[Marxism] Is a Republican Meltdown on the agenda?

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Is a Republican Meltdown on the agenda?*



Although my crystal ball stopped working years ago, it looks to me like the
electoral system in the United States is entering a major crisis.

The center of the crisis right now is the Republican Party. What a circus!
What low-life clowns! How could any sane human being vote for any of them?

But this is the party of Lincoln. This is the Grand Old Party that won the
civil war and rebuilt the United States. This is the party of business;
this is the main party of the American capitalist class. And it is
self-destructing.

Food for thought.

Since the 1960’s the GOP has rebuilt itself into a new party. Clearly a
party of business owners and farmers in the 20th century United States was
doomed to be a minority party in elections. Even if every small business
owner voted for it, it would lose every election if the working class and
poor all voted for some other party. The party of business needed to
acquire voters from among the ignorant masses.

It found them after World War II by being more anti-communist than even the
Democratic Party. But, cold-war anti-communism was a card that had worn
thin by 1960.

John F. Kennedy’s razor thin election victor paradoxically gave the
Republicans the key to getting a lot more voters. Kennedy’s cynical ploy of
supporting black voting rights had helped him win the elections, but it
insulted and betrayed the southern Jim Crow base of his party. When
Kennedy’s southern born and bred Vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
took over, he only made matters worse for his southern Democratic brothers
in arms by pushing through the Civil Rights Act.

The revolt followed when Alabama Governor George Wallace led the southern
Democrats out of the Democratic Party and temporarily into a short-lived
new party called the American Independent Party. The GOP saw the
opportunity to grab the very base of the old Democratic Party. Nixon’s
southern strategy swallowed the AIP whole, and took the Texas Democratic
Party along with it. By 1972 what had been the solid Democratic South had
been transformed into the solid Republican south.

Unfortunately for the GOP political strategists around Nixon, racism had
been dealt a powerful blow by the great uprising of youth and black people
of the 1960’s. Racism had not been killed, but it was mortally wounded and
has never recovered. The fact that Barack Obama was elected president is
very strong evidence of this. The fact that two of the most important
clowns in the Republican primaries this year, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have
Spanish last names, and the facts that one of the GOP candidates was black
and another was a woman are additional evidence.

The GOP needed to find another way to attract some other group of backward
people. They found it in religion. The Moral Majority helped Ronald Reagan
into the White House and transformed abortion from a medical issue into a
political litmus test.

To add to the toxic mixture, the GOP became the party of the National Rifle
Association.

This hybrid monster, led by the traditional Calvin Coolidge stratum of the
Republican Party, was headed for a disaster.

The problem is, even the most backward Republican voter expects something
in return for his vote. And the voter base of the Republican Party got
almost nothing from Republican victories. Less than nothing for most of
them when it comes to the nuts and bolts of “the economy stupid”.

Whether or not they were aware of the tenuous nature of their electoral
victories, the GOP was working hard to use its electoral base to give it
permanent dominance of the electoral system. They focused on gaining
control of the Supreme Court and state legislatures. These were the keys to
reversing the inclusion of poor people into the voting booths that had
resulted from the civil rights movement and the black rebellions of the
1960’s.

This strategy led to the creation of the Burger Supreme Court in place of
the Warren Supreme Court, and it lead to Republican control of almost 40
state legislatures and a cascade of big and small court decisions and
legislative actions that has whittled down the electorate to give a
minority party the position of the majority party in everything but
presidential elections.

And it is all unraveling in front of our eyes.

It is not just Ted Cruz and Donald Trump trashing each other’s wives. It is
not just the Tea Party faction of the GOP running candidates against
mainstream Republicans in primaries. It is not just the ever more intense
crisis in the Republican Congressional and Senate delegations.

The top of the Republican Party has fractured. The Koch brothers are not an
accident. 

[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: Benin: The Nigerian City that Made the Europeans Jealous – Observe Nigeria

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.observenigeria.com/cultures/the-great-benin-city/
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[Marxism] How to Hack an Election

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

"For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging
major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job
was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign
strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm
and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña
Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night,
he cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual
on election night, he was alone."

"Last year, based on anonymous sources, the Colombian media reported
that Rendón was working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Rendón
calls the reports untrue. The campaign did approach him, he says, but he
turned them down because he dislikes Trump. “To my knowledge we are not
familiar with this individual,” says Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. “I
have never heard of him, and the same goes for other senior staff members.”
But Rendón says he’s in talks with another leading U.S. presidential
campaign—he wouldn’t say which—to begin working for it once the primaries
wrap up and the general election begins."
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Re: [Marxism] Adventures in the Trump Twittersphere

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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I wonder how much of the alt-right universe's bizarro views about IS stem
from the failure of people on the left to take principled positions on the
crisis in Syria.

On Thursday, March 31, 2016, Michael Yates via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> What the author says rings true. I have long known of the alternative
> universe of which he speaks, where facts don't matter and a crazy mix of
> beliefs exist in the same mind. Over the past fifteen years, we have seen a
> lot more of this and some of what we have seen I wrote about in my book,
> Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist's Travelogue. I am not sure about
> his friends in Austin saying that he didn't know the code when people with
> whom he was talking would be saying something sensible and then would toss
> in a racist remark. I think that a good many white people assume that you
> are a racist if you are white, and would be genuinely shocked if you
> disagreed with what they said, much less saying angrily that they were
> racists. There is a Facebook page dedicated to those of us who grew up in
> the 1950s and 60s, and the ignorant racism expressed there is hard to
> believe sometimes. Every time I have called people on this, they react with
> incomprehension, and more racism, suggesting that I am some sort of insane
> person. Most deny that racism ever existed in our town, which to any
> objective observer would sound really loony. See my essay, "Minstrel Show."
> One of my classmates, after reading it, said that it was a shame I was such
> an unhappy person, who only wanted to criticize. My guess is that there are
> a lot of Trump supporters in Ford City, PA.
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-- 
- Amith
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[Marxism] Adventures in the Trump Twittersphere

[Michael Yates via Marxism]

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What the author says rings true. I have long known of the alternative universe 
of which he speaks, where facts don't matter and a crazy mix of beliefs exist 
in the same mind. Over the past fifteen years, we have seen a lot more of this 
and some of what we have seen I wrote about in my book, Cheap Motels and a 
Hotplate: An Economist's Travelogue. I am not sure about his friends in Austin 
saying that he didn't know the code when people with whom he was talking would 
be saying something sensible and then would toss in a racist remark. I think 
that a good many white people assume that you are a racist if you are white, 
and would be genuinely shocked if you disagreed with what they said, much less 
saying angrily that they were racists. There is a Facebook page dedicated to 
those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and the ignorant racism expressed 
there is hard to believe sometimes. Every time I have called people on this, 
they react with incomprehension, and more racism, suggesting t
 hat I am some sort of insane person. Most deny that racism ever existed in our 
town, which to any objective observer would sound really loony. See my essay, 
"Minstrel Show." One of my classmates, after reading it, said that it was a 
shame I was such an unhappy person, who only wanted to criticize. My guess is 
that there are a lot of Trump supporters in Ford City, PA.  
  
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[Marxism] Fwd: SyriaComment.com: Riad al-Turk Interviewed by Joe Pace on Mehlis, the Opposition, Ghadry

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Interview and translation by Joe Pace
8 September 2005

Riad al-Turk has often been called Syria’s Mandela because he is the 
grandfather of the Syrian left. For many years al-Turk was the Amin 
al-`Amm (Secretary General) of the Syrian Communist Party - Political 
Office. He has been a fixture in the enlightened opposition for 55 years 
and is respected for his fearlessness and humanity. Although he has 
spent over 20 years in prison, Riad is still hail and sharp at 75. His 
first stint in jail was under Adib Shishakli in 1954. He spent another 
15 months in jail under Nasser in 1960, then under Assad from 1980 to 
1998, and finally under Bashar for another year and three months. He has 
recently undergone heart surgery, but he still smokes on occasion and is 
surrounded by a loving wife, beautiful daughters and grandchildren. Also 
see my 11 March 2005 interview with Riad al-Turk here.


Joe Pace: Could you give us information about yourself; how did you 
become opposition?


Riad al-Turk: You haven’t heard the saying that when anyone discusses 
himself, he is a liar? I’m from Homs, born in 1930. I went to law school 
and joined the lawyers union. I am now a member of the lawyers union in 
Homs. I joined the Communist party early in my life—I cannot remember 
when exactly because at that time the party life consisted more of a 
social movement than organized party life like there exists in the US or 
Europe. In the student movement, there were four tiers: a conservative 
trend dominated by the bourgeoisie, a religious movement dominated by 
the Muslim Brotherhood, a nationalist trend even though Nasser had not 
yet come into power led by the Ba’thists, and a Marxist trend led by the 
Communist party. I was part of the Communist party.


I, like the rest of the members, was a member of all the relevant 
forums. In 1969, the party split into two: the traditionalists and the 
one’s who wanted to re-evaluate their stance towards the Soviets. I was 
from the later and after the party conference, I was elected first 
secretary, a position that I held until April of last year when Abdullah 
Hoshi took over.


At that time, we changed the name of our party from the Communist Party 
to the People’s Democratic Party.


full: 
http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/Joshua.M.Landis-1/syriablog/2005/10/riad-al-turk-interviewed-by-joe-pace.htm

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[Marxism] The torturing of Aziz Asaad

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(On September 2nd, 2012, I was one of a handful of American socialists 
who went to Washington to join a rally in support of the Syrian 
revolution. As you would note from my report on the rally 
(https://louisproyect.org/2012/09/06/report-on-september-2nd-rally-for-syrian-revolution/), 
the keynote speaker was a Palestinian professor from U. of Cal. Berkeley 
who was a leader of the BDS movement that the Israeli lobby was trying 
to get fired, not John McCain. My video includes an interview with a 
young woman who was a key organizer. When I asked her what would happen 
if she had tried to organize a meeting that was critical of Assad at her 
university in Syria, she said that she would have been arrested and then 
tortured. While reading "Burning Country", I discovered that you didn't 
even have to be opposed to the regime to be tortured. What you read 
below is from Robin Yassin-Kassab's blog and essentially what ended up 
in "Burning Country".)


http://qunfuz.com/2013/09/14/azizs-story/

When I met Aziz Asaad, an activist from Selemiyyeh, across the Turkish 
border in Antakya, I asked him why the community was so revolutionary, 
why it hadn’t been scared into fencesitting or even grudging support for 
Assad by the Islamist element of the opposition. His answer: “We read a 
lot. We’ve always read books.”


Why did Selemiyyeh rise? For the same basic reason as the rest of Syria 
– in reaction against the terrible decades-long oppression of the Assad 
regime. Here, as illustration, is Aziz’s personal story.


When he was 19 he was a student of Information Systems Engineering, as 
eager as any of his townsmen to earn academic qualifications. He was 
also a young man with a passion for aeroplanes. When he met an Iraqi 
ex-pilot he was spurred to research and write a long article on the role 
of air power in the Iran-Iraq war. He managed to publish the article in 
“Avions”, a specialist magazine in France.


That was his mistake. He thinks something in the article must have upset 
the Iranians, Assad’s closest allies. He was arrested and tried for the 
crimes of “seeking to undermine national unity, and the disclosure of 
military information.” He was sentenced to two and a half years’ 
imprisonment. After the first year, and after paying a thousand-dollar 
bribe, his parents were able to pay him a two-minute visit. During this 
agonisingly brief encounter they were insulted by the guards, but at 
least they knew their son was alive.


Aziz spent four months of his detention in solitary confinement, in the 
dark. Mercifully, he forgot his sense of smell. Sight was irrelevant.


The cell was 90 cm wide and 180 cm long. It included a toilet and a tap. 
The terrible humidity caused mould to grow on his skin. He caught 
scabies from his filthy blanket. Sores filled with puss developed all 
over his body. Unable to see, he explored these with his fingers.


How did he survive? By exercising his memory. He remembered his parents, 
his brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles, and he laughed and 
cried. He was tormented by guilt for hurts he’d inflicted on his loved 
ones, and moved to tears by their remembered kindnesses.


But imagination didn’t always help. One day (we can’t specify morning or 
evening, because he had no way of distinguishing), Aziz awoke in great 
pain. He touched his right shoulder. An insect emerged from the skin 
there. He grasped the thing and judged it a cockroach, but it seemed 
larger than a cockroach. For a timeless stretch after that he was 
gripped by panic. He threw himself against the walls. He imagined his 
face being eaten. When despairing calm returned, he considered suicide, 
but could think of no way to commit the act: he could find nothing 
sharp, nothing to make into a rope. These were the worst moments of his 
life.


Some days later he was taken from the cell for yet another 
interrogation. Because the interrogating officer couldn’t stand the 
smell, he ordered hot water and Aziz was able to wash. In the light for 
the first time, he had visual proof of his sores. The swellings, 
particularly those in the abdomen and thighs, held the shapes of 
subcutaneous worms.


At some point after that he was called again from the cell. Alcohol was 
thrown on his body. It stung terribly, but he knew it would help to 
cleanse his wounds. Then the guard brought out a lighter and set fire to 
Aziz. Aziz ran. Aziz screamed.


This torture did in fact get rid of the parasites. Eventually Aziz was 
moved to a shared cell, anointed with disinfectant in the mornings, and 
placed two hours daily in the sun. Until his physical wounds had healed.


Some die. In September 2008 

[Marxism] Fwd: Riad al-Turk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(I have begun reading "Burning Country" by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila 
Al-Shami. I find myself stepping away from the book every few pages to 
look up a reference on the Internet. This is one of them.)




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riad_al-Turk

Al-Turk joined the Syrian Communist Party while a student. He was 
imprisoned for the first time in 1952 shortly after finishing law school 
for opposing the military government that came to power in a coup. He 
was held for five months and tortured but never tried in court.[1] He 
later wrote articles for the party newspaper, Al-Nour, and became a 
leading party ideologue. He was imprisoned again in 1958 under Nasser 
for opposing the merger of Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic 
and held for sixteen months. Again he was tortured but not tried for any 
crime.[1]


Turk had for some time been leading a faction within the Communist Party 
that demanded a more positive view of Arab nationalism, in opposition to 
Secretary-General Khalid Bakdash, who ruled the party with an iron fist. 
In 1972, Bakdash decided to merge the party into the National 
Progressive Front, a coalition of organizations allied with the ruling 
Arab Baath Socialist Party. Along with supporters on the radical wing of 
the party, Turk formed the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), 
consolidating a split that had been apparent since the late 1960s. The 
SCP-Political Bureau initially negotiated with the government for terms 
of legalization and membership in the Front. However, it later took a 
strong opposition stance, especially from 1976 on after the Syrian 
intervention in favour of the Maronites right-wing government in the 
Lebanese Civil War. This led to repression of the party, which was 
stepped up at the beginning of the 1980s when the Hafez al-Assad 
government felt itself under increasing pressure from both Islamists and 
the secular opposition. Al-Turk was arrested and imprisoned on 28 
October 1980 and held under very difficult conditions for almost 18 
years.[2] He spent most of this period in solitary confinement and 
suffering regular torture. Based on interviews with al-Turk journalist 
Robin Wright reports he was "locked way in a windowless underground 
cell, about the length of his body or the size of a small elevator 
compartment, at an intelligence headquarters." Al-Turk was "never 
allowed out of his cell to exercise. Until the final months, he was not 
allowed a book, newspaper, mail or anything else to keep his mind 
occupied." For the first thirteen years of his imprisonment he was 
allowed no communication from, or information about, his friends and 
family, including his two young daughters. His "only activity was being 
allowed three times a day to go to a shared toilet." He was never 
allowed to use it when other prisoners were there but did scrounge the 
toilet bin for discarded clothing as his own clothing was worn out.[2] 
One of his few diversions was collecting grains of dark cereal he found 
in the thin soup he was served in the evening and using the grains to 
create pictures in his cell.[3] He suffered considerable ill-health, 
including diabetes for which he was refused treatment. He was released 
on 30 May 1998.


After his release in 1998, al-Turk was initially not particularly active 
politically. In June 2000, however, Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad died 
and his son Bashar succeeded him. This was followed by an outburst of 
political debate and demands for democratic changes, known as the 
Damascus Spring, and al-Turk resumed a prominent role. His statement on 
al Jazeera television in August 2001 that "the dictator has died" was 
seen as a direct cause of renewed repression by an angered government, 
and al-Turk himself was arrested some days later on September 1, 2001, 
subjected to a trial widely seen as unfair before a state security 
court. In June 2002 he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for 
`attempting to change the constitution by illegal means.`[4] This led to 
international protests, especially given his poor health.

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[Marxism] Fwd: How did Syria become a burning country? | SocialistWorker.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This interview was submitted first to Jacobin which refused to publish 
it. What a bunch of scumbags.


http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/31/how-did-syria-become-a-burning-country
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Re: [Marxism] Excellent Cindy Sheehan article on Trump, Sanders, primaries

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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>
> the rise of The Donald is a true insurgency campaign


[Sanders] does not represent a break from the established Democrat Party,
> but just a mild left-wing expression of it.


This is basically a pro-Trump article that never mentions racism.

As I responded recently to a pro-Trump tweet from Medea Benjamin,
https://twitter.com/clayclai/status/715044775498526721

> 
>
> Clay Claiborne Retweeted Medea Benjamin
>
> Look for more Assad/Putin supporters & RT fans to start warming up to
> Trump #*SaudiArabiaUncovered*
>  #
> *CodePinkExposed* 
>
> Clay Claiborne added,
> 
> *Medea Benjamin* @medeabenjamin
> Sometime Trump says gems of wisdom, like #*NATO* is obsolete. #
> *cnntownhall*
> 0 retweets 0 likes
> ,
>


Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 


On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
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>
> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/coke-pepsi-antics-cindy-sheehan-on-us-presidential-primaries/
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[Marxism] Fwd: I'm from Palmyra, and I can tell you after what I've seen that the Assad regime is no better than Isis | Voices | The Independent

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/im-from-palmyra-and-i-can-tell-you-after-what-ive-seen-that-the-assad-regime-is-no-better-than-isis-a6961681.html
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Re: [Marxism] Excellent Cindy Sheehan article on Trump, Sanders, primaries

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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>
> For sure, Donald Trump has said some horrific things out on the campaign
> trail especially about immigration.


They are only just "horrific" if you're white.


> Democrat partisans have hypocritically gone to stop Trump rallies never
> mentioning that Obama has deported more immigrant workers than any
> president before him; breaking up families and holding young people in
> detention centers.


And those who oppose Trump are all hypocrites, even if they are black.

That sound's basically pro-Trump to me.


Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
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(310) 581-1536

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On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
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Re: [Marxism] Excellent Cindy Sheehan article on Trump, Sanders, primaries

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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I love Pepsi,  drink maybe a liter a day. I can't stand Coke.

Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 


On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Opposing the twin parties of US imperialism is actually the principled
> position.
>
> The 'liberal nonsense' is falling into the trap of supporting this
> capitalist politician against that capitalist politician.
>
> And heaven forbid that anyone should take anti-capitalist politics
> seriously enough to take the long view and not expect instant
> gratification.
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 1:50 PM,  wrote:
>
> > This is nonsense.  It only appeals to those who are willing to stay in
> the
> > game for a long time.  What arrogant liberal nonsense.
> >
> >
> >  Philip Ferguson via Marxism  wrote:
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> > >
> >
> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/coke-pepsi-antics-cindy-sheehan-on-us-presidential-primaries/
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[Marxism] Adventures in the Trump Twittersphere

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(The author was one of the moderators of the Marxism list that preceded 
Marxmail.)



NY Times Op-Ed, Mar. 31 2016
Adventures in the Trump Twittersphere
by Zeynep Tufekci

EVERY morning since August, I have steeled myself to enter an alternate 
universe. I scroll through social media feeds where people are convinced 
that Congress funds the Islamic State, that our president hates this 
country and wants it to fail and that Donald J. Trump is the only 
glimmer of hope in this bleak landscape.


It’s my look at a list of Twitter users whom I’ve identified as Trump 
supporters. Some accounts have only a few followers while some have tens 
of thousands. (No one comes close to Mr. Trump himself, at more than 
seven million.) They include people of many professions and backgrounds. 
I found them by reading at responses to news media or political 
accounts, and then went on to seek out other accounts they followed. 
It’s a large, sprawling network.


As an academic, I study social media and social movements, from the 
uprising in Egypt to Black Lives Matter. As I watched this election 
season unfold, I wanted to gain a better understanding of the power of 
the Trump social media echo chamber. What I’ve been reading has 
surprised even my jaded eyes. It’s a world of wild falsehoods and some 
truth that you see only rarely in mainstream news outlets, or hear 
spoken among party elites.


It’s popular to argue today that Mr. Trump’s success is, in part, a 
creation of the traditional news media — cable networks that couldn’t 
get enough of his celebrity and the ratings it brought, and newspapers 
that didn’t scrutinize him with enough care. There is some truth in 
that, but the contention misses a larger reality.


Mr. Trump’s rise is actually a symptom of the mass media’s growing 
weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable 
to say.


For decades, journalists at major media organizations acted as 
gatekeepers who passed judgment on what ideas could be publicly 
discussed, and what was considered too radical. This is sometimes called 
the “Overton window,” after Joseph P. Overton of the conservative 
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who discussed the relatively narrow 
range of policies that are viewed as politically acceptable. What such 
gatekeepers thought was acceptable often overlapped with what those in 
power believed, too. Conversations outside the frame of this window were 
not tolerated.


For worse, and sometimes for better, the Overton window is broken. We 
are in an era of rapidly weakening gatekeepers.


When I first came to this country from Turkey as a graduate student in 
the late 1990s, I was something of an anomaly: an adult foreigner with 
white skin who was fluent in English but not a native. Though I was a 
newcomer culturally, many people in my new home, Austin, Tex., assumed I 
was born and raised here. I have a bit of an accent, but my appearance 
seemed to overwhelm their ear.


Curious about my new country, I soaked up conversations. Sometimes, they 
went very, very wrong in ways I couldn’t understand.


It would go something like this: I would be chatting with a seemingly 
nice person who would complain that a brother-in-law had lost a job. As 
I sympathetically listened, there would be a brief, unrelated mention of 
a black man who was hired for some other job. Just as I was squinting to 
try to comprehend the point, a vile and thunderous racist rant would be 
unleashed.


I ran back to my classmates who were born in this country, in horror, 
wondering what had happened.


“Oh, you don’t know the code,” they told me with a laugh.

“The code” was their shorthand for how racists sent out feelers to find 
kindred spirits. Since many people of all races opposed racism, racial 
identity itself was no guarantee of agreement. I didn’t know the markers 
of this “code,” so I sometimes failed to recognize them, or responded 
inadequately to them.


Today, this feeling-out process happens online and is much quicker, 
resulting in cascading self-affirmation. People naturally thrive by 
finding like-minded others, and I watch as Trump supporters affirm one 
another in their belief that white America is being sold out by secretly 
Muslim lawmakers, and that every unpleasant claim about Donald Trump is 
a fabrication by a cabal that includes the Republican leadership and the 
mass media. I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one 
another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.


After many months of observing Mr. Trump’s supporters online, I wanted 
to see this phenomenon in person, so this month I attended a Trump rally 
in 

[Marxism] Fwd: NOVA - Official Website | The Great Math Mystery

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Saw this last night. Really fascinating. Full show available from link 
below.)


Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of 
math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's 
signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, 
and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to 
everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction 
and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on 
Mars. Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast 
of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers, follow math from 
Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond. It all leads to the ultimate riddle: 
Is math a human invention or the discovery of the language of the universe?


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/great-math-mystery.html
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[Marxism] Job Growth in Last Decade Was in Temp and Contract

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Mar. 31 2016
Job Growth in Last Decade Was in Temp and Contract
by Neil Irwin

If you believe the Silicon Valley sloganeers, we are in a “gig economy,” 
where work consists of a series of short-term jobs coordinated through a 
mobile app. That, anyway, is both the prediction of tech executives and 
futurists and the great fear of labor activists.


But anyone who cares about the future of work in the United States 
shouldn’t focus too narrowly on the novelty of people making extra money 
using their mobile phones. There’s a bigger shift underway. That’s a key 
implication of new research that indicates the proportion of American 
workers who don’t have traditional jobs — who instead work as 
independent contractors, through temporary services or on-call — has 
soared in the last decade. They account for vastly more American workers 
than the likes of Uber alone.


Most remarkably, the number of Americans using these alternate work 
arrangements rose 9.4 million from 2005 to 2015. That was greater than 
the rise in overall employment, meaning there was a small net decline in 
the number of workers with conventional jobs.


That, in turn, raises still bigger questions about how employers have 
succeeded at shifting much the burden of providing social insurance onto 
workers, and what technological and economic forces are driving the shift.


The labor economists Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of 
Princeton found that the percentage of workers in “alternative work 
arrangements” — including working for temporary help agencies, as 
independent contractors, for contract firms or on-call — was 15.8 
percent in the fall of 2015, up from 10.1 percent a decade earlier. 
(Only 0.5 percent of all workers did so through “online intermediaries,” 
and most of those appear to have been Uber drivers.)


And the shift away from conventional jobs and into these more distant 
employer-employee relationships accelerated in the last decade. By 
contrast, from 1995 to 2005, the proportion had edged up only slightly, 
to 10.1 percent from 9.3 percent. (The data are based on a person’s main 
job, so someone with a full-time position who does freelance work on the 
side would count as a conventional employee.)


This change in behavior has profound implications on social insurance. 
More so than in many advanced countries, employers in the United States 
carry a lot of the burden of protecting their workers from the things 
that can go wrong in life. They frequently provide health insurance, and 
paid medical leave for employees who become ill.


They pay for workers’ compensation insurance for people who are injured 
on the job, and unemployment insurance benefits for those who are laid 
off. They help fund their workers’ existence after retirement, at one 
time through pensions, now more commonly through 401(k) plans.


Perhaps most significant of all, the implicit contract between an 
employer and an employee is that there is a relatively high bar for 
firing the employee if business slumps. If the economy turns down or 
business slows, a contract worker is, as a rule, far more likely to be 
out of a job than a conventional employee.


It’s true that the Affordable Care Act has made health insurance more 
easily within reach for independent contractors, for example, and 
temporary services firms can offer retirement benefits and workers’ 
comp. But over all, there’s little doubt that workers in these 
nonconventional work arrangements carry some of the burden of protecting 
themselves from misfortune that employers traditionally have carried.


That makes the question of why the shift has happened particularly 
important.


You could imagine a world in which more workers become independent 
contractors voluntarily, trading the social insurance functions of 
traditional employers for higher pay and greater flexibility. If the 
period from 2005 to 2015 had been one when workers had a lot of power in 
the job market, that might even be plausible.


It wasn’t. The unemployment rate was above 7 percent for nearly half of 
the period, from the end of 2008 to late 2013. Employers had the upper 
hand. That suggests it’s more likely that employers were driving the 
shift to these alternate arrangements.


But Mr. Katz and Mr. Krueger raise the possibility that something has 
changed beyond the weak job market of the last several years. And that’s 
technology.


When people working as a team need extensive experience working 
together, it can be tricky to contract out the work. But when there are 
clear, simple measurements of how successful each person is, and a 
company can monitor it, the 

[Marxism] Fwd: Dark Horse; Whale Rider | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A while back I reviewed a film called "Dark Horse" about a Maori 
chessmaster in New Zealand that I considered the best film of 2015. It 
opens tomorrow at the Angelika in NYC and strongly encourage you to 
check it out.


https://louisproyect.org/2015/10/07/dark-horse-whale-rider/
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[Marxism] Fwd: ‘The power to create a new world is… in our hands’ | Frontline

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Vijay Prashad interviews Jill Stein

http://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/the-power-to-create-a-new-world-is-in-our-hands/article8399212.ece?homepage=true
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Re: [Marxism] Suggestions: books on history of Ireland/Dublin

[Doug via Marxism]

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On Ireland: the latest* London Review of Books* (31 March 2016) has an
interesting article by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín on the Easter Rising.
If you can't get a copy I can perhaps send it to you.

Douglas Hainline

On 31 March 2016 at 12:30, Shalva Eliava via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Hi comrades,
>
> Looking for some suggestions on good books on the history of Ireland
> (and/or Dublin). Preferably nothing too tome-ish in size - a leftish
> orientation is welcome but not essential. Thanks in advance.
>
> Best,
> Shalva
>
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