[Marxism] What kind of politics to counter imperialism?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * As what appears to be a never-ending and ever-expanding set of wars by the Western powers in the Middle East rages, what is the political basis for developing anti-imperialist politics? A contribution from New Zealand: http://rdln.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/towards-an-anti-imperialist-movement-a-manifesto/ Phil _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Russian LGBT Activist Seeks Asylum in Germany
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=100story_id=41342 LGBT Activist Files for Asylum in Germany By Sergey Chernov The St. Petersburg Times Prominent local LGBT activist Kirill Kalugin announced last week that he had applied for political asylum in Germany, while an anti-gay crowd in St. Petersburg assaulted his lawyer later that same day. “In the course of my internal referendum I took the decision to separate myself from the Russian Federation and join Germany. That’s about it. Auf Wiedersehen, Russland. Willkommen in Deutschland,” Kalugin wrote on his Facebook account on Nov. 25. Kalugin is best known for his one-man LGBT rights protests on Palace Square during Paratroopers’ Day on Aug. 2 in 2013 and 2014, which he staged as a reaction to remarks by officials who mockingly suggested that LGBT rights activists stage rallies on that day, implying that the protesters would be beaten by the macho veterans. According to Kalugin, he left Russia on Nov. 16 but did not make a statement until he had made all the necessary arrangements. Speaking to The St. Petersburg Times on Sunday, Kalugin said he made the decision because of persecution from Center “E” counter-extremism police rather than threats from anti-gay campaigners. “I made the decision in August, when Center ‘E’ officers attempted to put me in a car by force,” Kalugin said. “I told them that if they wanted to speak to me, they should send me a notice. They replied that a notice is sent only when there is a criminal case, but if that’s what I wanted, then they would open one.” President Vladimir Putin launched the Center “E” police department in 2008 allegedly to fight extremism, but its officers are reported to be present at protest rallies and dealing with activists. According to Kalugin, the local Center “E” has officers who deal specifically with LGBT rights activists. “There was a certain Dmitry among those three [officers], who goes to all the protests on a regular basis and who visited me at the police station, where they held me after the Aug. 2 protest,” he said. He pointed out that his emigration was not caused by threats from anti-gay activists. “These Orthodox activists have threatened me for three years and usually these threats don’t go any further,” he said. Kalugin said he first came in contact with Center “E” in 2013 when either anti-gay lawmaker Vitaly Milonov or his aide, Anatoly Artyukh, who chairs the local branch of the Orthodox nationalist organization People’s Assembly, reported him to the Investigations Committee for alleged extremism. “I did not know yet that the officers were from Center ‘E’; they took me to the Investigations Committee and I was questioned there. The case did not work then and they threw it away after I said I did not plan either to offend anybody or incite anything,” Kalugin said. “My position is that I was not going to cooperate or communicate with this agency because I know that it was created specifically to put obstacles in the way of activists and opposition. The thing is that there are LGBT activists who communicate and cooperate with them. But I don’t support this position and they apparently don’t like it.” Kalugin said that the situation for LGBT activism has worsened following the annexation of Crimea and the massive anti-Western campaign in the Russian media. “In the beginning we tried to get through to people and say that the authorities were deceiving them, that LGBT people are not guilty of anything, and that elections get rigged. Now, with the annexation of the Crimea and the total support for the current president, it’s obvious that people are not very eager to listen and understand what is happening,” Kalugin said. “Many people write to me saying, ‘Why did you leave? Now when oil prices collapse, people will reconsider their views and changes will start.’ But I think that they will simply start to think with their empty stomach, rather than with the television as they do now, and a revolt of the hungry has nothing to do with change.” Nevertheless, Kalugin said that he would have remained active in Russia if it had not been for the pressure from Center “E”. “I simply did not want to wait until they produced some criminal case,” he said. “They could put me in prison for blocking Nevsky Prospekt with feminists. They took me to a police station then and told me obstructing traffic on a public road was a criminal offense.” According to Kalugin, he has been placed in a social house in Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany until the decision is made by authorities, which can take up to several months. Later on Nov. 25, Kalugin’s lawyer Vitaly Cherkasov,
[Marxism] Fwd: Highway 80 revisited | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * About a month ago I heard John Waters being interviewed on NPR about his new book “Carsick” that is a chronicle of hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco. Since he is nearly as old as me and is a wealthy and successful filmmaker accustomed to a cushy lifestyle, I was impressed with his feat. There are three things I did when I was in my late teens and early 20s that I would not do today, one of them is take LSD, the second was to drive a motorcycle, and the last is hitchhiking from Dallas to Baltimore in the summer of 1965. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/12/03/highway-80-revisited/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Vassar professors' essays about racial profiling and racism attract attention @insidehighered
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[Marxism] Fwd: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, is a great history of capitalism.
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * By the early 19th century, Britain, and soon all of Europe, had robust cotton manufacturing industries. But they relied on imported cotton—and no source for those imports was more important than the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. supplied Great Britain with 77 percent of its raw cotton, 90 percent of France’s, and 92 percent of Russia’s. At the same time, cotton-manufacturing industries emerged in northern U.S. cities, propelling the U.S.’s own Industrial Revolution. In fact, Beckert writes, the United States was unique among all other industrializing nations in that it both grew and manufactured its own cotton. The trick, of course, was that all these new cotton-manufacturing nations depended on slave-grown cotton. Like other new scholars of capitalism, Beckert drives home the point that slavery was not a hidebound institution that capitalism destroyed, but an integral one that made capitalism possible. full: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/12/empire_of_cotton_a_global_history_by_sven_beckert_is_a_great_history_of.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] [UCE] Re: Fwd: Mystery document alleges Numsa is bent on regime change | News | National | Mail Guardian
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://secure-web.cisco.com/1T8O_-QyYrFGUtpqLLMCiUODMuaHSYsSiUBlCZbaSzli06HR-wdNQbAfdK6jLNJEES_5tsNeVXsoiT4HfsjVotDJqLuhx50LeCqf01VoYTTyG432rS9S_GnY1g0b-pPbH2NwKmHCuw6hUoHHvBlnWzcNeUQ18HYn5VBtt4AtO15ACyFCTHPK94wU1PYWMqdjnUSA7-mn3IPWuRm54BIksdA/http%3A%2F%2Fm.ewn.co.za%2F2014%2F12%2F03%2FNumsa-members-approached-by-intelligence-forces He also says people claiming to work for the State Security Agency have approached their members. “'We have shop stewards who have been approached by people who wanted to recruit them to report on Numsa’s activities.'” On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Andrew Pollack acpolla...@gmail.com wrote: Europe-solidaire has an extensive selection of articles reporting on the initial steps of NUMSA and community allies to form a new United Front, all in the context of the attacks on them in links above: http://secure-web.cisco.com/1EcLPQFf9iOlRbNhxDjDynqop5RcCGsBX9KN_mUuub98OQSF5xG9EK3zKFPt7ak7vxNtrlRQyvP21no3ZUFrel2hQKJT_BW5AjSuEf78qCoypXa2_eBbk_DC3icbY1JYZP3fRR58jIcqhc1CwKhDsnsZV0vMi9ZeMnQR3BKX9psSKS8AR77PT8o58GJjkQdAEiQXERpgVGUvNEo4oCTAmsVrh2onT0fFOc_5zJA7xLSQ/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.europe-solidaire.org%2Fspip.php%3Farticle33708 On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 9:40 AM, Andrew Pollack acpolla...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry for the late response as this is a very significant development, but was tied up last night and only just saw this email. 1. Notice in the list of those targetted our comrades Federico and Patrick. Of course I consider all those slandered as comrades but I only know those two personally. 2. Notice Sonny Melencio (misspelled as Mellencio) is in the list. Sonny is head of the PLM, a Philippines revolutionary group which recently sponsored the latest Asia Socialism conference: http://secure-web.cisco.com/1NKqjwR3PODECGFzU1lqDlPG0HCWWVoH1Un6nSXWci2C3h0ImX9cDN17OS5BEAUAeQ-E-TO9H0C7GS0WNCYPT89LP2lEJOMQ4yYR-5EAdewnA1YysnKjaXT59bJUFuDR27XifNs7-MwyqSHNuFh4XkvD-YQOXieiVOcSDPV8I2_l2hNXg7_AIU7xxPAFnbN7n6mgp-0CoCIV1vrmT4YgvHjdrBbtFhRO8PZb-J2ipkh8/http%3A%2F%2Flinks.org.au%2Fnode%2F4177 The conference passed a resolution backing NUMSA, and the parties involved are part of the same general trend of nonsectarian revolutionary approach with those slandered in the document. See IV and Links for past articles by and about the PLM. See also Sonny's book. 3. An earlier article by Claude Gabriel (although the one Louis forwarded is much more detailed): http://secure-web.cisco.com/1qs9P5p91FsHRZEw7RP-IwOFW7NUz06J3T7T-zCrmca2ygSPjJ6V0e-R9hFkAbc11gfvL_iFsrWZiNvbET_KxcIrymwVgDZGljiowezB_YlNoT4LL91gsbMM3ft8oKtiVz2EYNEeKEfAByLsTuk30J2UYEOFf4veJH3otYofVVfCgPX0LKe8jQ070wz2VQ-yeva9ANC1cB5G42E8zXGE1fJfvEceH6b1Ttc90c0WLWW4/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.europe-solidaire.org%2Fspip.php%3Farticle33674 4. Odds are this is only the start of a long campaign of slanders and as a result the need for a defense of the unions and others under attack (unions plural because there are 9 in NUMSA's camp). Be ready! On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Is the ANC preparing a crackdown on NUMSA using a bogus document? http://secure-web.cisco.com/11yI9bazmMkULBVJoc8p859Re1NdVIp1JChxkcPncXmETIYZpR3XVG73rrah0CzEC32pcuSZne5dXzEBgBI2yxZ9roM26CVGutt7MN1Sa8M5H6-VA2lTZ2J_FcQyT96uKR7diruaU3SRRENEXjuGhOs_epM8U9KKQJ8Q0XRqcQWQN-AZN5ozwz2V5xO1sJGMTlqTez98Q1KMu6_as6bTZpKEjbo572AQrrNg2xVOhZhE/http%3A%2F%2Fmg.co.za%2Farticle%2F2014-12-01-mystery-document- alleges-numsa-is-bent-on-regime-change _ Full posting guidelines at: http://secure-web.cisco.com/12BOkCrGv3xq9sNhNGaq9ekNZ0r9MdKLtq9IUiqlTVzzbL6K1Kuq7ak1bAf-r74XXWXPenyiIJlBVFsZPGPHcgqQfsZ6GUQAST84wsC2lUIBf3G_BmhR1iIlCtZpk8zhlrx1m5QfpDTL8Uj1GyEnoUw4SyvxO7zlgdv7fNzZQKlBhmYO7W9VS4iTTfEdjp5Xx6gSgPaBQDJ31NMikpPlSSZ6TGB0wPb5ZDAi3EwTvmk8/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marxmail.org%2Fsub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/ options/marxism/acpollack2%40gmail.com _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Dog bites man
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[Marxism] Fwd: Who is 'professor' from Michael Brown autopsy? - CNN.com
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Re: [Marxism] Dog bites man
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 12/03/2014 03:37 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: U Albany students here are out blocking traffic. Big protest in Albany tomorrow. It strikes me that the ruling class may be approaching an Enron moment. They will have to make an example out some cop, hoping to quiet this growing movement. Jon Flanders http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/nyregion/grand-jury-said-to-bring-no-charges-in-staten-island-chokehold-death-of-eric-garner.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/jonathan.flanders%40verizon.net _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Dog bites man
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Another grand jury, this on in New York City, and another murderer goes uncharged. It doesn't matter what place, big city or small town, liberal town like Portland, OR or conservative town like Pittsburgh, whether a black person has a good job or a bad one, whether you are a criminal or not, whether you are young or old, the insidious white disease of racism goes on and on and on and on. Just like war. How can we expect this to end through the kinds of marginal changes the politicians and media keep recommending. It's all blah, blah, blah. But I have a feeling that the horrible heartbreak engendered by these killings is generating more and more rage, that we are seeing the resurgence of a black liberation struggle. One that will combine many different but connected tactics, build a cohesive strategy, encourage alliances with kindred spirits while maintaining its independence, learn from the successes and failures of the past, develop programs that benefit people in the here and now, including collective self-help economic programs, challenge the police forcefully, and many other things as well. And as this movement is built, I think we will see eyes opening to the connections between it and the sickening system of warmaking, imperialism, and profit obsession that is intimately connected to the oppression of black, Hispanic, and other minority peoples. Something to embrace and support as best we can. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Dog bites man
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * - Original Message -From: michael yates via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu But I have a feeling that the horrible heartbreak engendered by these killings is generating more and more rage, that we are seeing the resurgence of a black liberation struggle. One that will combine many different but connected tactics, build a cohesive strategy, encourage alliances with kindred spirits while maintaining its independence, learn from the successes and failures of the past, Sure hope so, but see this: http://www.beyondchron.org/local-ferguson-protests-effective/ SR _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Ohio: Officer Who Killed Boy Had a Negative Firearms Review - NYTimes.com
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[Marxism] Stirred up Moslems
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Brzezinski 1998 in interview with French paper: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War? http://rdln.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/how-the-west-created-osama-bin-laden/#more-9859 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What is a Marxist organization?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://libcom.org/library/what-marxist-organization It is a commonplace on the Marxist Left that revolutionary organizations need to be rooted in the working class, so much so that “middle-class” is just as common an insult as “sectarian” or “opportunist.” Middle-class dominated socialist groups are generally aware of their class basis and strive to overcome it—noting that an organization tends to be middle-class does not tell anybody anything they did not already know. Therefore, we will look at the problem of the base of an organization from a different angle. A fundamental weakness of the organizations of the socialist Left is that their members do not have a material stake in their organizations. Members of Leninist organizations join largely because they believe in the ideas. This is certainly how they are recruited. For the groups that are able to grow larger than an irrelevant sect, the members may even join because they believe in the actions of the organization. But very few of these actions actually have a material impact on the lives and livelihoods of their members and Leninists rarely even consider that this might be a problem. For decades, Leninists of various stripes have distinguished themselves by their unique analyses of the Soviet Union, recruiting members to their theoretical model and, in some of the better cases, engaging in mass movements and even trade union activism as well. These groups could debate on end their different analyses of whether the the Soviet Union was state capitalist, or a degenerated workers state, or whether they included China, Cuba, Serbia, Albania, or North Korea among their canon. In spite of their exhaustive sociological analyses of these various bureaucracies and how they did or did not represent the will of the working class or whether a political or economic revolution could bring workers to power, these Marxists never applied the same rigorous analyses to their own organizations. Implicit was always the assumption that their organization was somehow exempt from the pressures of society such as the racist and sexist muck that we are all raised with. They also held the assumption that their organization would not succumb to the very basic pressures society applies to all organizations, bureaucracies and institutions. It is approximately one hundred and sixty years too late to begin this discussion, but better late than never. Building an organization based on people who are convinced of Marxist ideas is, to put it bluntly, not very Marxist. Marxism is not a theory of the world but a strategy to change it. To the extent that it does provide an analysis of the world–and it certainly does–it would suggest that convincing people to a set of revolutionary ideas will end in failure. Revolutionaries are made by their experience in the class struggle, not in study groups and meetings, no matter how well intentioned these efforts are. As the American socialist Hal Draper wrote, “To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to ‘believe in’ the class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton in order to fall from an airplane.” Too often, though, Marxists have engaged in building their own organizations as though they were physicists jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, confident that their in depth knowledge of the laws of gravity would protect them from disaster. It is a long way down, and may even be quite pleasant and gratifying much of the time, but eventually there is the realization that they are hurtling toward earth at thirty-two feet per second per second just like everybody else. The catastrophic failure that became of the British Socialist Workers Party is a useful case in point. The SWP did not predict that the Soviet Union would be reformed into a genuine workers’ state or that it could not be overthrown by its own working class. Their theory, confirmed (while others were left in shambles) by the fall of the Soviet Union, has done it little good in practice beyond convincing people they have good ideas. There remains the basic Marxist problem of developing an actual cadre of militants who are courageous, self sacrificing, understand the mood on the shop floor–to the extent that workers today even work on a “shop floor”–and can galvanize people into action. A debate on the website of the group Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21), one of the post-SWP groupings, has seen contributions from people with several decades of experience as active, party building Leninists, asking whether “Leninism” is worth saving and whether it is even a coherent body of thought. One contribution describes
Re: [Marxism] What is a Marxist organization?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * on Donnerstag, 4. Dezember 2014 at 04:14, Scott J. via Marxism wrote: my spontaneous first answer to the question in the Subject line is and was. An organisation calling itself Marxist. And since each and everybody can call herself and himself a Marxist, this designation is quite useless. Cheers, Lüko Willms _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Another killer cop gets off as Ferguson outrage sparks new protests, nation-wide debate
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * The news came through on December 3, as I write this, that another grand jury has refused to indict a white cop for murdering an unarmed Black man. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57932 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
