[Marxism] cartoons and class struggle
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. * In 1941, Disney animators walked off work to demand that the New Deal be brought to the Magic Kingdom. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/disney-animators-strike-union-busting _ 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] The Story of Appalachia, With Plenty of Villains
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. * NY Times, Nov. 21 2017 The Story of Appalachia, With Plenty of Villains By DWIGHT GARNER NOV. 20, 2017 Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia By Steven Stoll Illustrated. 410 pages. Hill and Wang. $30. The novelist John Knowles (1926-2001) attended Phillips Exeter and Yale, and is the author of “A Separate Peace,” the quintessential American prep school novel. But he was born in West Virginia. Sometimes his fiction was set there. In his novel “A Vein of Riches” (1978), Knowles described the wealthy, exploitative, coal mine-owning Catherwood family. Young Lyle Catherwood wanted out because he understood that a “labyrinth of clammy menace underlay every limousine, tea dance and dividend in the world above.” Knowles’s own father was a coal company executive. The novelist may have been describing his own unease and need for escape. Moral qualms of the sort Lyle expressed, about denuding the landscape and impoverishing the people of West Virginia, were rare indeed, if you believe Steven Stoll, the author of “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.” His book is a powerful and outrage-making if somewhat academic analysis of the forces that have made West Virginia one of the sorriest places — statistically, at any rate — to live in America. “Ramp Hollow” is not “Hillbilly Elegy” redux. Stoll, a professor of history at Fordham University, does not relate his own story, and his book is not especially warm to the touch. But as economic history it is gravid and well made. Stoll describes how outsiders did their worst to the agrarian smallholders of Appalachia: taking their land by fiat in the 19th century and later stripping the region’s trees for lumber and violating its landscape in the extrication of coal. Thus dispossessed, these people were at the mercy of mine owners for sustenance, sent daily for pitiful wages into sphincters of the earth. Worse, these smallholders were betrayed by their representatives. About West Virginia, Stoll writes, “Perhaps no political leadership anywhere in the United States or the Atlantic World ever exposed its own people and environment to the same unbridled destruction and abuse.” This is granular history, especially when it comes to dispossession. This book’s primary sentence is probably this one: “I am interested in how people get kicked off land and why we don’t talk about them.” Native Americans and African-Americans are considered at some length in this book, but Stoll’s primary focus is on poor whites. He delivers a painstaking history of how public land became real estate, and how hundreds if not thousands of people were pushed aside by one or two barons. Steal a little and they throw you in jail, as the Bob Dylan lyric has it; steal a lot and they make you king. Stoll lingers on England in the 16th century, when lords for the first time began to turn the countryside into real estate though a process of enclosure, eliminating common land used for hunting and herding and planting. He draws a line between these lords and those who divvied up Appalachia’s land from afar. “Ramp Hollow” suggests a litany of villains. Early ones included Alexander Hamilton, who as secretary of the Treasury tried to tax the many Appalachians who made alcohol, leading to the Whiskey Rebellion. (Stoll renames this the Rye Rebellion, by the way, a decision that will surely lead to some 90-proof think pieces from this country’s drinks pundits.) Hamilton, like many who came after him, wished to modernize Appalachians and drag them by their stringy beards into the circuit of capital. Stoll argues they were mostly better left alone. These people were not poor by their own standards; they simply made do for themselves, and often made do quite well. Stoll takes his time building this story for a reason. “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.” Those that preyed on Appalachians, he writes, turned them into “the horrifying hillbillies that lowlanders had always assumed them to be.” Stoll clings to a different vision of what the United States could be. His book becomes a withering indictment of rapacious capitalism. We behave as if capitalism itself were “nailed to the roof of heaven,” he writes, and few dare to question its assumptions. He is aghast that so many Appalachians vote against their own interests. (West Virginia went heavily for Donald Trump.) He posits that jobs versus health is a false choice. He suggests a way forward that includes reparations, the creation of new kinds of
[Marxism] Colin Kaepernick and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Protest
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. * NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 21 2017 Colin Kaepernick and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Protest By GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE LAST week, the editors of GQ named the quarterback Colin Kaepernick its Citizen of the Year for his work protesting racial injustice. Mr. Kaepernick has been heavily criticized by people like President Trump, who claims that an N.F.L. player who kneels during the playing of the national anthem “disrespects our flag” and should be fired; others argue that he is out of bounds as an activist who mixes sports with politics. The problem is that Mr. Kaepernick’s critics, and most of America, don’t really understand how protests work. Our textbooks and national mythology celebrate moments when single acts of civil disobedience, untainted by political organizations, seemed to change the course of history. But the ideal of the “good” protest — one that materialized from an individual’s epiphany — is a fantasy. More often, effective protest is like Mr. Kaepernick’s: it’s collective and contingent and all about long and difficult struggles. Consider what most Americans would agree were two “good” protests: Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and the student sit-ins at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Parks, the story goes, was exhausted from a day’s work and took a seat in the “whites only” section. To the astonishment of onlookers, she refused to give up her seat when asked. In Greensboro, black college students decided to eat at the local five-and-dime and initiated the first sit-in at a segregated Southern restaurant. They were idealistic and perhaps naïve. These stories follow a set narrative. They are “firsts”: the first time a black woman refused to give up her seat or the first time students staged a sit-in. They seemed to arise spontaneously when someone fed up with unfair treatment couldn’t take it anymore. Good protesters act as individual citizens, untainted by associations with suspect political organizations. The trouble is that these stories are historically inaccurate and obscure just how protest in the 20th century forged a more democratic country. A narrative with greater accuracy would allow us to better evaluate protests against racial discrimination. Earlier protests, similar to the one that Mr. Kaepernick started, sprang from protesters’ associations with activist organizations, were deeply political rather than individual, and played out in unfamiliar venues in new forms. Protests that change history have their own long histories. They are almost never the first of their kind. Successful protesters plan campaigns, rather than respond to oppression in a single, spontaneous act. Protesters often belong to organizations that lend theoretical, moral and logistical support. Protests don’t reveal previously hidden wrongs to an unaware public. Instead, they cast those wrongs in a new light. They fail, time and time again. When they succeed, they win only partial victories. Rosa Parks, for example, was a trained civil rights activist. She built on efforts that started in the 19th century to desegregate transportation and gained speed in the 1930s. In 1940, for example, Pauli Murray, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Petersburg, Va. Though most Americans today look back on the desegregation of public transportation with pride, most white Southerners opposed it vehemently, and many did so violently. During World War II, white passengers and bus drivers beat uniformed black soldiers who tried to integrate buses. A. Philip Randolph knew that the emergency of war meant that these instances of discrimination ran counter to the nation’s interests. Randolph drew on his long experience as a labor leader to found the March on Washington Movement in 1941. The movement threatened to bring millions of African-Americans to Washington to protest; when President Franklin Roosevelt promised reforms, Randolph called off the march. Throughout the war, the movement continued to train people who became civil rights protesters in the 1950s, including Pauli Murray. This pressure influenced the Supreme Court in 1946, which ordered desegregation on interstate buses in Morgan v. Virginia. That case set a precedent that Parks strategically worked to extend to local and state laws in Montgomery. Just as Parks had done, the students sitting-in at the Woolworth counter drew from a long history of struggle. African-Americans had been “stool sitting” since the early 1940s. Howard University students in Washington staged some of the first sit-ins, which involved
Re: [Marxism] DSA member identified in sexual harassment case
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. * When you said DSA in the subject line, I expected someone under 50. :-) John Conyers has probably been the most left wing member of the U.S. Congress for decades. _ 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] Nick Cave blasted for Israel performance
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. * Acclaimed "alternative" songster Nick Cave has shown himself to be an alternative to decency by performing in and speaking in defence of Israel http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/roger-waters-brian-eno-criticize-nick-cave-for-israel-concerts-w512232 _ 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: First trailer for Syrian internet hacker doc 'The Disappeared' (exclusive) | News | Screen
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[Marxism] Fwd: Climate summit’s solution to global warming: More talking « Systemic Disorder
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[Marxism] Fwd: Political Economy of Labour Repression in the United States: An Interview with Andrew Kolin – Radical Notes
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. * https://radicalnotes.org/2017/11/15/political-economy-of-labour-repression-in-the-united-states-an-interview-with-andrew-kolin/ _ 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: Evan Mawarire, the Zimbabwe Pastor Fighting Robert Mugabe | Time
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[Marxism] DSA member identified in sexual harassment case
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. * https://www.buzzfeed.com/paulmcleod/she-complained-that-a-powerful-congressman-harassed-her _ 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
