Re: [Marxism] new Trotsky on Ukraine article

[Einde O'Callaghan via Marxism]

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On 22.01.2016 17:09, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine2.htm
it's new to MIA, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't cited when we last discussed
this question

Just to clarify, there is already another version of this article, which 
appeared in /Fourth International/ in November 1949. This can be found at:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine.html

The version given by Andrew above is the original version published 
in/Socialist Appeal/ in May 1939. I haven't checked to see if there are 
any significant differences between them.


Einde O'Callaghan (MIA)
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Re: [Marxism] Richard Levins, R.I.P.?

[Paul Eckstein via Marxism]

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Hi All,
It's sad to lose Richard Levins.  Back in 2008, I interviewed him for an hour 
on WBAI radio in NYC.  Here is a link to the page with the audio of that 
interview.
http://www.equaltimeforfreethought.org/?s=Levins

Best,Paul Eckstein 

On Friday, January 22, 2016 12:11 PM, Jim Farmelant via Marxism 
 wrote:
 

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https://www.facebook.com/TruthIsTheWhole/posts/807215896073345?fref=nf=story


Sad news regarding Professor Richard Levins

Dear GHP Community:

It is with sadness that I write to report the death yesterday of Professor 
Richard Levins, the John Rock Professor of Population Sciences in GHP. Dick 
died peacefully surrounded by family.
Dick earned his PhD from Columbia in 1965 and soon established himself as a 
leading scholar in the field of integrated population biology with the 
publication of his book, Evolution in changing environments: some theoretical 
explorations, in 1968. Over the course of his four decades at Harvard, Dick was 
unequaled in his ability to weave together seemingly disparate topics 
effortlessly, presenting practical theories on complex systems. We will miss 
his presence in the department and his voice in the field.

Last June, Dick was honored for his numerous contributions in a symposium in 
celebration of his 85th birthday. A number of former students and colleagues 
attended and shared fond memories and tributes. The School featured the event 
and Dick’s accomplished career in a recent article: 
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/finding-truth-in-the-whole/


A notice of Dick’s passing will go out from the Dean’s office to the School 
community shortly.
Our sympathies are extended to Dick’s family and close colleagues at this time 
of loss. We will share memorial arrangements as we receive them.
Best regards,

---


Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math





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Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist Capitalist

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Jan 22, 2016, at 12:20 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> NY Times, Jan. 22 2016
> Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist Capitalist
> by Josh Barro

This piece first appeared (and Lou posted it to the list) on Oct 20.
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[Marxism] China's capitalist crisis threats world economy

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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If there is a single statistic that conveys the enormity of this
infrastructure program, it is cement production. Between 2011 and 2014,
China used more cement than the US did in the entire 20th century — 6.6
billion tonnes in four years compared with 4.5 billion tonnes in 100 years.

One result of this huge program of state-sponsored growth has been a
property bubble that predictably burst, leaving roads to nowhere and ghost
cities in its wake.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/60926

-- 
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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
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[Marxism] Richard Levins

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Richard didn't post that often on Marxmail but when he did, it was 
usually of some gravity. This was occasioned on the death of his wife , 
who was as important to the left as he was.



On 3/28/11 7:27 AM, "Aurora Levins Morales"  historica.us> wrote:

Rosario Morales, pioneering Puerto Rican feminist writer, died in her home
on March 23, 2011 from multiple myeloma.  Born in 1930, Rosario grew up in
the South Bronx, New York City, in a working class home.  She attended
Hunter College in the late 1940s, where her interests in science and social
justice led her to join the Communist Party.  In 1950 she married Richard
Levins and the couple moved to Indiera Baja, Maricao in the coffee farming
region of Puerto Rico.  Blacklisted as communists, they farmed, organized
and raised three children.  In 1956 they returned to New York to study.
Rosario studied psychology and biology at City College of New York, and art
with Hugo Gellert and at the New School.  She graduated in 1959, and
returned to Puerto Rico with her family in 1960.   There she pursued her
interests in evolutionary anthropology, art and botany, and the education of
her children, while her husband taught biology.  When he was forced out of
the University of Puerto Rico for his political activism, they moved to
Chicago and Rosario studied anthropology at the University of Chicago.  Her
M.A. thesis was a devastating critique of Claude Levi‑Strauss, idolized at
the time by many American anthropologists.  This prevented her from pursuing
a doctorate.  In Chicago, she was a leader in student, anti‑war and feminist
organizations.  She and her daughter Aurora were the oldest and youngest
members of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.  In 1975, she and her
husband moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was part of the upsurge
of women of color feminist writers.  She was a contributor to the
groundbreaking collection *This Bridge Called My Back*, and her work
appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  In 1986, she and her
daughter Aurora Levins Morales wrote *Getting Home Alive,* hailed as a
landmark in US Puerto Rican literature.  She had wide‑ranging interests in
science, politics and the arts.  She worked for two years with her husband
at the Harvard School of Public Health, was an active writer and performer,
and an accomplished fabric artist.  She was  a member of the Women’s
Community Cancer Project, which pioneered research, education and organizing
on the environmental causes of cancer, exposing the role of corporate greed
in toxic pollution.  She passed through many organizations and pursued a
wide range of interests, all of them consistent with her feminism, Marxism,
her identity as a Puerto Rican independendist woman and her love of art and
nature, especially lizards, birds and bromeliads.  She is survived by her
husband Richard Levins, her sister Gloria, her children Aurora, Ricardo and
Alejandro and grandchildren Olivia, Alicia, Manuel, Emilio and Nico.  There
will be a public celebration of her life on May 7, 2011 in Cambridge,
location TBA.

=
Richard Levins
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[Marxism] Fwd: swecw-list> Carbon and slavery

[dr.woooo via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: *dr.w* 
Date: Saturday, January 23, 2016
Subject: swecw-list> Carbon and slavery
To: socialwar-energy-climatewar <
socialwar-energy-climate...@googlegroups.com>


http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/01/20/463600820/todays-slaves-often-work-for-enterprises-that-destroy-the-environment

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Re: [Marxism] Richard Levins, R.I.P.?

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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https://www.facebook.com/TruthIsTheWhole/posts/807215896073345?fref=nf=story


Sad news regarding Professor Richard Levins

Dear GHP Community:

It is with sadness that I write to report the death yesterday of Professor 
Richard Levins, the John Rock Professor of Population Sciences in GHP. Dick 
died peacefully surrounded by family.
Dick earned his PhD from Columbia in 1965 and soon established himself as a 
leading scholar in the field of integrated population biology with the 
publication of his book, Evolution in changing environments: some theoretical 
explorations, in 1968. Over the course of his four decades at Harvard, Dick was 
unequaled in his ability to weave together seemingly disparate topics 
effortlessly, presenting practical theories on complex systems. We will miss 
his presence in the department and his voice in the field.

Last June, Dick was honored for his numerous contributions in a symposium in 
celebration of his 85th birthday. A number of former students and colleagues 
attended and shared fond memories and tributes. The School featured the event 
and Dick’s accomplished career in a recent article: 
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/finding-truth-in-the-whole/


A notice of Dick’s passing will go out from the Dean’s office to the School 
community shortly.
Our sympathies are extended to Dick’s family and close colleagues at this time 
of loss. We will share memorial arrangements as we receive them.
Best regards,

---


Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math





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[Marxism] Fwd: Anticapitalism can only be global in scope — the real purview of the “transition debate” | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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In the course of writing about the Brenner thesis for the better part of 
20 years, I have heard questions about the relevance of the debate to 
contemporary politics—including I should add from myself. When I found 
myself writing, for example, about the importance of the turnip in the 
agrarian economy of 17th century England, I could not help but wonder if 
I would be better off researching logging and ranching incursions into 
indigenous regions of the Amazon rainforest instead. As it happens, Alex 
Anievas and Kerim Nisancioglu, the authors of the monumentally important 
and deeply researched “How the West Came to Rule”, have demonstrated in 
their conclusion that the 17th century growth of capitalism worldwide 
and today’s struggles are related. Not only that, in making this point 
they also connect it with the need for a worldwide revolutionary party 
that both forsakes petty and sectarian self-interests but returns to the 
original vision of proletarian revolution as a global endeavor as this 
excerpt makes clear.


full: 
http://louisproyect.org/2016/01/22/anticapitalism-can-only-be-global-in-scope-the-real-purview-of-the-transition-debate/

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Re: [Marxism] Richard Levins, R.I.P.?

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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Jacobin now has an obit for Richard Levins too.
--
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/richard-levins-obituary-biological-determinism-dialectics/


Richard Levins, the great radical and scientist, passed away on January 19. 
Levins was a profound thinker who made foundational contributions to scientific 
and intellectual fields ranging from community ecology and evolutionary theory 
to mathematical biology, public health, and the philosophy of science.

His extraordinary scientific legacy is matched by his legacy as a radical and 
activist. Blacklisted in 1950s for his activism, Levins subsequently moved to 
Puerto Rico with Rosario Morales, his wife and lifelong partner, and became an 
important member of the Puerto Rican independence and antiwar movements.

Levins was also a leading intellectual figure in the fight against biological 
determinism and remained an activist to the end of his life, often lecturing on 
his favorite topic: the use of dialectics to understand complexity and change 
in both the natural and social sciences.

While I did not know Levins personally, few people have had a greater 
intellectual and moral influence on me. Levins showed me it was possible to be 
a serious scientist and a radical — a revelation for a scientifically and 
mathematically inclined young adult growing up at the “end of history.” He 
taught me to understand how the prejudices of “bourgeois society” shape our 
views of science and nature, and gave me the intellectual and moral courage to 
fight for an emancipatory vision of science.

As a scientist Levins had an incredible ability to analyze complex systems — to 
examine them from multiple, contradictory viewpoints simultaneously — without 
falling into the seductive traps of reductionism or static thinking. In the 
1960s, Levins authored a series of extraordinary papers that helped launch the 
field of community ecology — all while facing FBI harassment for his activist 
work with the Puerto Rican left.

These papers combined sophisticated mathematical techniques with profound 
ecological insights to investigate the origins of biodiversity and evolution in 
fluctuating environments. Levins seamlessly shifted intellectual fields, going 
on to make foundational contributions in areas as varied as mathematical 
modeling of complex systems, agroecology, and disease ecology.

Levins was inducted into the US National Academy of Sciences — the country’s 
most prestigious organization of scientists — but resigned shortly afterwards 
to protest the organization’s role in advising the US military during the 
Vietnam War. After his first visit to Cuba in 1964, Levins also served as a 
scientific adviser to the Cuban government.

Levins outlined his approach to analyzing the world in his book The Dialectical 
Biologist, penned with his longtime comrade and scientific collaborator, 
Richard Lewontin. (The work, whose title is an allusion to Engels’s Dialectics 
of Nature, is dedicated “to Fredrich Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time 
but who got it right when it counted.”) In passages that were scientifically 
decades ahead of their time, the book outlines a holistic way of looking at 
nature and the world — an outlook now fully embraced by the new fields of 
systems biology and complex systems:

The dialectical view insists that persistence and equilibrium are not the 
natural state of things but require explanation, which must be sought in the 
actions of the opposing forces . . . The opposing forces are seen as 
contradictory in the sense that each taken separately would have opposite 
effects, and their joint action may be different from the result of either 
acting alone . . . The relations among the stabilising and destabilising 
processes become themselves the objects of interests, and the original object 
is seen as a system, a network of positive and negative feedbacks.

This dialectical outlook undergirded Levins’s deep skepticism of, and prolonged 
fight against, biological determinism and sociobiology.

In one of the book’s most incredible passages, Levins and Lewontin use the 
example of gravity to show the inseparability of genes, environment, and 
organism. They point out that bacteria
are largely outside the influence of gravity as a consequence of their size, 
that is, as a consequence of their genes. On the other hand, they are subject 
to another universal force, the Brownian motion of molecules, which [humans] 
are protected from by our large size, again a consequence of our genes.

Thus, whether an organism is subject to something as universal and seemingly 
natural as the laws of gravity 

[Marxism] Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist Capitalist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(The author of this piece that appears in the Upshot blog is a 
self-described "neoliberal Republican".)


NY Times, Jan. 22 2016
Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist Capitalist
by Josh Barro

In last week’s Democratic Party debate, Bernie Sanders stuck up for the 
idea that Americans are prepared to elect a democratic socialist, which 
is how he describes himself. “We’re gonna win,” he said, when the 
moderator, Anderson Cooper, pressed him on his electability under any 
kind of socialist label.


This led Hillary Rodham Clinton to defend capitalism, saying, “We would 
be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest 
middle class in history,” though she allowed the need to “rein in the 
excesses of capitalism.”


The weirdest thing about this fight is that Mr. Sanders, a Vermont 
senator, is not really a socialist. Or at least, if he is a socialist, 
he is also, at the same time, a capitalist.


“I think Bernie Sanders’s use of the word ‘socialism’ is causing much 
more confusion than it is adding value,” said Lane Kenworthy, a 
professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego. Mr. 
Kenworthy, who recently wrote a book called “Social Democratic America” 
and thinks about these sorts of things for a living, offered a 
suggestion: “He is, if you want to put it this way, a democratic 
socialist capitalist.”


Ugh. Do we have to put it that way? In addition to being a mouthful, 
that still seems as if it’s going to confuse a lot of people.


After all, Mr. Sanders does not want to nationalize the steel mills or 
the auto companies or even the banks. Like Mrs. Clinton, he believes in 
a mixed economy, where capitalist institutions are mediated through 
taxes and regulation. He just wants more taxes and more regulation than 
Mrs. Clinton does. He certainly seems like a regular Democrat, only more so.


“It’s not socialism, it’s social democracy, which is a big difference,” 
said Mike Konczal, an economic policy expert at the left-wing Roosevelt 
Institute. Social democracy, Mr. Konczal noted, “implies a very active 
role for capitalism in the framework.”


Social democracy, Mr. Sanders will have you remember, is not what they 
were up to in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It’s the 
little-of-this, little-of-that philosophy of parties like Labour in 
Britain or the Social Democrats in Germany. Such parties have abandoned 
their past support for the nationalization of industry and have presided 
for long periods over economies that certainly appeared capitalist to 
visiting American tourists, albeit with higher taxes than we have in the 
United States.


Mr. Sanders himself emphasizes the “democratic” part of democratic 
socialism, and promised in last week’s debate that “we’re gonna explain 
what democratic socialism is.” He cited Denmark, which has very high 
taxes, very generous social programs and a robust economy driven by 
private capital investment, as an example of a place that does social 
democracy really well. (Though, as Matt Yglesias at Vox noted, Denmark’s 
Social Democrats have been out of power for 11 of the last 15 years 
while the country’s policies have continued to look pretty social 
democratic, further highlighting the difficulty of figuring out who’s 
really a socialist or not, or what.)


Mr. Konczal laid out four hallmarks. You might be a social democrat if 
you support: a mixed economy, that is, a combination of private 
enterprise and government spending; social insurance programs that 
support the old and the poor; a Keynesian economic policy of government 
borrowing and spending to offset economic recessions; and democratic 
participation in government and the workplace.


If that’s what social democracy is, it’s not obvious what the term would 
add to the American political lexicon. Most Democrats would tell you 
they support all four of those things. So would quite a few Republicans.


Mr. Sanders said on the campaign trail this week that police and fire 
departments are “socialist institutions,” as are public libraries. He 
noted that Social Security and Medicare, which are very popular with 
Americans, are “socialist programs.” This, again, is more confusing than 
clarifying. If supporting Social Security and public firefighting makes 
you a social democrat, the term does nothing to distinguish Mr. Sanders 
from his opponents.


“When you look at the policies, there’s a way to see it as Bernie has 
cranked up Hillary’s agenda to 11,” Mr. Konczal said. To wit: Mrs. 
Clinton favors preserving Social Security with some enhancements for the 
poorest beneficiaries, while he wants to raise taxes on the rich to 
expand 

[Marxism] A Question of Environmental Racism in Flint

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Jan. 22 2016
A Question of Environmental Racism in Flint
By JOHN ELIGON

If Flint were rich and mostly white, would Michigan’s state government 
have responded more quickly and aggressively to complaints about its 
lead-polluted water?


The 274 pages of emails released by Gov. Rick Snyder this week on 
Flint’s water crisis included no discussion of race. Instead, they 
focused on costs relating to the city’s water supply, questions about 
scientific data showing lead contamination and uncertainty about the 
responsibilities of state and local health officials.


But it is indisputable that in Flint, the majority of residents are 
black and many are poor. So whether or not race and class were factors 
in the state’s agonizingly slow and often antagonistic response, the 
result was the same: Thousands of Flint’s residents, black and white, 
have been exposed to lead in their drinking water. And the long-term 
health effects of that poisoning may not be fully understood for years.


For civil rights advocates, the health crisis in Flint smacks of what 
has become known as environmental racism. Coined in the 1980s, the term 
refers to the disproportionate exposure of blacks to polluted air, water 
and soil. It is considered the result of poverty and segregation that 
has relegated many blacks and other racial minorities to some of the 
most industrialized or dilapidated environments.


Many of those advocates assert that environmental racism is a major 
reason black people in Louisiana’s factory-laden “Cancer Alley” contract 
the disease at higher rates, or why the most polluted ZIP code in 
Michigan is in a southwest pocket of Detroit that is 84 percent black.


Many also say that environmental racism left blacks confined to the most 
flood prone parts of New Orleans, and that the government was slow to 
respond to the agonies immediately after Hurricane Katrina. President 
George W. Bush staunchly rejected that assertion.


Environmental decisions are often related to political power. In some 
cities, garbage incinerators have been built in African-American 
neighborhoods that do not have the political clout to block them. In 
Michigan, where blacks are 14 percent of the population and the state 
government is dominated by Republicans, Flint has little political power.


The water contamination in Flint was born out of a decision to switch 
the city’s water source to the Flint River in April 2014. The explicit 
goal was to save Flint, which was on the brink of financial collapse, 
millions of dollars. At the time, an emergency manager appointed by Mr. 
Snyder, a Republican, was running Flint. And in a sign of how racial 
issues are often not simple, that manager, Darnell Earley, who supported 
the switch, is black.


There were immediate concerns among residents about the quality of the 
murky water from the Flint River, which years ago was a repository for 
industrial waste from the city’s once booming, now almost extinct, 
factories. (Officials argued that they were drawing water from a cleaner 
portion of the river upstream.) Early tests showing coliform bacteria in 
the water were not "an actual threat to citizen safety,” Mr. Earley was 
quoted saying in The Flint Journal on Sept. 12, 2014.


Complaints continued to roll in — people got rashes, lost hair and were 
sickened by the water. But state officials sought to minimize the 
problem and attributed the uproar to politics. Flint is a Democratic 
stronghold which voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Snyder during his 
re-election campaign two years ago.


If the emails make no mention of race, they do at times view things 
through a political prism, treating some complaints from community 
representatives as political grandstanding. One notes that state 
environmental regulators believed that Flint activists were trying to 
turn lead exposure “into a political football.” Another email referred 
to the “anti-everything group.”


Even as levels of one chemical compound in Flint water exceeded 
federally allowable levels, a memo prepared for Mr. Snyder by his staff 
said that it was “not a top health concern” and that residents needed to 
understand the compound in context, the email records show. The memo, 
sent last February, also said that by the time the city connected to a 
new water system in 2016, “this issue will fade in the rearview.”


Dennis Muchmore, who was Mr. Snyder’s chief of staff at the time, 
sounded alarm bells in July. But some state officials responded tepidly. 
When Mr. Muchmore wrote to the state health department that people were 
rightfully concerned about studies of lead levels, the department 
responded 

Re: [Marxism] The broad party question after Syriza

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> SA (Socialist Alternative), of which he is one of the central leaders, has
> pursued a course of trying to unite the Australian anti-capitalist left on
> a solid anti-capitalist basis, so it is not like they are simply
> sectarians.  Apart from the small RSP, no-one else has been interested in
> uniting with SA; they prefer the world of fake internationals and
> sect-building.  The SA-RSP fusion , meanwhile, seems to have been very
> successful...
>
> By contrast to SA,  SocAll (Socialist Alliance) has got weaker and weaker,
> politically and numerically.  The old DSP's 'broad party' strategy simply
> didn't work.
>

Well that's pretty much complete bollocks.

In 2012, months before Socialist Alternative said anything about unity,
Socialist Alliance wrote a favourable review of the Marxism conference and
proposed it be organized more broadly
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50677. After the fusion of the
remnant (less than 20) of the collapsing RSP into SAlt, and an apparent
general turn to unity from SAlt, later that year, Socialist Alliance
proposed a unity process https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/52746. We
initiated joint activities including a sizable meeting in Melbourne
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54152. We helped build the 2013 Marxism
conference, the largest to date. I helped with the children's program (a
good initiative) https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54070. We wrote a
substantial document on programmatic and organisational points
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/unity-dossier-—-5-draft-documents-prepared-socialist-alliance-unity-negotiations.
I was the main author of an 8000 word article on unity for their journal
http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no6-winter-2013/92-revolutionary-unity-to-meet-the-capitalist-crisis
.

SAlt wrote nothing substantial for this process and rejected a number of
proposals for joint meetings. They made no response at all to the
programmatic document or my article. Later in 2013 they abruptly called the
process off with the briefest of excuses, stopped talking about unity and
closed down the hatches on the brief opening up of their journal. The
Marxism conferences, while still big, have been successively smaller since
2013. It's not clear whether they were confused about what they wanted,
divided about what they wanted or were disappointed in the lack of another
quick swallowing up, but a principled and consistent approach to unity it
was certainly not. Some disingenuous and/or confused behaviour is detailed
here
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/unity-dossier-—-2-recent-correspondence
.

Socialist Alliance, while certainly modest and imperfect, has rebuilt in
recent years and is larger and more active than it was at the time of the
unprincipled split by the RSP in 2008. It never had delusions about being a
big broad party in the sense Phil means it, particularly in the DSP's
conception, which was always as a bridge to a bigger and broader
revolutionary organisation (see e.g. http://www.dsp.org.au/node/236). I
think there were errors in the execution of that perspective at least up to
a couple of years ago, but that's what the perspective was, not what Phil
thinks it was. In any case Socialist Alliance has for some years defined
itself as a revolutionary organisation, adopting a substantial programmatic
document in this regard last year
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/towards-socialist-australia. We're also
certainly open to a range of unity options including with SAlt if they get
or re-get serious and are for example in serious discussion with the
Sudanese Community Party in Australia, a significant force.

Phil might have appointed himself an off-shore cheer leader for SAlt but
regarding the Australian far left he has little idea of what he's talking
about.
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[Marxism] Fwd: The 50 Most Unacceptable Sentences in City on Fire, In Order - The Awl

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I remember when this novel got rave reviews in the NY Times. It was 
based on the 1977 blackout in NY and supposedly very political with an 
eye to the city's racial and class contradictions. I very rarely read 
fiction nowadays but was skeptical about the claims being made for this 
900 page novel. I am glad I did not waste my time or money after taking 
a look at this amusing article on the awful writing contained within. 
Read the whole article for the rest of "unacceptable sentences".




http://www.theawl.com/2016/01/the-50-most-unacceptable-sentences-in-city-on-fire-in-order

10. “Breasts like bronzed mangoes.”

9. “Seven o’clock was some kind of citywide dog walking hour, when 
hordes of ostensibly autonomous individuals, still in permutations of 
professional attire, rushed out of their co-ops tugged by leashes taut 
as water-skiers’ ropes, at the other end of which, straining like hairy 
engines, were spaniels, shah thus, bichon frises.”


8. “There has to be a natural limit to how long anyone can spend like 
this, in a black aluminum suppository lodged in the asshole of the earth.”


7. “His beard was Amish-ish. The girl wore some kind of insalubrious 
sports uniform and carried a bag with a broken zipper.”


6. “Once he’d carried her to the bed, he lifted her nightgown and moved 
down between her legs and lapped at the spiced copper there until, 
across the quivering swell of her belly and breasts he saw the flush 
leap into her throat, her hands twisting the sheets by her head.”


5. “She looked like a mythological creature, a silkie or dryad, long 
blond hair and a low-cut dress in which her breasts, without any 
apparent means of support, were offered like alluring canapés.”


4. “There were her tits, perfect pale apples, their small stems hard 
from the basement chill.”


3. “In the moonlight through the ceiling’s trapdoor, her tits look like 
soft blue balloons.”


2. “You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone.”

1. “Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black 
sycamores.”


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[Marxism] [UCE] Syria and Surrealism

[Fred Murphy via Marxism]

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Syria and Surrealism, by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

"When Syria was a political issue, realists responded without imagination;
now that it has become a “security” issue, they are viewing it with
blinkers. Because ISIS is the primary concern for the US, they assume it
should be for Syrians too. Their pragmatic solution to the Syrian dilemma
is to court Assad to defeat or contain ISIS — and they are surprised when
Syrians don’t jump at the opportunity to ally with their main tormentor
against what for them is an ugly but manageable threat. They seem oblivious
that were ISIS to vanish tomorrow, the party to the conflict responsible
for 95 percent of the civilian deaths would still be in power — armed,
dangerous, and unaccountable. Nor do they understand that in making Assad’s
survival conditional on his usefulness against ISIS, they give him an
incentive to preserve the group, rather than destroy it and make himself
dispensable. Having learned nothing from the disastrous consequences of
America’s support for repressive dictatorships during the Cold War, they
want to regress to the troglodyte world of dungeons and dictators,
condemning Syrians once again to totalitarian rule (albeit now through
Russian hands)."

FULL: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/syria-and-surrealism
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[Marxism] new Trotsky on Ukraine article

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine2.htm
it's new to MIA, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't cited when we last discussed
this question
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[Marxism] New Trotsky on Ukraine article

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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"Not a trace remains of the former confidence and sympathy of the Western 
Ukrainian masses for the Kremlin. Since the latest murderous “purge” in the 
Ukraine no one in the West wants to become part of the Kremlin satrapy which 
continues to bear the name of Soviet Ukraine. "

Years ago I was told that, in the wake of these events, the Communist Party in 
the Western Ukraine simply disbanded.

ken h
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[Marxism] Fwd: Is human behavior controlled by our genes? Richard Levins reviews “The Social Conquest of Earth”

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/08/01/is-human-behavior-controlled-by-our-genes-richard-levins-reviews-the-social-conquest-of-earth/
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[Marxism] Popular resistance during WW2

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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Donny Gluckstein (ed), *Fighting on all Fronts: popular resistance in the
Second World War*, London, Bookmarks, 2015; reviewed by *Philip Ferguson*

This is a fascinating book.  Its ten contributors provide eleven chapters –
two are by Gluckstein – on people's resistance to dictatorship in Europe
and Asia/Pacific during World War 2 and struggles within two capitalist
democracies (Australia and Ireland, the latter not being formally involved
in the second great imperialist conflagration).

The struggles range from Jewish resistance to the Nazis and the Holocaust
in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, to the Slovak national uprising of
1944 to resistance to French rule in Algeria to Burmese resistance to both
British and Japanese imperialism to the Huk rebellion in the Philippines. .
.

full at: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/14129/

Other recent stuff on Redline.

I've put up the nice tribute to Richard Levins that Rob Wallace posted on
facebook and there's an article about how the newly-appointed
general-secretary of the Labour Party (NZ) is fittingly symbolic of the
party's role as capitalist managers (the dude is an actual capitalist
manager):
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/new-labour-party-general-secretary-indicative-of-partys-managerial-capitalism/

Plus there's a major extract from an interesting letter in the *Weekly
Worker* on the state of the British working class:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/disengaging-in-britain/
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