright ownership over the 50-volume, English-language edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings. To some, it was “uncomradely” that fellow radicals would deploy the capitalist tool of intellectual property law to keep Marx’s and Engels’s writings off the Internet. And it wasn’t lost on the archive’s supporters that the deadline for complying with the order came on the eve of May 1, International Workers’ Day. “Marx and Engels belong to the working class of the world spiritually, they are that important,” said David Walters, one of the organizers of the Marxist archive. “I would think Marx would want the most prolific and free distribution of his ideas possible — he wasn’t in it for the money.” Still, Mr. Walters said the archive respected the publisher’s copyright, which covers the translated works, not the German originals from the 19th century. On Wednesday, the archive removed the disputed writings with a note blaming the publisher and a bold headline: “File No Longer Available!” The fight over online control of Marx’s works comes at a historical moment when his ideas have found a new relevance, whether because the financial crisis of 2008 shook people’s confidence in global capitalism or, with the passage of time, the Marx name has become less shackled to the legacy of the Soviet Union. The unlikely best seller by the French economist Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century,” harks back to Marx’s work, examining historical trends toward inequality in wealth. Despite this boomlet in interest, however, Lawrence Wishart, located in East London, hardly expects to have an online hit on its hands, said Sally Davison, the publisher’s managing editor. The goal is to create a digital edition to sell to libraries in place of a print edition, which costs roughly $1,500 for the 50 volumes. “Creating a digital strategy is key to our survival,” she said. “We are currently negotiating with somebody, that’s why we’ve asked the archive to take it off; it’s hard to sell it to librarians if a version already exists online.” Lawrence Wishart has been losing the argument online, however. The publisher said that it had received about 500 irate emails, along the lines of “How can you say you are radicals?” There are more than 4,500 signatures on an online petition to oppose the notion of a copyright claim on Marx’s and Engels’s writings; the petition cites the incongruity, noting that the two philosophers “wrote against the monopoly of capitalism and its origin, private property, all their lives.” And the libertarian Cato Institute enjoyed teasing its ideological adversaries with an I-told-you-so blog post titled, “Because Property Rights Are Important.” Ms. Davison said she was flabbergasted to see Lawrence Wishart cast as the oppressor. The publisher has two full-time employees and two part-time employees and barely makes ends meet, publishing a handful of journals, like Anarchy Studies, and about a dozen left-wing books a year, she said. “We make no profit and are not particularly well paid,” she said. Ms. Davison defended her position by quoting Marx to the effect that you must adapt to real-world conditions: “We don’t live in a world of everybody sharing everything. As Marx said, and I may be paraphrasing, ‘We make our own history, but not in the conditions of our own choosing.’ ” The publisher also tried to turn the tables on its critics, questioning whether it was indeed radical to believe that there is no ownership of content produced through hard work, like the mammoth translation and annotation of Marx’s and Engels’s work, a project initially directed by the Soviet Union in the late 1960s that took some 30 years of collaboration among scholars across the world. In a note on its site, Lawrence Wishart said its critics were not carrying on the socialist and communist traditions, but reflecting a “consumer culture which expects cultural content to be delivered free to consumers, leaving cultural workers such as publishers, editors and writers unpaid, while the large publishing and other media conglomerates and aggregators continue to enrich themselves through advertising and data-mining revenues.” The statement noted that many works by Marx and Engels — including “The Communist
[Marxism] Radicals fight over a Karl Marx copyright - latimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-radicals-fight-over-a-karl-marx-copyright-20140429,0,303004.story Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Boris Kagarlitsky on eastern Ukraine: The logic of a revolt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/1/14 4:08 AM, glparrama...@greenleft.org.au wrote: Boris Kagarlitsky on eastern Ukraine: The logic of a revolt http://links.org.au/node/3838 Kagarlitsky is an embarrassment--comparing Donetsk to the Paris Commune when peaceful protesters are violently repressed by pro-Russia thugs and reporters are abducted and beaten for days on end. If you read his prolix article, there is not a single reference to a mass demonstration in the east. He draws a parallel between Maidan and the Donetsk People's Republic without mentioning this. It is worth reposting this: https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/tag/boris-kagarlitsky/ In an editorial published on the web site Rabkor.ru, entitled “Anti-Maidan and the Future of Protests,” Kagarlitsky (or his alter ego: unfortunately, the article has no byline) describes the events in Ukraine as follows: “Nothing testifies to the class character of the confrontation that has unfolded in Ukraine like the two crowds that gathered on April 7 in Kharkov. At one end of the square, the well-dressed, well-groomed and prosperous middle class, the intelligentsia, and students stood under yellow-and-blue Ukrainian national flags. Across the square from them had gathered poorly and badly dressed people, workers and youth from the city’s outskirts, bearing red banners, Russian tricolors, and St. George’s Ribbons.” According to Kagarlitsky, this is nothing more or less than a vision of the future of Russia, where only the “state apparatus despised by liberal intellectuals defends them from direct confrontation with those same masses they dub ‘white trash.’” The fact that the venerable sociologist has been forced to resort to such demagogic methods as assessing the class makeup of protesters by reversing the proverb “It’s not the gay coat that makes the gentleman” indicates the conjectural nature of his scheme. (I wonder how much time Kagarlitsky spent poring over photos from Donetsk with a magnifying glass.) When discussing the social aspect of Maidan, most analysts have noted the dramatic changes that occurred as the protests were radicalized. “At the Euromaidan that existed before November 30–December 1,” notes political analyst Vasily Stoyakin, “it was Kyivans who dominated, and in many ways the ‘face’ of Maidan was made up by young people and the intelligentsia, albeit with a slight admixture of political activists. Many students, people with higher educations, and creative people attended it. […] After November 30, when the clashes began, […] a lot of blue-collar workers without higher educations arrived, in large part from the western regions.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Green Left Weakly on Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Really too bad the comrades are so fucked up on this question, allowing Tony Ilitis and Roger Annis to speak for them in their newspaper. One would think that at least one voice in the entire Socialist Alliance could reflect the POV of he Ukrainian left. I guess they deem the decrepit Communist Party of Ukraine as the left. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] ZCommunications » What Helped Bring Donald Sterling Down?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Almost a century ago, WEB Du Bois called for workers actions not for higher wages or medical benefits but against racism. He believed that if the power of wealthy bigots could be crippled economically, then racist laws would go by the wayside. The importance of the “strike against racism” is rarely taught in school, but a critical part of our history. “In the midst of the Great Depression, as workers were organizing and striking, Du Bois made the case in his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America (1935) that it was the ‘general strike’ launched by the slaves themselves against the peculiar institution which set the stage for Emancipation,” labor historian Peter Rachleff said to me. “The slaves’ heroic efforts would be echoed a century later in Memphis, Tennessee, when Black sanitation workers on strike for dignity and respect as higher wages, and fair work rules, emblazoned their picket signs with the simple mantra, ‘I AM A MAN.’ Our labor history is peppered with such stories, which all too often have remained ‘untold stories.’ If more of us knew more of these stories, our ability to engage the present and shape the future would be strengthened.” That history was built upon this week when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver levied his unprecedented lifetime ban against Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Yes, Sterling’s racism had become a liability to the NBA’s business interests. Yes, sponsors were leaving in droves. But now we also know that in the days before Adam Silver levied this punishment, he had word that players had planned to walk off the court before the start of Tuesday night’s playoff games. As Marcus Thompson II wrote for the San Jose Mercury News: “The plan was set, the product of a 30-minute players meeting. The Warriors were going to go through pre-game warm-ups and take part in the national anthem and starting line-up introductions. They were going to take the floor for the jump ball, dapping up the Clippers players as is customary before games. Then once the ball was in the air, they were just going to walk off. All 15 of them. full: http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/what-helped-bring-donald-sterling-down/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fuck! I can't get medical marijuana
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.theawl.com/2014/05/new-york-politicians-nervously-try-weed Thursday, May 1st, 2014 Drug Wars New York Politicians Nervously Try Weed John Herrman @ 10:20 am In January, Governor Cuomo proposed a legal weed baby step. The plan was to limit dispensing to a small group of hospitals: Marijuana would be legal for medicinal use but difficult to acquire, available for severe conditions and only at the discretion of a board of doctors. The boldest thing about this legislation was that it contained the word marijuana (legally: MARIHUANA); activists worried it was so cumbersome that nobody would bother to take advantage of it. Above all it was presented as safe: for patients, for The Children, and for politicians who might be interested in supporting it. But apparently not safe enough! To get the bill through the Senate, sponsors made a few changes. Now they think it might have a chance of getting passed: On Friday, Bolstered by growing public acceptance and hints of support from Gov. Cuomo, proponents of pot as medicine believe newly re-drafted legislation will be approved in Albany this spring – making New York the 22nd state to legalize medical marijuana. We're closer to this than we have ever been before, said Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance. But this re-draft was significant. Maybe fatally so! The original proposal gave doctors discretion about what constituted a SEVERE DEBILITATING OR LIFE-THREATENING CONDITION; now, there is a strict list: CANCER POSITIVE STATUS FOR HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS OR ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME, AMYOTROPHIC LATERAL SCLEROSIS, ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE, MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY, TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY AND POST-CONCUSSION SYNDROME, DYSTONIA, PSORIASIS, PARKINSON'S DISEASE, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS, DAMAGE TO THE NERVOUS TISSUE OF THE SPINAL CORD WITH OBJECTIVE NEUROLOGICAL INDICATION OF INTRACTABLE SPASTICITY, EPILEPSY, CACHEXIA, WASTING SYNDROME, CROHN'S DISEASE, POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, NEUROPATHY, RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS, LUPUS, AND DIABETES No colitis or glaucoma! (clip) I thought my glaucoma had an upside. No such luck. That, and his backing for charter schools, is reason enough to stick a pitchfork in Cuomo. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Honor for Tarnished Clippers Owner Turns Spotlight on N.A.A.C.P. Branch
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, May 1 2014 Honor for Tarnished Clippers Owner Turns Spotlight on N.A.A.C.P. Branch By TANZINA VEGA When the racist words of Donald Sterling spilled out in a recording last week, the incident not only caused the N.B.A. to ban Mr. Sterling for life, it also drew attention to the N.A.A.C.P.'s small Los Angeles branch, which had been planning to honor Mr. Sterling with a lifetime achievement award this month. Officials from the NAACP California state conference are now reviewing why the branch was planning to give one of its highest awards to Mr. Sterling, who has been accused of racially offensive comments and discriminating against blacks and Hispanics before, a person familiar with the review said. At the center of that investigation is the man that many people familiar with the N.A.A.C.P. say spearheaded the effort to honor Mr. Sterling, Leon Jenkins, the branch president. Under Mr. Jenkins’s leadership, the group gave Mr. Sterling a similar award in 2009. On Monday Mr. Jenkins announced that the organization had rescinded its award to Mr. Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, whose foundations have given the Los Angeles group at least $45,000 since 2007, records show. Mr. Jenkins, who became a judge in a district court of Detroit in 1983, was removed from the bench in 1991 and then disbarred in Michigan in 1994 for accepting bribes to dismiss traffic citations, misstating his address to lower his insurance premiums, soliciting a person to commit perjury and other ethical violations, according to court records in Michigan. After a federal investigation led to an indictment, Mr. Jenkins was acquitted of charges including mail fraud, extortion and bribery. But the Supreme Court of Michigan, which oversaw Mr. Jenkins’s work, conducted its own investigation and concluded that from 1984 to 1987 Mr. Jenkins “systematically and routinely sold his office and his public trust.” The high court removed him from the bench and he was subsequently disbarred in the state. Mr. Jenkins moved to California but was prevented from practicing law in the state in 2001 because of his problems in Michigan. The bar association has twice rejected his applications for reinstatement, most recently last year, on the grounds that he “failed to establish his rehabilitation from his past misconduct or that he presently possesses the necessary moral qualifications for reinstatement.” The bar association, in an opinion published last month, praised Mr. Jenkins’s “impressive record of involvement in community service,” primarily with the N.A.A.C.P., noting his success in raising $2 million to host the organization’s national convention in Los Angeles in 2011. But it declined to reinstate him, saying that he had failed to disclose a $660,000 debt, had misrepresented himself twice on rental applications and had not disclosed a $25,000 loan from a friend, Leland Spencer, who was also described by the bar association as Mr. Jenkins’s employer. Mr. Spencer, a restaurant owner in the Los Angeles area, was also scheduled to receive a humanitarian award from the Los Angeles branch of the N.A.A.C.P. at the group’s May 15 dinner. According to the bar association, Mr. Jenkins never repaid Mr. Leland’s $25,000 loan. One of Mr. Leland’s restaurants, the Warehouse, also paid Mr. Jenkins $14,575 in 2007, the document shows. The branch president job is unpaid, N.A.A.C.P. officials said. When questioned by a reporter outside his office in a Culver City shopping mall on Wednesday, Mr. Jenkins said, “I’d talk to you if I could, but I’ve been told not to.” The sign above the door of Mr. Jenkins’s office said “Career Center” and inside computers were available for people to search for jobs and update their résumés. In an interview Tuesday, Derek Turner, a spokesman for the national N.A.A.C.P., described the local branches as “stand-alone organizations that do the work that we shape nationally.” But Mr. Turner has declined since to respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment about Mr. Jenkins, whose legal problems have been reported by news organizations in Michigan and California. One of 52 branches in California – 11 in the greater Los Angeles area alone – the Los Angeles branch has for some time operated in the shadow of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch. Mr. Jenkins became president in 2009. A review of its website shows no listings for programs, other than the May 15 dinner, and the only staff person or volunteer named is Mr. Jenkins. Though independent of the national organization, the local branches send a portion of their fund-raising and membership dollars to the national office, including 25 percent of the funds raised by the
[Marxism] BBC News - The curious survival of the US Communist Party
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26126325#story_continues_1 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and Finitude [23th April 2014]
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/1/14 5:21 PM, Ralph Johansen wrote: Similarly, the fact that Ukraine has always had separatist tendencies and that these have constantly been reactive: that is, backed by strongly reactionary powers and even worse. The Ukrainian Orthodox clergy, whose sacred city is Kiev, has played a determining role in all this, and it goes without saying that it is the most reactionary on Earth, a megalomaniac centre of Imperial Orthodoxy. This separatism at certain moments reached extremes that no one could forget, particularly not the Russian people, knowing that the vast mass of the Nazi-armed and organised armies coming from Russian territory were Ukrainian. The Vlasov army was a Ukrainian army. Do people take the trouble to fact-check the bullshit they forward to the list? You don't have to go to the library. Just look at the Wikipedia link that comes up when you google Vaslov army. There was no Vaslov army. Adolf Hitler permitted the idea of the Russian Liberation Army to circulate in propaganda literature so long as no real formations of the sort were permitted. (Wiki) When they finally got the green light to form divisions made up of Russians, they were only deployed in the West as part of the Wehrmacht because Hitler feared that they would be susceptible to local anti-Nazi feelings in the East, especially in a place like Ukraine that the Nazis turned into a graveyard. As I have pointed out on multiple occasions, polls taken in Ukraine indicate that 98 percent of those polled regard the Red Army positively while only 2 percent feel the same way about the Bandera militias. Those in Vaslov's army who did fight in the West were worthless to the Third Reich. A number of such soldiers were on guard in Normandy on D-Day, and without the equipment or the motivation to fight the Allies, most promptly surrendered. (Wiki) In fact, the ROA or Russian Liberation Army did not come into existence as such until Heinrich Himmler convinced Hitler to permit the formation of 10 divisions. By February 1945 only one division had come into existence. The only active combat the Russian Liberation Army undertook against the Red Army was by the Oder on 11 April 1945, done largely at the insistence of Himmler as a test of the army's reliability. After three days, the outnumbered first division had to retreat. (Wiki) Alan Badiou is a horse's ass. I won't comment on Ralph Johansen's carelessness in forwarding his junk except to say that if Ralph was still practicing law, I'd hate to be in his client's shoes. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and Finitude [23th April 2014]
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/1/14 8:14 PM, Ralph Johansen wrote: something typically intemperate. I'm not writing for the New Yorker, vouching for every word, nor are most who post here. And I know nothing of the history of the Vlasov army, nor do I think it's material. Actually, we have higher standards than the New Yorker that routinely publishes garbage from Jon Lee Anderson and David Remnick despite its long-vanished reputation for fact-checking. If you can't figure out that Badiou's article was identical to the ones posted 5 times a week on DissidentVoice, Counterpunch, and Global Research--except with some high-falutin' philosophical verbiage--than I can't help you. I guess I've developed a nose for bullshit having been around it for over 3 years on Syria. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and Finitude [23th April 2014]
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/1/14 8:40 PM, Joseph Catron wrote: Judging from that Žižek article you posted here last night, I should certainly think so! :-D Seriously, I know of no one who fact-checks everything they post here, or on any comparable forum. And: glass houses, stones, etc., etc. For the edification of new subscribers, Joseph--who went a year or so without posting here--is a supporter of Bashar al-Assad. I am not sure why since he called himself an anarchist some time ago (I think--at least he adores the Black bloc). Most anarchists would like to see him hung in Syria by his entrails. I of course am referring to al-Assad, not Joseph. Despite his admission that he is not a Marxist, he has no trouble interjecting himself into the ongoing discussions here. My guess is that he is influenced by the pro-Baathist elements of the Palestinian leadership since he resided (or may still reside) in Gaza. As people can easily figure out, there are very few people--probably none--who don't line up on Ukraine as they do on Syria. For them, geopolitics trumps the class struggle. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] UKRAINE: Report from a visit in Kiev in April 2014 | Tahrir-ICN
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == All left-wing activists said that the fascists or radical right wingers did not dominate the movement nor represented a big part of the protestors. They did describe fascist attacks on themselves and how they were excluded from the barricades, but that was rather a result of their own weakness then of the strength of the fascists. The mass waving of Ukrainian flags or chanting nationalist slogans were not signs of fascist or radical right wing ideas. Some protesters also had a blurry understanding of nationalism, expressing that for them it was fighting for a free world. Racism or ethnic nationalism did not seem to catch on. Before Maidan the biggest right-wing force was the Ukrainian nationalist party Svoboda (in parliament) with their fascist “youth organization” and militia C-14, with several fascist groups even further on the right (outside parliament). Pravy Sektor was founded by several fascist groups including paid activists and football hooligans at the beginning of the Maidan movement. One of these fascist groups (White Hammer) was later excluded after it had killed three policemen at the outskirts of Kiev. Not all fascists took part in Maidan, some also supported Yanukovich – and, of course, the Russian nationalist fascists did not take part either. They are active now in the separatist activity in Eastern Ukraine, for instance, showing the black-yellow-white flag of the Russian monarchists or national-bolshevik banners. Most of the fascist leaders on Maidan were from the middle class and intellectuals, their infantry consisted of many students, and there were few workers or farmers. The fascist intervention on Maidan seemed like a contradiction from the start, since many of the main issues were liberal or left, like pro-democracy, for EU-association, against corruption, against police-violence, etc. These are topics the fascists do not represent, so their standing among the protesters was not based on their political program but their ability to organize the struggle against the police. When rightists attacked unionist or left-wing activists on Maidan in November, others supported that because everyone “communist” was identified with the Communist Party of Ukraine (which supported Yanukovich). However, even when the Right Sector led the struggle against the police in January, it constituted a rather small group. full: http://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/ukraine-report-from-a-visit-in-kiev-in-april-2014/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Anand Gopal: How to lose a war that wasn’t there
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Last night I went to hear my old friend John Halle and his colleagues performing new compositions out in Brooklyn that I will be blogging about later. If I hadn't been committed to that, I would have gone to a book party for Anand Gopal who has a new book out on Afghanistan. Anand wrote a terrific article on the Syrian revolution in Harper's about two years ago, one that I frequently refer to. I expect his new book to be first-rate.) How the U.S. created the Afghan war — and then lost it The unreported story of how the Haqqani network became America’s greatest enemy By Anand Gopal It was a typical Kabul morning. Malik Ashgar Square was already bumper-to-bumper with Corolla taxis, green police jeeps, honking minivans, and angry motorcyclists. There were boys selling phone cards and men waving wads of cash for exchange, all weaving their way around the vehicles amid exhaust fumes. At the gate of the Lycée Esteqial, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, students were kicking around a soccer ball. At the Ministry of Education, a weathered old Soviet-style building opposite the school, a line of employees spilled out onto the street. I was crossing the square, heading for the ministry, when I saw the suicide attacker. He had Scandinavian features. Dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, and carrying a large backpack, he began firing indiscriminately at the ministry. From my vantage point, about 50 meters away, I couldn’t quite see his expression, but he did not seem hurried or panicked. I took cover behind a parked taxi. It wasn’t long before the traffic police had fled and the square had emptied of vehicles. full: http://warincontext.org/2014/04/29/anand-gopal-how-to-lose-a-war-that-wasnt-there/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Oklahoma execution: Clayton Lockett writhes on gurney in botched procedure | World news | theguardian.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/30/oklahoma-execution-botched-clayton-lockett Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Dugin Says Putin Being Undermined by Insiders Who Don’t Back Him All the Way | The Interpreter
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == According to the Eurasian leader and frequent Kremlin advisor, one cannot describe this confrontation “in ideological terms” because both Russia and the West are democratic societies with capitalist market economies, a liberal ideology, and are secular. Dugin says that it isn’t even a battle between eastern and western Christianity Instead, he says, what is going on is a civilizational struggle reflecting the tendency of geopolitics “to regionalize space and society,” to divide the world between what he calls “the civilization of the Sea” (the West) with its liberal values and “the civilization of the Land” or World Island (Russia and adjacent territories, “an Empire of conservative values.” Sometimes this conflict runs along national borders and sometimes, as in the case of Ukraine, it cuts across them. But Dugin says he wants to focus on the ways in which the civilization of the West is using some in Russia to undermine its civilizational basis and thus advance the power of the West. full: http://www.interpretermag.com/dugin-says-putin-being-undermined-by-insiders-who-dont-back-him-all-the-way/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Volodymyr Ishchenko: “For Ukrainians, as for any other people in the world, the main threat is capitalism.” | LeftEast
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Chuck Mertz: On the line with us right now is Volodymyr Ishchenko. He is a sociologist studying social protests in Ukraine. Good evening, Volodymyr. Volodymyr Ishchenko: Good evening. Volodya CM: Volodymyr’s most recent writing includes Tuesday’s Guardian post Maidan or Anti-Maidan: the Ukraine situation requires more nuance. This week, Volodymyr, here’s the story from the BBC: Russia and Ukraine agree on steps to end crisis. “Russia and Ukraine struck a deal on Thursday to end unrest in Eastern Ukraine stoked by pro-Russian militants.” Has that agreement solved all of Ukraine’s problems? Do you think that this will provide safety and security for Ukrainian citizens? One of the stories that’s been going around in the U.S. media is the idea in Crimea, and also in the East of Ukraine, that Kiev has become lawless, it has become run by gangs, that there has been criminal activity, that it is not safe, and they fear that the same kind of chaos is coming to Crimea or the Eastern Ukraine. VI: That’s a very exaggerated picture. Life in Kiev is totally safe. It’s definitely much safer now than in the Eastern Ukraine; in Donbas there are armed gangs which have attacked state buildings. Some of them seem to be local protesters, but some of them seem to be too well-equipped and too well-trained to be just some militia. If they aren’t Russians or Russianists, they could also be former riot police officers who left Kiev to escape punishment by the new government. Kiev is definitely much safer than in February, when there really was chaos and street clashes in the center; the major problem is in the Eastern Ukraine. CM: Let me ask you a couple of really general questions about this protest. Whenever there is any coverage of any protest—it could be Ukraine, it could be Egypt, it could be Venezuela, it doesn’t matter where it is—the media often points out that this is about the economy, and if it weren’t for a downturn in the economy, these protests would never happen. It’s almost as if the media is saying, protests do not happen when people are upset about an infringement on their rights or freedoms; the only thing that drives people out into the streets is the economy. To what degree did the economy play a role in this Ukrainian uprising? Is this at all about freedoms and rights, or is this just about the bottom line and Ukrainians’ wallets? VI: There were actually two uprisings. You have the Maidan uprising—that started in December and became more violent in January—and now you have the Eastern Ukrainian uprising. They have many similar traits, but the socio-economic component is somewhat deeper in the Eastern Ukraine now, where the economic situation is really deteriorating. The national currency lost something like 40% of its value during the last two or three months, prices are rising, and people in Eastern Ukraine are mainly workers, pensioners. They are speaking about wages, they are speaking about prices, about the collapse of industry. Some of them demand nationalization, some of them demand decent pay for their work. That protest has more to do with the economy; it’s not just about their identity. But they also speak, of course, about their dignity, about their language, about their history, about their heroes, and about this federalization question—which also animates the question of recognition of their self-determination, the question of concrete freedoms and rights. The Maidan protest started more as an ideological protest that was, to some extent, an attempt to break through to the European Dream, seeing it as a kind of utopia which would solve many Ukrainian problems. And for other people, it was a protest against Russia. It was generally believed that if Yanukovych would not sign the European Association Agreement, he will join the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. These countries were described in quite negative tones as authoritarian, poor countries that Ukraine doesn’t need to orient itself to. But later during the Maidan uprising, there came the questions of police repression and violence, of the authoritarian laws which were passed in January—they were pulled to the forefront. They became more important than the European Association. CM: This is the other general question I wanted to ask you: how much are these protests caused by outside forces? Since the Wikileaks revelation from last week—about USAID and the work that they have done in trying to destabilize or help overthrow governments that are not friendly to the United States—there has been some talk in critical sectors of the media, here in the States, about the role that USAID and NED play. And then
[Marxism] MRZine and chlorine gas attacks
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Today, on Yoshie's blog there are four tweets from a Marxist-Leninist named Phil Greaves who blames Al Qaeda and Al Nusra for such attacks on Syrian towns and villages. These allegations are made despite the preponderance of evidence that Baathist helicopters are responsible. For instance, Brown Moses has a report this morning: http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-chemical-attack-alleged-in-al.html The local medical centre's Facebook page claims 70 were injured, and at least one death. As with previous chlorine/ammonia attacks, it has been claimed that the attacks involved barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, with the medical centre claiming this is the third such attack on the town. Videos posted on April 12th/13th and April 18th support the claim that this is the third attack in the town. Al-Tamanah is located 15km northeast of Kafr Zita, and 20km south of Talmenes. Both towns were subject to a recent investigation by the Daily Telegraph and SecureBio which confirmed high levels of chlorine and ammonia in samples taken from the impact sites of attacks on April 11th, 18th, and 21st (click on the links for videos from those attacks). As with the Al-Tamanah attack, and other reported chemical barrel bomb attacks in the area, witnesses have consistently reported the use of helicopters to drop the chemical barrel bombs used. As it stands, around a dozen chemical barrel bomb attacks have been alleged in that region in the last three weeks. --- Now I understand that people like Phil Greaves and Yoshie Furuhashi are lost to the left but it continues to amaze me that John Foster Bellamy remains indifferent to the damage that MRZine does to Monthly Review's reputation. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Commentary on Marx-Engels Collected Works dispute @insidehighered
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Value, Price and Profit April 30, 2014 By Scott McLemee For five years now, off and on -- as massive financial crisis and spiking unemployment have given way to healthy corporate profits and a “recovery” characterized by a surge in low-wage job creation — the word has gone around that people are rediscovering Marx’s Capital. Whether very many have the stamina to finish its opening chapter, on the commodity form, may be doubted. (Over the years I have been in at least three informal study groups that broke up before getting through the analysis of money in chapter three.) But anyone seriously considering making the trek through Capital might best start with Friedrich Engels’s shorter commentaries on it, including a number of reviews he published anonymously or under pseudonyms, as many an author’s friend has on Amazon. Engels was not disinterested, of course, but as a critic he had the considerable advantage of knowing, from long and close acquainting, what Marx was trying to say. You can find those fugitive pieces — and hundreds of other primary works, major and minor — at the Marxists Internet Archive, which has been around since well before the dawn of the World Wide Web. It makes available a constantly expanding array of texts by scores of writers (not all of them Marxists and some not radical by any standard) in an impressive range of languages, and all at no charge. The site draws more than a million readers per month. And yes, traffic has increased during the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery. full: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/04/30/commentary-marx-engels-collected-works-dispute Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Whose sarin?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Whose sarin? For a second time the LRB has aired Seymour Hersh’s highly shaky claim that the opposition was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta on 21 August 2013 (LRB, 17 April). Hersh provides only one source for the key claims in his piece: a ‘former intelligence official’. As the bloggers Eliot Higgins and Scott Lucas have shown, he entirely ignores the overwhelming balance of tangible evidence that indicates the responsibility of the regime for the Ghouta attack. The two types of munitions found at the site were the Soviet M14 and an improvised type of rocket known as ‘the Volcano’. Both have been spotted in several combat videos, always being used by regime forces and never by the opposition. Contrary to Hersh’s claims in his first article, all of the rockets used were well within range of regime-held areas (LRB, 19 December 2013). The position of the intact munitions, in particular ‘Missile 197’, indicates a firing point to the north, where the regime-held areas were. The 21 August incident involved multiple rocket attacks on the Ghouta from those directions. full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/letters Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Ivory Cage and the Ghosts of Academe: Labor and Struggle in the Edu-Factory
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Now, more than ever, the insights of the Edu-Factory Collective and their network of interlocutors are crucial. Founded in the mid-2000s in Europe, the Collective now counts scholars and activists from around the world among its members. Based around a listserv, a series of conferences, a book and an occasional journal, Edu-Factory has sought to explore how the transformations of the university are part and parcel of a broader, more systematic transformation of the global economic paradigm towards an age of cognitive capitalism. Edu-Factory's central theoretical conceit, as once was the factory, so now is the university, illuminates three overlapping ideas. First, it speaks to the increasing industrialization of higher education, the standardization of a universal educational product (available in different brands and at different price points at various institutions) and the application to university laborers of those forms of discipline and measure once reserved for the factory. In order to compete in a global education marketplace (and for lucrative international student tuitions), the neoliberal university has formalized and refined disciplines of learning and courses of study to provide students with job-ready skills, typically at the expense of critical thinking, social responsibility and earnest intellectual exploration. Whole departments and areas of study are being shuttered when they fail to meet performance targets or attract student and corporate investment. These often have the effect of quenching or obstructing the most dynamic and important insights and tendencies to have emerged from marginalized approaches, such as Indigenous epistemologies, feminist and queer analyses and methods, ethnic studies approaches, and anti-racist and anti-colonial theories. Meanwhile, university administrations have become pathologically addicted to the rhetoric of newness, (disruptive) innovation, niche marketing and the vacuous ideals of interdisciplinary and collaboration which, more often than not, poorly disguise the caustic restructuring germane to the age of austerity. The result is a highly commodified and increasingly homogenized global educational product, a nightmare version of what critical pedagogy scholar Paolo Freire called the banking model of schooling where the teacher deposits discrete chunks of standardized information or parceled skills in the students' mind for later withdrawal at the exam or in the workplace. To this we can add the tremendous profit actual banks are extracting from the university system through student debt, the financing of university expansion, and the interest on the debt of universities themselves. full: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/23391-the-ivory-cage-and-the-ghosts-of-academe-labor-and-struggle-in-the-edu-factory Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] LA NAACP President Leon Jenkins Defends Donald Sterling | Robert Littal Presents BlackSportsOnline
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://blacksportsonline.com/home/2014/04/la-naacp-pres-says-sterlings-words-dont-reflect-his-heart/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Socialist Alternative: Successes and Turds | spreadtheinfestation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == People may accuse me of being a sectarian killjoy for writing this, and likely level that criticism against anyone posting or sharing this piece. After all, there is a reason that Socialist Alternative has been in our headlines: it’s been succeeding! However we cannot afford to wait, or censor ourselves. Socialist Alternative has accomplished some truly special things, but is now on the verge of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The fact is, Socialist Alternative’s successes were a strong deviation from business as usual on the US Socialist Left – its typical routines of self-promotion and cycling through non-class issues. But now Socialist Alternative is attempting to capitalize on those successes through methods that are almost opposite of the ones that made them successful! Instead of doing good work which is inspiring to the entire Left, they are caving back into self-promotion and domination of front groups. And it will make their success short-lived. full: http://spreadtheinfestation.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/socialist-alternative-successes-and-turds/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Baathists deal lethal blow to terrorists
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, April 30 2014 Bomb Hits Elementary School in Ravaged Syrian City By ANNE BARNARD and HWAIDA SAAD BEIRUT, Lebanon — A barrel bomb tore into an elementary school in the northern city of Aleppo on Wednesday morning, just as an exhibit of children’s art was about to open, killing at least 18 people, including 10 students, residents and anti-government activists there said, blaming the attack on the government. Footage of the wrecked school posted online showed pools of blood, rubble and some of the children’s drawings, one of which depicted a warplane firing a missile over the school. “These are terrorists!” a man cried in one video as he held a shock of hair clinging to part of a scalp, as another man in the video cried, “Five years old.” Another man cursed insurgents who in recent days struck a deal with the government to restore electricity to government-held parts of the city in return for an end to bombardments of rebel-held areas, a part of the deal that apparently was not upheld on Wednesday. The bombing came a day after mortar shells struck a technical school in government-held Damascus, killing at least 14 people and wounding more than 80. Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, issued a statement condemning that attack and another, on the Damascus suburb of Adra, which killed three children in a camp for the displaced on Tuesday. “Every day, across Syria, children who are simply trying to go about their everyday lives are being killed and maimed by indiscriminate attacks on populated areas”, said Maria Calivis, Unicef’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa. “These attacks appear to be escalating, in complete disregard of all the calls that have been made to stop this insane cycle of violence, and to avoid similar breaches of international law.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Rise of the Drone Master: Pop Culture Recasts Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times, April 30 2014 The Rise of the Drone Master: Pop Culture Recasts Obama By MICHAEL D. SHEAR WASHINGTON — In Marvel’s latest popcorn thriller, Captain America battles Hydra, a malevolent organization that has infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government. There are missile attacks, screeching car chases, enormous explosions, evil assassins, data-mining supercomputers and giant killer drones ready to obliterate millions of people. Its inspiration? President Obama, the optimistic candidate of hope and change. Five and a half years into his presidency, Mr. Obama has had a powerful impact on the nation’s popular culture. But what many screenwriters, novelists and visual artists have seized on is not an inspirational story of the first black president. Instead they have found more compelling story lines in the bleaker, morally fraught parts of Mr. Obama’s legacy. “We were trying to find a bridge to the same sort of questions that Barack Obama has to address,” said Joe Russo, who with his brother, Anthony, directed “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” “If you’re saying with a drone strike, we can eradicate an enemy of the state, what if you say with 100 drone strikes, we can eradicate 100? With 1,000, we can eradicate 1,000? At what point do you stop?” Photo A scene from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” a new movie with topics like missile attacks, data-mining supercomputers and killer drones. Credit Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures Beyond “Captain America,” a virtual arts festival of films, books, plays, comics, television shows and paintings have been using as their underlying narratives the sometimes grim reality of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The commando raid that Mr. Obama ordered to kill Osama bin Laden is the basis for the actions of the fictional President Ogden in the Godzilla comic books. Several episodes of CBS’s “The Good Wife” feature mysterious wiretaps of the main characters by the National Security Agency. Artists in California are protesting drones by sculpturing a Predator out of mud. In New York, playwrights are exploring disappointment in the pace of societal change in Mr. Obama’s America. The public relations machinery of the White House assiduously tries to control Mr. Obama’s image and legacy, but there is nothing it can do to stop artistic interpretation of his policies. After inheriting a post-Sept. 11 surveillance state and security apparatus from President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama pulled back in some areas and expanded others. Artists have focused particularly on the N.S.A. spying revelations disclosed by Edward J. Snowden and the president’s “kill list” of terrorists targeted by drones. “The drone wars are really one of Obama’s signature foreign policies,” said Trevor Paglen, a photographer whose fuzzy images of flying drones are exhibited in galleries around the world. “We are living in a moment that’s characterized by this mass surveillance. I think art can help us call attention to certain things. It can help contribute to the cultural vocabulary that we use.” Past presidents have also seen their actions reflected in the culture of the day. Ronald Reagan’s crusade against Communism in Central America became fodder for 1980s movies such as “Red Dawn,” and Reaganomics inspired Alex P. Keaton, the conservative teenager played by Michael J. Fox on NBC’s popular sitcom “Family Ties.” Artists in the 1980s also used their canvases to protest the conservative cultural movement that Reagan embraced and nurtured. Bill Clinton’s White House inspired the NBC series “West Wing,” and the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was an irresistible story line for everything from cartoon strips to novels. When Mr. Clinton’s effort to capture a Somali warlord in Mogadishu went bad, the disaster became the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” The difference for Mr. Obama may be the gap between what his supporters expected and what they now see. The artist Kara Walker set off a minor controversy in 2012 with a black-and-white drawing displayed at the Newark Public Library in New Jersey. The drawing included an image of Mr. Obama standing at a lectern beneath a burning cross. It is titled “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.” In New York City, the playwright Richard Nelson’s series at the Public Theater explored the lives of family members who, among other things, become disillusioned with Mr. Obama and his promises of change. “The arts are often a left or progressive community,” said Nato Thompson, the chief curator at Creative Time, a public arts group in New
[Marxism] Slavoj Žižek · Barbarism with a Human Face: Lenin v. Stalin in Kiev · LRB 8 May 2014
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The entire European neo-fascist right (in Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia) firmly supports Russia in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, giving the lie to the official Russian presentation of the Crimean referendum as a choice between Russian democracy and Ukrainian fascism. The events in Ukraine – the massive protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang – should be understood as a defence against the dark legacy resuscitated by Putin. The protests were triggered by the Ukrainian government’s decision to prioritise good relations with Russia over the integration of Ukraine into the European Union. Predictably, many anti-imperialist leftists reacted to the news by patronising the Ukrainians: how deluded they are still to idealise Europe, not to be able to see that joining the EU would just make Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe, sooner or later to go the same way as Greece. In fact, Ukrainians are far from blind about the reality of the EU. They are fully aware of its troubles and disparities: their message is simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe may have problems, but they are a rich man’s problems. Should we, then, simply support the Ukrainian side in the conflict? There is a ‘Leninist’ reason to do so. In Lenin’s very last writings, long after he renounced the utopia of State and Revolution, he explored the idea of a modest, ‘realistic’ project for Bolshevism. Because of the economic underdevelopment and cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, he argues, there is no way for Russia to ‘pass directly to socialism’: all that Soviet power can do is to combine the moderate politics of ‘state capitalism’ with the intense cultural education of the peasant masses – not the brainwashing of propaganda, but a patient, gradual imposition of civilised standards. Facts and figures revealed ‘what a vast amount of urgent spadework we still have to do to reach the standard of an ordinary West European civilised country … We must bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from which we have not yet extricated ourselves.’ Can we think of the Ukrainian protesters’ reference to Europe as a sign that their goal, too, is ‘to reach the standard of an ordinary Western European civilised country’? full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/slavoj-zizek/barbarism-with-a-human-face Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Richard J. Evans reviews ‘Burning the Reichstag’ by Benjamin Carter Hett · LRB 8 May 2014
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The Conspiracists Richard J. Evans Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery by Benjamin Carter Hett Oxford, 413 pp, £18.09, February, ISBN 978 0 19 932232 9 Conspiracy theories cluster around violent and unexpected political events. The sudden death of a head of state, the assassination of a government minister, a bomb attack on a building or a crowd: these seemingly random occurrences demand explanation, and for many, the idea that they could be the product of the deranged mind of a single individual seems too simple to be plausible. The authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and pseudo-explanations. Argument continues to rage, as the proponents of rival theories construct evidential edifices of such staggering detail and complexity that they are often almost impossible for a lay reader to navigate. full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/richard-j-evans/the-conspiracists Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Slavoj Žižek · Barbarism with a Human Face: Lenin v. Stalin in Kiev · LRB 8 May 2014
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 4/30/14 6:15 PM, Joseph Catron wrote: Pretty transparent crap, too. I mean, we've got the Internet now. These things aren't hard to check. http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/European_nationalist_parties_by_the_stance_on_Russian_intervention_in_Ukraine This is out of date. The Italian fascists do support Putin: http://www.forzanuova.org/comunicati/fn-accoglie-putin-triestedistuggi-leuropa-dei-tecnocrati Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Slavoj Žižek · Barbarism with a Human Face: Lenin v. Stalin in Kiev · LRB 8 May 2014
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 4/30/14 7:37 PM, Greg McDonald wrote: And the only reason these other parties support Putin is not out of some ideological allegiance to the great right wing russian leader, but because they want to see the collapse of the EU. It suits their nationalism. That's not true. They identify mostly with his hatred of gays. That Italian ultraright group I linked to before was ecstatic over how gays are getting harassed in Russia. Here's a gay blogger commenting on that: http://gayburg.blogspot.com/2013/09/forza-nuova-sta-con-putin.html Frankly, I find it pretty disgusting how Putin is being hoisted on the shoulders of much of the left after his pushing through anti-gay legislation that not even the Republican right in the USA would have the nerve to propose. I guess his anti-imperialism (arming the murderer Bashar al-Assad) trumps gay rights. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Moscow Needs a New Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, Russian Historian Says | The Interpreter
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == One of the darkest pages in Soviet and indeed Russian history was the anti-cosmopolitan campaign Stalin unleashed against everything Western in 1949, a campaign that ultimately focused on the Jews whom the Soviet dictator was planning to deport beyond the Urals at the time of his death. Even those who remain partisans of Stalin and even those who have in recent weeks compiled lists of “national traitors” have generally refrained from praising this campaign because of the emotions it generates if not unfortunately because of the vicious immorality on which it was based. But now a Russian historian, Aleksandr Vdovin, a member of the Russian Academy of Humanitarian Sciences, has celebrated Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign and argued that the Russian state must renew its struggle against “the propaganda of cosmopolitanism,” something he says is “a threat to the state” . In a sprawling 5500-word essay, Vdovin talks about the threat that he says cosmopolitanism and its accompanying ideas of the dominance of the West and the denigration of all Russian traditions and values posed at the end of World War II and poses now, he argues. He praises Stalin for recognizing this danger, “unmasking its ‘reactionary essence,’ and fighting against it between 1945 and 1953. He argues that “the struggle against cosmopolitanism in the USSR was directed not only at US pretensions to world rule under new slogans” but also at the attempt of the West to destroy “Soviet patriotism and replace it with ‘all-human values.” full: http://www.interpretermag.com/moscow-needs-a-new-anti-cosmopolitan-campaign-russian-historian-says/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Readers of Marx and Engels Decry Publisher’s Assertion of Copyright - Research - The Chronicle of Higher Education
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Chronicle of Higher Education is the major trade paper for higher education administrators and professors. Very important that it has weighed in.) http://chronicle.com/article/Readers-of-MarxEngels/146251/ By Jennifer Howard In a capitalist world, even a radical publishing house devoted to the works of socialist thinkers has to make money to survive. That’s the argument being used by Lawrence Wishart, a London-based publisher, to explain why it has asked the Marxists Internet Archive, a volunteer-run online collection of socialist writers’ works, to remove from the website copyrighted material from the publisher’s Marx Engels Collected Works by April 30. The publisher says it wants to market a digital edition to libraries in order to keep itself in business. While the Marxists Internet Archive is not contesting the company’s right to enforce its copyright, news of its request set off an outcry from some observers and supporters of the archive. If Lawrence Wishart still considers itself a socialist institution, its treatment of the archive is uncomradely at best, and arguably much worse; while if the press is now purely a capitalist enterprise, its behavior is merely stupid, wrote the columnist and critic Scott McLemee in an April 24 post on the Crooked Timber blog. More than 4,000 people have now signed a petition on Change.org calling for an end to copyright on Marx and Engels’s work. Privatization of Marx and Engels’ writings is like getting a trademark for the words ‘socialism’ or ‘communism,’ the petition says. Compiled over a quarter-century beginning in 1975, the 50-volume Collected Works includes English translations of not just blockbusters like The Communist Manifesto but also harder-to-find and less-familiar published and unpublished articles, letters, and other writings. Lawrence Wishart jointly holds the copyright with two other publishing houses, International Publishers and Progress Publishers. Plenty of Marx and Engels’s work is in the public domain. One doesn’t need to be a member of a privileged class—with access to a university library, for instance—to find freely available editions of Das Kapital. In this case, what is copyrighted is the specific translations, the considerable notes, etc., said Betty Smith, president of International Publishers, in an email. In response to its critics, Lawrence Wishart posted a statement on its website assailing what it called a campaign of online abuse and defending its decision to enforce its copyright. It said that it survives on a shoestring and argued that its continued existence depends on its being able to derive income from its stake in the Collected Works. We are currently negotiating an agreement with a distributor that will offer a digital version of the Collected Works to university libraries worldwide, the publisher said. This will have the effect of maintaining a public presence of the Works, in the public sphere of the academic library, paid for by public funds. This is a model of commons that reimburses publishers, authors, and translators for the work that has gone into creating a book or series of books. The publisher defended its history and record as a radical publishing enterprise, suggesting that its critics should direct their anger elsewhere. We would suggest that if online activists wish to attack targets in the publishing industry who truly do derive huge profits from the exploitation of their workers and from catalogues filled with radical political thought, then there are far-more-appropriate targets for them to direct their anger towards than a tiny British publishing house with no shareholders and a small, ill-paid staff, it said. ‘Simple Factual Notice’ Andy Blunden has been part of the volunteer collective that runs the nonprofit Marxists Internet Archive for about 15 years. He told The Chronicle that he was authorized to speak for the group, and that it does not contest Lawrence Wishart’s copyright on the material at stake—some 1,662 files, really quite a small percentage of everything in the Collected Works, he said. (It’s also a tiny fraction of the archive’s total contents, which include the writings of hundreds of authors in dozens of languages.) According to him, the archive has not been a party to the criticism lobbed at the publisher. We put a simple factual notice on our main page, and we put that on our Facebook page, Mr. Blunden said. We feel that it’s improper of us to go out and agitate and say bad things about Lawrence Wishart. We’re trying to be quite restrained about this. It’s down to our readers, really, to defend us. He said that the archive last had talks with Lawrence Wishart around 2005, at
[Marxism] The Pacification of the American Working Class: A Time Series Analysis | George S. Rigakos - Academia.edu
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Probably worth reading despite the use of the word operationalize.) Abstract In this paper we operationalize and empirically test six core tenets of pacification theory derived from Marxian political economy using time series data for the USA from 1972-2009. Our analysis confirms that rising inequality is statistically significantly correlated to increased public and private policing over time and that increased public and private policing is also statistically significantly correlated to increased industrial exploitation as measured through “surplus-value”. While unionization correlates to strikes and lock-outs which suggests that unions have an important mobilizing role for the industrial reserve army, unionization also inversely correlates to total policing employment. As union membership decreases, policing employment increases, which gives credence to the notion that unions may also act as policing agents for capital. We conclude that when these findings are coupled with our previous international research of 45 countries for the snapshot year of 2004 (Rigakos and Ergul 2011) that produced almost identical results, there appears to be significant empirical support for pacification theory. The relationships we have discovered recur both across time and international contexts despite the fact that variations in legal norms and institutional histories of policing are varied and complex. full: https://www.academia.edu/5524921/The_Pacification_of_the_American_Working_Class_A_Time_Series_Analysis Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Ukraine: Hate in Progress by Tim Judah | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yekaterina Mihaylova runs the press office of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk. She used to be a journalist. I asked her why the rebels used so many Soviet-era flags and posters. Echoing Putin, she said that the collapse of the USSR was a geopolitical catastrophe and that it had resulted in an artificial border between Ukraine and Russia. When our conversation turned to Soviet history, she said that Ukrainians should be grateful for Stalin because he had created the Ukrainian Soviet republic out of diverse bits of territory and this had subsequently become the first Ukrainian state in history. I asked her about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, in which some 3.3 million people are estimated to have died. “The legend of the Holodomor,” she said, using the name given to it here, was created in Canada by fascist Ukrainian exiles. On Stalin’s Gulags she said, “that story is like Snow White, or…”—and at this point Ludmila, who was translating for me, stumbled, looking something up on her iPhone translator—“‘Thumbelina?’ Do you know what that is?” I got the impression that some in Mihaylova’s office thought that maybe she had gone a bit far. Viktor Priss, a twenty-eight-year old IT systems administrator, was not a famine-denier. He said that the issue was whether one believed it was created on purpose to target Ukrainians as a nation, or whether Ukrainians were simply its biggest victims which is a respectable argument to have. But Stalin, he went on to say, came to power because it had been “the will of the people to create a dictator.” full: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/apr/28/ukraine-hate-progress/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Iran’s Courts are Still Blaming Rape Victims for Their Attacks | VICE News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == https://news.vice.com/articles/irans-courts-are-still-blaming-rape-victims-for-their-attacks Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] ISIS Insurgents Have Almost Surrounded Baghdad | VICE United States
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Sounds like the Baathist strategy of cultivating ISIS as an anti-Sunni tool is having unintended consequences for its ally Shiite neighbor.) http://www.vice.com/read/ISIS-Iraq-jihadists-Anbar-Fallujah-Bagdhad?utm_source=vicetwitterus Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Sterling’s Racial Honors
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (A good op-ed piece from the generally useless Frank Bruni, the ex-restaurant reviewer for the NYT.) NY Times, April 29 2014 Op-Ed Columnist Sterling’s Racial Honors by Frank Bruni Exactly 50 years ago, the Beatles declared that money can’t buy you love. They hadn’t met Donald Sterling. Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, just did the impossible. He wrested the racist-of-the-moment mantle from Cliven Bundy, thanks to an audiotape that seems to capture remarks of his to a female acquaintance, who is being berated for publicly associating with black people and, worse yet, appearing in a photo with one. A lady can really ruin her reputation that way. It’s a jaw-dropping snit, attended by this mind-bending fact: The Los Angeles chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. was about to bestow upon Sterling a lifetime achievement award, which would have been his third honor from the N.A.A.C.P. over recent years. If you’re thinking that his recurring lionization is explained by an unblemished history until the audiotape, well, you’re as naïve as those adorable lads from Liverpool. He’s been sued repeatedly for racial discrimination, and he put an end to one case, which accused him of trying to eject minority tenants from apartments that he owned, with a multimillion-dollar settlement that was among the largest payouts ever of its kind. (He admitted no wrongdoing.) A former property supervisor of his, in sworn testimony, said that Sterling even fumed that black tenants were smelly and dirty, and that Mexican ones were lazy and drunk. He has contested these accounts, but has also, perversely, joked about them, exhibiting amusement about his ability to sail above the rap against him. In a profile of him that appeared in ESPN’s magazine in 2009, the writer Peter Keating describes Sterling’s arrival at an N.A.A.C.P. event that year. Sterling, referring to reporters’ interest in him, reportedly says, “They want to know why the N.A.A.C.P. would give an award to someone with my track record.” The answer’s no mystery: money, which most certainly buys you love, in the form of encomiums, endorsements, acclaim. Just as you can purchase an ambassadorship, you can purchase an image of altruism, and if you want inoculation from, or forgiveness for, the bad you’ve done or may yet do, there are few strategies wiser than taking out your checkbook. Put enough commas and zeros in the amount you’re scribbling and the love will be all the larger. It will wash over you. It will cleanse you. Sterling surely appreciated this. He placed newspaper ads celebrating Black History Month. He gave minority children free seats at Clippers games. “He also has, over the years we looked at, contributed to a lot of minority charities, including the N.A.A.C.P.,” said Leon Jenkins, president of the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, at a transcendently awkward news conference on Monday. Jenkins was rationalizing the latest lifetime achievement award — which the N.A.A.C.P. has now rescinded — and its coddling of Sterling over time. Jenkins dismissed the ugliness attributed to Sterling even before the audiotape as mere “rumors about someone’s character” that were best ignored. They simply didn’t receive as much publicity as the audiotape, which isn’t ignorable. I don’t mean to single out the N.A.A.C.P. Among many advocacy groups, there’s a cynically transactional ethic: cash for karma. You fund me, I’ll friend you. Advance my cause and I’ll absolve your sins. In March 2013, the gay advocacy group Glaad invented a whole new honor — the Ally Award — for the Hollywood moviemaker Brett Ratner. This happened little more than a year after he publicly used a homophobic slur and was forced to resign a role as producer of the 2012 Oscar telecast. What rehabilitated him from devil to angel? Well, he devoted his time — and money — to public service announcements for Glaad. He also raised funds for Christine Quinn, an openly lesbian candidate for mayor of New York City. In a 2010 story in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer noted that David Koch had given tens of millions to cancer research and had also, unsurprisingly, received a seat on the National Cancer Advisory Board and the Excellence in Corporate Leadership Award from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Meanwhile, Koch Industries was involved in aggressive lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces, as a known carcinogen. Some philanthropy is purely generous. Some is prophylactic or penitential: The polluter supports environmentalists, while the peddler of sugary soft drinks contributes to campaigns against obesity. And some stems
Re: [Marxism] The Ukranian-SyrIan Arms Connection?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 4/29/14 1:00 PM, Greg McDonald wrote: Couple of points. The article you clipped below is from der spiegel, not some pro-assad blogger. The arms shipment in question was destined for the syrian government. The shipment of arms was publicized due to the weapons embargo against assad. The original article was also by der spiegel, but it was in german. it got your dander up because the translation was done by some pro-assad person. Who cares who the article is from? The political point it is making is that machine guns (SKS's) are part of a triangle that starts in the Ukraine, heads next to Germany, where they finally end up in the grubby paws of Syrian jihadists according to the Jamestown Institute, like the 18th century rum-sugar-slave trade. It is just the latest attempt to make the Syrian revolution look like an imperialist plot, this time killing two birds with one stone: Ukraine and Syria. This stanky Qaddafi website, now carrying a torch for Bashar al-Assad, made sure to make the same amalgam as the creepy blog you cited: http://libya360.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/ukraine-funnels-arms-to-jihadis-in-syria-via-germany/ As well as Friends of Syria (ie., friends of Bashar al-Assad): http://friendsofsyria.co/2014/04/29/ukraine-funnels-light-arms-to-jihadis-in-syria-via-germany/ You are obviously trawling around in the garbage dump for this sort of thing but don't have the brains or the guts to make a serious argument. Sad, really. You see, the combination of the words Ukraine and Syria is meant to win the propaganda battle, not that any serious attempt has been made to pin down the accusations (as if anybody gives a shit about some machine guns ending up in the hands of people in Homs or Aleppo--facing tanks and jet planes). Here's what the Ukrainian opposition to Putin and his thugs says about this: http://euromaidanpr.com/2014/04/28/der-spiegel-lies-about-ukraine/ The Jamestown Foundation never made the link between SKS rifles and Syria, only Der Spiegel made this connection. Tellingly, Der Spiegel linked to the “About us” page on the Jamestown website, as linking to the real report would have shown that Germany – yes that is the country of Germany! – was the buyer of 53,800 rifles in 2011, but the report does not say what type of rifles were purchased. Was it SKS rifles? Neither the Jamestown Foundation report nor its source, a 2012 report by the Gorshenin Institute, make any connection between SKS rifles, the purchase of 54,000 rifles by Germany, and Syria (http://gorshenin.eu/media/uploads/013/23/01695039abbc.pdf). To sum up the first half of the article, Jamestown does not say the 54,000 rifles are SKS rifles, it does not say these rifles are destined for Syria, however, it does say that Germany was the buyer of these rifles and Der Spiegel – surely by accident – fails to mention this relevant fact and also that Germany adamantly refuses to deliver weapons to the Syrian rebels, has never done so, and does not grant licenses to do so. Now halfway through the article, do you think it can get even more ludicrous? This is Der Spiegel, so it surely can and does! Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Bohemians | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Last night I went to a panel discussion timed to the launch of “Bohemians: a Graphic History”, a comic book co-edited by Paul Buhle and David Berger. Paul gave the opening remarks and David concluded. Sandwiched between them were a number of artists who took part in the project. Based on my readings of previous projects Buhle was involved with along these lines, I expect this latest book to be a winner. In the past Buhle worked closely with Harvey Pekar on works such as “SDS”, “The Beats” and “Yiddishkeit”, in many ways a natural tie-in to “The Bohemians”. Given the centuries long tendency for American capitalism to crush all forms of human expression under its heel, it is only natural for a homegrown bohemia to have emerged. In his concluding remarks, Berger said that bohemia is dead but followed that observation immediately with one that it has always been dead. In Paris, back in 1850, you can be sure that someone would have been saying “La Boheme c’est mort.” Obviously as long as there is moloch—as Allen Ginbsberg once put it—there will be bohemia. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/04/29/bohemians/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] N.B.A. Bars Clippers Owner Donald Sterling for Life
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yeah!!! NY Times, April 29 2014 N.B.A. Bars Clippers Owner Donald Sterling for Life By LYNN ZINSER Donald Sterling, the longtime owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, was barred from the N.B.A. for life and may be forced to sell the team for making racist remarks, the league commissioner, Adam Silver, announced Tuesday. Silver said that Sterling would be barred from any contact with his team and the league and that he would be fined $2.5 million, the maximum allowed by the league’s constitution. “The views expressed by Mr. Sterling are deeply offensive and harmful,” the commissioner said. “We stand together in condemning Mr. Sterling’s views. They simply have no place in the N.B.A.” The commissioner said Sterling, in an interview, had admitted to him that the racist remarks on a recording released last week by the website TMZ were his. He said he would “do everything in my power” to see that Sterling was forced to sell the Clippers. “I fully expect to get the support I need to remove him,” Silver said. Before the announcement, Silver said, he discussed the decision with Coach Doc Rivers and guard Chris Paul of the Clippers. “I believe the players will be satisfied with the decision,” Silver said. The commissioner’s announcement came at the conclusion of the league’s investigation, which started over the weekend after the recording was released and news of it spread. The ensuing outrage put tremendous pressure on Silver to act decisively. After the announcement, the immediate reaction from players and owners supported Silver’s decision. James L. Dolan, the owner of the Knicks, was among those releasing statements. “This behavior has no place in basketball, or anywhere else,” Dolan said in a statement. “We as a league must stand together in condemning this ignorance.” The Clippers quickly changed the home page of their website to contain only a team logo and the words, “We Are One.” Magic Johnson, who found himself in the middle of the controversy when Sterling, on the tape, told a woman not to bring Johnson or other black men to Clippers games, responded immediately on Twitter: Continue reading the main story Owners, players and advertisers had been speaking out since the recording emerged, with players staging on-court protests and advertisers suspending or cutting ties with the team. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was among those cautioning the league to move carefully, calling it “a very, very slippery slope” when owners are disciplined for their words. But, after the decision, Cuban expressed full support of the move. “What Donald said was wrong,” Cuban told reporters Tuesday. “It was abhorrent. There’s no place for racism in the N.B.A., any business I’m associated with, and I don’t want to be associated with people who have that position. But at the same time that’s a decision I make. I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do. It’s a very, very slippery slope.” Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento, a former N.B.A. star who had called for the league to issue the maximum possible penalty against Sterling, expressed his unequivocal support of Silver’s move. “Adam Silver showed he is not just the owners’ commissioner. He is the players’ commissioner,” Johnson said in a news conference after Silver’s. “There will be zero tolerance for institutional racism, no matter how rich or powerful.” At Johnson’s news conference, Roger Mason Jr., first vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, said the players were ready to discuss a boycott of games if Silver had not barred Sterling. Sterling’s remarks were believed to be recorded by a woman identified as V. Stiviano, who has regularly been seen with him. In the recording, he asks her not to associate with black people and not to bring black people to Clippers games, and criticizes her for posing for photographs with black men, including Magic Johnson. “Don’t put him on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me,” Sterling said in the recording. “And don’t bring him to my games. Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you want to promo, broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?” Before the penalties were handed down, Michael Jordan, a Hall of Fame player and an owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, said in a statement, “There is no room in the N.B.A. — or anywhere else — for this kind of racism and hatred.” About 75 percent of the league’s players are black. Sterling’s time as owner of the Clippers has been marked by player unrest, accusations of racism and sexism, and until the team began winning
[Marxism] Tony Blair’s confidence tricks | Al Jazeera America
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Blair’s neoconservative instincts dispose him to intervention in Syria; but his anti-Islamic prejudice impels him to seek stalemate, even Assad’s preservation. Blair’s crude self-interest prevents him from noticing the Gulf monarchies that better exemplify the tendencies he is lamenting. They, after all, still butter his bread. He allied himself with ruthless Central Asian strongmen while in office, turning a blind eye to their torture and repression. Now he actively services them. Dwindling chorus Blair, in short, is as qualified to speak on Islam’s failings as Jimmy Savile might have been on youth delinquency. The pandemonium that he evidences for Islam’s failings is largely his own creation. The chorus that once approved his every move is dwindling. The embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party’s repression is something few can stomach. In the Middle East, Blair is a butt of innumerable jokes. His message has, however, resonated with Britain’s far-right English Defence League and the pro-settler Clarion Project. Having forfeited his old constituency, Blair may be gaining a new one. full: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/tony-blair-speechmiddleeast.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Sterling Ban: 10 Takeaways from Adam Silver and Kevin Johnson's Press Conferences | The Nation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == By Dave Zirin. http://www.thenation.com/blog/179580/sterling-ban-10-takeaways-adam-silver-and-kevin-johnsons-press-conferences Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Studying the Rich | Boston Review
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == If economists to Piketty’s right are concerned that he doesn’t ground his theory deep enough in economic models, economists and others to Piketty’s left are concerned that he concedes too much to mainstream economics and not enough to politics. Recently, there has been a strong recent resurgence on the left in emphasizing the way the state, through law, regulation, and public policy, necessarily structures markets. In this telling there is no such thing as a “free” market, just different choices about how to structure markets fundamentally based in politics and power. The idea of a “free” market is a vacuous, question-begging abstraction, invoked to defend the status quo or the interests of the wealthy. (A quick look at the titles of current academic works like The Illusion of Free Markets, The Myth of Ownership, and The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire give a sense of the argument.) This context explains what is at stake in the left critique of Piketty. Some economists, like Dean Baker, have argued that Piketty doesn’t do enough to explain how financial regulations or patent protections could help deal with the problems he identifies. Others, like James Galbraith, invoke debates among midcentury Keynesians to argue that adding up capital and assigning it a return doesn’t make sense as a model. More broadly, Piketty has been criticized for not acknowledging how institutions and politics influence the returns on capital: his theory of the dominoes is too focused on economic forces. So, while economists to Piketty’s right think he should create a model that predicts the rate of return on capital (his r) based on the state of the economy, rather than historical data, economists to Piketty’s left want him to emphasize the idea that many different rates of return are consistent with the character of the economy; “r” is a function of institutions and political decisions. Those on the left also worry that the debate over Capital could devolve into, as the economist Suresh Naidu argues, a “bastard Pikettyism” that just navel-gazes at the mathematical economic models discussed above, instead of a more critical, broader inquiry of how capital works in economies and societies. full: http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/mike-konczal-thomas-piketty-capital-studying-rich Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Russian Roulette: the Invasion of Ukraine (Dispatch Thirty-One) | VICE News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == How Vice's Simon Ostrovsky was kidnapped by Donetsk's pro-Russian goons. https://news.vice.com/videos/russian-roulette-the-invasion-of-ukraine-dispatch-thirty-one?trk_source=276-show-video Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Bohemians | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 4/29/14 3:56 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: Last night I went to a panel discussion timed to the launch of “Bohemians: a Graphic History”, a comic book co-edited by Paul Buhle and David Berger. Paul gave the opening remarks and David concluded. Sandwiched between them were a number of artists who took part in the project. Based on my readings of previous projects Buhle was involved with along these lines, I expect this latest book to be a winner. In the past Buhle worked closely with Harvey Pekar on works such as “SDS”, “The Beats” and “Yiddishkeit”, in many ways a natural tie-in to “The Bohemians”. Given the centuries long tendency for American capitalism to crush all forms of human expression under its heel, it is only natural for a homegrown bohemia to have emerged. In his concluding remarks, Berger said that bohemia is dead but followed that observation immediately with one that it has always been dead. In Paris, back in 1850, you can be sure that someone would have been saying “La Boheme c’est mort.” Obviously as long as there is moloch—as Allen Ginbsberg once put it—there will be bohemia. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/04/29/bohemians/ An interesting comment on this: Re Oscar Wilde: Wilde was well over six feet tall and exceptionally strong even for his size. He could fight effectively when he felt he had to and was as much at home with the miners of Leadville as he was in the drawing rooms of London--maybe more so. In his own account of the visit to Leadville, Wilde asserts that he himself opened a new seam in the silver mine using a silver drill that the miners presented to him as a gift afterward. Effete, foppish, gay, and tragically self-destructive Wilde certainly was--yet he was nevertheless anything but the stereotypical sissy so many assume him to have been. Of course, in 1891 Wilde published the famous essay The Soul of Man under Socialism, where he lays out a libertarian socialist philosophy based on the writings of Peter Kropotkin. I don't suppose this commends him to Marxists, but it isn't what some might expect from the stereotype. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
