[Marxism] South Korean socialist and peace activist: US-North Korea summit ‘a first step to ending final Cold War conflict’

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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 The summit essentially reaffirmed the spirit of transitioning to peaceful
coexistence contained in the Panmunjom Declaration signed at the
North-South Korean summit in April.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/south-north-korea-united-states-summit-trump-kim-jong-un

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[Marxism] Left in a Corner

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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What to do about the Russian presidential election is just one of many 
questions that have plagued Russia’s small and fractured left. In a 
country where Lenin’s body still lies mummified on Red Square, Communist 
iconography adorns the facades of many buildings, and polls suggest that 
a majority of the Russian population would welcome a return to 
socialism, the Russian left’s battle for political relevance 
nevertheless looks Sisyphean.


https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/russian-left-communist-party-navalny-udaltsov
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[Marxism] ‘Empire of Guns’ Challenges the Role of War in Industrialization

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Another element undermining the Brenner thesis.)

NY Times, April 9, 2018
Review: ‘Empire of Guns’ Challenges the Role of War in Industrialization
By Jonathan A. Knee

Adam Smith, in his classic “The Wealth of Nations,” was an early 
proponent of the now mainstream view that wars are unfortunate accidents 
that have “crowded out” more productive investments.


In “Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution,” 
the Stanford history professor Priya Satia aims to overturn this 
conventional wisdom about the role of guns specifically, and war and 
conquest more generally, in the world’s economic development.


Given that “Britain was involved in major military operations” for most 
of the years leading up to and during the Industrial Revolution, 
Professor Satia argues that imagining an alternative universe in which 
peace prevailed is a fool’s errand. (“It is impossible to factor the 
violence out.”) She contends, rather than crowding out infrastructure 
development, perpetual war actually “produced the financial structures 
that could fund it.”


Professor Satia’s detailed retelling of the Industrial Revolution and 
Britain’s relentless empire expansion notably contradicts simple free 
market narratives. She demonstrates that the deep partnership between 
the public and private sectors underpinned economic growth. Professor 
Satia argues convincingly that the expansion of the armaments industry 
and the government’s role in it is inseparable from the rise of 
innumerable associated industries from finance to mining.


Government planning played a central role even in the new technologies 
that are “arguably the most iconic developments of the industrial 
revolution,” like the steam engine and interchangeable parts 
manufacturing. Government investment “in manufacturing and technological 
progress” was viewed as “a national obligation in a time of political 
vulnerability.” Just as the United States government’s establishment of 
Arpanet, the precursor to today’s internet, laid the foundation of the 
current digital revolution, the British government’s financing of a wide 
range of technological and organizational innovations — many directly or 
indirectly associated with small arms manufacture — spawned the original 
Industrial Revolution.


On the subject of guns, “Empire of Guns” seeks to elucidate not only 
their industrial history but also their social and moral history. To 
tell these parts of the story, Professor Satia uses the Quaker church’s 
decision in 1796 to disown the prominent British gun maker, Samuel 
Galton Jr.


On its face, the decision by the Society of Friends to censure a 
flagrant arms merchant in its ranks may not seem surprising. Pacifist 
principles were central to Quaker ideology, as was opposition to 
slavery. Guns fueled not just war but the slave trade. Yet Mr. Galton’s 
father, and his father before him — and indeed many other Quakers who 
long dominated Birmingham’s arms industry — had been unapologetic 
gunmakers for 70 years without attracting rebuke. What had changed in 
the interim, in ways that are deeply interrelated, were society and the 
guns themselves.


Guns, for long after their introduction, were rather clumsy instruments 
of death. The unpredictability of guns had previously made them more 
suitable to terrorize than inflict harm. Despite their availability, 
guns were rarely fired in homicides, in robberies, in riots or even on 
the battlefield throughout most of the 18th century. But the British 
government, through enforced standardization and sponsored 
experimentation, drove “countless small innovations” that improved gun 
performance significantly by the end of the century.


Enhancements in gun technology increased both their ubiquity and their 
use in violent human interaction by the end of the 18th century. This, 
in turn, corresponds with the shifting social and moral meaning of these 
inanimate objects, which remain so profoundly associated with the 
“impersonal, casual violence they enable.”


Professor Satia examines these changes not only across time but across 
cultures. Although much of this exploration is fascinating, the detail 
can be numbing. Tracking the exhaustive catalog of Quaker family 
intermarriages and gun part transactions that characterized the 
18th-century armaments trade, for instance, is quite a slog.


The biggest disappointment of “Empire of Guns,” however, is how little 
detail there is on the history of gun culture in the United States and 
its deep hostility to government regulation. The contrast with Britain — 
and, indeed, all other developed nations — is so striking that it begs 
for 

[Marxism] A Community Cracked Open by Fracking

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, June 14, 2018
A Community Cracked Open by Fracking
By Jennifer Szalai

Amity and Prosperity:
One Family and the Fracturing of America
By Eliza Griswold
318 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.


Any ideology operating under the seismic pressures of the actual world 
will reveal a seam of inconsistency, a line of vulnerability running 
through it like a stress fracture. Free-market conservatives, for 
instance, have tried to square their support for big business with their 
professed fondness for little communities, sometimes by suggesting that 
the interests of both are one and the same.


Eliza Griswold will tell you what happens when they’re not. Scratch 
that: Eliza Griswold will show you what happens when they’re not. Her 
sensitive and judicious new book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and 
the Fracturing of America,” is neither an outraged sermon delivered from 
a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold, a 
journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in 
southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its 
confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process 
that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake 
loose deposits of natural gas.


Considering the animus and hardship described in this book, the title 
sounds almost cruelly ironic, but it comes from the land itself. Amity 
and Prosperity are the names of two towns in Pennsylvania’s Washington 
County, where “the history of energy extraction is etched into 
Appalachian hollows.” The people there are no strangers to industry, 
including its boons and disasters. Coal, steel and now natural gas: To 
suggest that the county’s residents have just been bamboozled by greedy 
industry sounds to them like the bleating of condescending elites and, 
for a number of locals, simply untrue. Some families have suffered while 
others have thrived. What Griswold depicts is a community, like the 
earth, cracked open.


Griswold arrived on the scene in 2011, a little more than halfway 
through the decade of the gas rush, when technological advances made 
fracking cheaper — economically speaking, that is. The ecological costs 
have proved to be quite dear.


ADVERTISEMENT

Natural gas may burn more cleanly than oil or coal, but flushing it out 
requires forcing enormous amounts of water and chemicals into the earth 
with pressure approaching a shotgun blast. (Oklahoma and Pennsylvania 
have had fracking-related earthquakes as a result.) Then there’s the 
grim matter of the waste left over, what one candid extraction employee 
calls “demon water.” Griswold describes sludge in a waste pond going 
septic, releasing an unbearable stench “like an infected wound.”


“It was the kind of fugitive scent that made Stacey feel paranoid and 
alone,” Griswold writes of Stacey Haney, a nurse who leased her mineral 
rights to Range Resources in 2008. Haney thought the money would help 
her and her two children, whom she was raising on her own after a 
divorce. Stacey tries to counter the odor with spritzings of Febreze and 
a steady supply of potpourri. Parts of “Amity and Prosperity” read as 
intimately as a novel, though its insidious, slow-motion ordeal is all 
too real.


Image
Eliza Griswold
CreditKathy Ryan
Griswold follows the Haneys over the years as their hope turns to worry 
and grinding disillusionment. Stacey’s problems begin with her old 
farmhouse, which acquires a blanket of dust and a cracked foundation 
after Range’s trucks start barreling up the dirt road nearby. Then the 
health problems kick in. Watery eyes and runny noses eventually give way 
to headaches and mouth ulcers. Stacey, in a loving relationship but 
anxious about cancer risks and fetal deformities, gets her tubes tied. 
“After the gas wells,” Stacey says, “we just don’t heal right.”


Most debilitated is her teenage son, Harley, who suffers from stomach 
ailments so overwhelming that he becomes a “listless stick figure” and 
can no longer attend his regular school. A urine test reveals arsenic 
poisoning. Stacey’s hydrologist says her well water is contaminated, 
while Range’s experts say otherwise. The company tells Harley his wood 
shop class — which he barely attended — might be to blame.


EDITORS’ PICKS

When Anti-Trump Evangelicals Confront Their Brethren

Russian Oligarch’s Yacht Is Part of Costly British Divorce

The Evangelical Fight to Win Back California
ADVERTISEMENT


Griswold chronicles all of this with care, as the Haneys and their 
neighbors, the Voyles family, endure mysterious ailments as well as the 
brutal demise of their farm animals to sudden 

Re: [Marxism] Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism: Rohini Hensman: 9781608469116: Amazon.com: Books

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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IMO comrades should order the book and review it wherever possible. We have
- depending on the format (Kindle, hard copy) -- a few weeks or more until
it's released.
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[Marxism] Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism: Rohini Hensman: 9781608469116: Amazon.com: Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.amazon.com/Indefensible-Democracy-Counter-Revolution-Rhetoric-Anti-Imperialism/dp/1608469115
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[Marxism] book sale at MR Press

[Michael Yates via Marxism]

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We're have a big book sale at Monthly Review Press. Here is the link.


https://monthlyreview.org/press/warehouse-clearance-sale/?utm_source=MR+Email+List_campaign=73421c8886-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_14_09_32_medium=email_term=0_4f879628ac-73421c8886-241884553_cid=73421c8886_eid=7c9269ff30

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[Marxism] Commentary on Max Ajl’s “Notes on Libya” | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2018/06/14/commentary-on-max-ajls-notes-on-libya/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Fake Left at the Left Forum: The Attack against Ajamu Baraka

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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I used to have a lot of respect for the Black Agenda Report in general, and
for Glen Ford in particular. That has changed.


The vitriolic and demagogic attack by Haiphong is only the tip of the
iceberg. That attack, by the way, reminds me of some of the attacks of the
Stalinists of the 1930s and ‘40s against “Trotskyists”, attacks that
preceded physical assaults. It would not surprise me at all if the present
vitriol opens the way to similar assaults. On the purely political level,
the fact that BAR would publish an article that is little but name calling
and “imperialist” baiting, an article that contains no actual facts, says a
lot about BAR.


I was one of those who distributed the leaflet that Haiphong attacked, as
well as the author of the DSA article (
https://www.dsausa.org/the_us_turn_to_assad) he mentioned but completely
glossed over. Our leaflet was attacked for, among other things, claiming
that Baraka supports Trump. That is not what we wrote. What we did write
was that both Baraka and Stein had pictured Trump as the lesser evil during
the election campaign - a subtle but critical difference.


This lesser evilsm stems from seeing the neo liberals as THE enemy, the one
and only enemy. A recent article by Glen Ford shows this same tendency:


 Ford writes about the meeting of Trump and Kim
https://www.blackagendareport.com/chaos-imperial-big-house. He seems to be
caught between wanting to call Trump the lesser evil and the overt racism
and jingoism of Trump. So he vacillates back and forth. On the one hand, he
pays tribute to the obligatory denunciations of Trump, calling him “the
arch racist and usurper of the Republican Party” and “an intellectually and
emotionally retarded spawn of super-privilege”.


But then he goes on to attack the Democrats. As one who has not supported
any Democratic candidate for office since I was young and uneducated (back
in the 1970s), I have no problem with attacking the Democrats. In fact,
I’ve done it time and again on my blog, including attacking the “left” wing
of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders included. But consider what Ford says:

   - He says the Democrats “have become overt partisans of the War Party”,
   as if the Republicans are any better.
   - He in effect denies the link between Trump and the Russian oligarchs,
   and praises Trump for his close ties with Putin, praising Trump for his
   “wholly unexpected appeal for peaceful relations with Russia.” He
   continues, “If white Republicans were not wedded to the permanent war
   agenda… then where was the mass constituency for the bipartisan War Party?”
   The only possible interpretation of this is that the connection between
   Trump and the totally reactionary Putin regime, an imperialist regime based
   on chauvinism and reaction, is a positive thing. This does not mean that
   socialists should support US imperialism in its rivalry with Russian
   imperialism, but neither should we support collaboration between these two
   reactionary imperialist powers.
   - Ford seems to be supporting Trump’s ‘vacillat(ion) on “free trade”.
   This can only mean supporting Trump’s imposition of tariffs. This is a
   reversal of everything that socialists have stood for regarding tariffs,
   and there is a good reason to oppose them. Tariffs are a first step towards
   outright trade wars, which are a step towards military wars. Instead,
   socialists should be explaining that neither “free trade” nor tariffs will
   serve the working class; that the issue of international trade of goods and
   services cannot be resolved in the interests of workers within the
   capitalist system; that the problem is the crisis of the very existence of
   the nation states in the era of global capitalism.

It may seem very radical to picture neoliberals and the Democrats as THE
enemy, but in fact it is the opposite. Its basis is the idea that
neoliberalism is the chosen policy of a wing of the capitalist class. In
other words, they have an option. On the contrary, neoliberalism simply is
the necessary direction of capitalism at this stage of development. The
former position opens up the left to collaboration with the far right; the
latter means opposition to ALL capitalist representatives, including Ron
Paul.


We can see that most clearly in the case of Haiphong, himself: This Assad
supporter is most definitely part of the red brown alliance, whose
existence he (naturally) denies. The most clear example is his association
with the Ronpaulinsitute. (See for example:
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/april/26/cruise-missile-left-complicit-in-american-escalation-toward-world-war-iii/
)

[Marxism] sex slaves in the American West

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://delanceyplace.com/delanceyplace-archives.php
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[Marxism] Lenin in Vietnamese

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Just announced at MIA's "What's New" page:
https://www.marxists.org/admin/new/index.htm

Lenin's Collected Works in Vietnamese:
https://www.marxists.org/vietnamese/lenin/toan_tap/index.htm
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[Marxism] Trump, Korea and Trade

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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IMHO D. Trump does not really give a rat's ass about No. Korea one way or
the other, except that his current road show is a lever to help the
Republican Party maintain its majorities in the House and Senate in the
upcoming November elections. Sure, he would like to get a Nobel Peace Prize
for "ending the Korean War", and sure, there are opportunities for making
quick bucks in side deals by his daughter or some other member of his
coterie, but the big prize is Congress. Trump is all about getting power
and glory to make money, and making money to get power and glory.

Behind this man stands a sector of the ruling class who want to enrich
themselves at the expense of not only the working class and petty
bourgeoisie, but also of other members of their own class.

Trump's trade war is not about making the pie get bigger so that everyone
can have a nice slice, it is about reslicing a smaller pie so that those
favored by Trump can have a bigger piece. This is the operating principle
behind Trump's "policy". This, and survival, dictate Trump's actions.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Top 8 Ways Iran Deal was Way Better than Trumps North Korea Commitment

[mkaradjis via Marxism]

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Of course, Cole is writing about how the Iran deal was a better deal
from the point of view of US imperialism than Trump's NK deal, not our
focus; but it is interesting to compare from the point of view of just
how much this one is theatre:

Top 8 Ways Iran Deal was Way Better than Trumps North Korea Commitment
Juan Cole 06/13/2018
https://www.juancole.com/2018/06/better-trumps-commitment.html
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[Marxism] A Terrible Country

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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From a review of Keith Gessen's (Masha's brother) new novel "A Terrible 
Country":


The novel’s title—taken from Andrei’s grandmother’s refrain that “this 
is a terrible country” and one should leave—isn’t entirely ironic. 
There’s poverty and sky-high prices and blackmail and endemic 
corruption, homophobia and anti-Semitism, political oppression, random 
beatings. Yet Andrei notices early on that Russia “sucked in a 
completely different way from the one I’d been led to expect. . . . I 
had thought I was going to be arrested, but no one was going to arrest 
me. No one gave a shit about me. I was too poor for that.” His rather 
inchoate understanding of this begins to coalesce into a real analysis 
only after he falls in with a group of socialists that includes Sergei, 
the hockey goalie, whose views seem borrowed from the real-life poet 
Kirill Medvedev, whom Gessen has translated into English and done much 
to promote.


Their take on the Putin regime and on Russia is very different from the 
standard liberal centrist line peddled in the Western press. From Sergei 
and friends, Andrei picks up the idea that there’s no necessary link 
between capitalism and democratic freedoms, and nothing inherently 
Soviet about authoritarianism. The cartoonish image of Putin as a former 
KGB goon who came along just when things were heading in the right 
direction under Yeltsin and swept the country back into a totalitarian 
nightmare is misleading, they argue—Putin pushed Yeltsin’s economic 
reforms still further, and his suppression of dissent on the streets and 
in the press has often been in the service of corporate wealth 
accumulation. The FSB (successor to the KGB) seems to work just as much 
for private oil interests as for the state. “This is what capitalism 
looks like on the margins of the world system,” Sergei says, echoing 
Medvedev. While local liberal protesters call for free speech and fair 
elections, they ignore labor unrest among those who, as Sergei puts it, 
“don’t use iPhones.” The group he joins has, Andrei realizes, become 
socialist not in spite of the post-Soviet transition to capitalism, but 
in direct response to it.

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Re: [Marxism] Has the Trump-Kim Summit Opened the Road to Peace in East Asia?

[mkaradjis via Marxism]

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"Another factor shaping Washington’s foreign policy towards Pyongyang
is the acceleration of the US warmongering against Iran. The threat of
another big war in the Middle East limits Washington’s desire to risk
simultaneously a second war in East Asia."

I'll go out on a limb here and say the alleged "US war on Iran" or
"Israel-Iran war" are fake news. Sure, I'll have egg on my face if it
happens, but I don't mind, since political prediction is not the same
as clairvoyance; obviously a thousand factors can come into play in
between. But I'm just talking about interests. Does US imperialism
want a war with North Korea or with Iran? In my opinion, no. But
war-like rhetoric, leading to a "deal" (like this sham, which isn't
even that), is good credibility-boosting theatre. "See, we forced
Kim's hands by not being wimps." Of course, it may not wash in this
case because it is Trump, and this theatre is just too, well,
theatrical, but that's what it is about. Bolton is there as scarecrow,
not someone to make a new war.

So I wasn't all that surprised when I read what Trump now says about
Iran, after having acted tough and all that a month or so ago:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-abe-japan-joint-press-conference-2/

“And if you look at what’s happened since I signed that deal [I assume
he means broke that deal – MK], Iran — and in all fairness, I say it
with great respect for the people of Iran — but Iran is acting a lot
differently. They’re no longer looking so much to the Mediterranean.
They’re no longer looking so much to what’s going on in Syria, what’s
going on in Yemen and lots of other places. They’re a much different
country over the last three months.

“Iran is not the same country that it was a few months ago. They’re a
much, much different group of leaders. And I hope at some point
they’ll come to us and we’ll sit down, and we’ll make a deal that’s
good for them, and good for us, and good for everybody. And it will be
great for Iran. I expect it to be — I want it to be great for Iran.”

One might say, hang on, are you saying US imperialism isn't into
waging wars?" Oh, Obama and Trump have been waging a war in Iraq and
Syria for 4 years, two cities have been completely flattened,
thousands of civilians have been killed, "regime change" has been
carried out in Raqqa and Mosul, just that the actual war does not
generate any interest, because it is not against who it is supposed to
be against. And that war is a massive expansion of the decade-long
drone war against "al-Qaida" launched by Obama throughout the region.

But a new Iraq-style war? Really, what's in it for US imperialism,
given the cost it would entail?


On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 2:53 PM, RKOB via Marxism
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> https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/has-the-trump-kim-summit-opened-the-road-to-peace-in-east-asia/
>
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[Marxism] The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left - The Philosophical Salon

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/
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[Marxism] bellingcat - The Chemical Munitions Used By the Syrian Government 2012-2018 - bellingcat

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/06/14/chemical-munitions-used-syrian-government-2012-2018/
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Terry Eagleton on George Bernard Shaw

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LRB, Vol. 40 No. 12 · 21 June 2018
A Row of Shaws
by Terry Eagleton

Judging Shaw by Fintan O’Toole
Royal Irish Academy, 381 pp, £28.00, October 2017, ISBN 978 1 908997 15 9

It is no surprise that Irish studies has become something of a heavy 
industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of 
Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the 
moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of 
it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, 
and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá. Being colonised by the 
British has its advantages. Postcolonialism is also much in fashion in 
universities, and most of Ireland ticks that box too. The war which 
recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick 
counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention 
to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a 
famine in which British bungling and indifference played a considerable 
part, a sizeable segment of the Irish population was scattered to the 
four corners of the earth, another reason Irishness is an international 
phenomenon. There is also the fact that the Irish were put on earth for 
other people to feel romantic about. We are all Irish in the eyes of God.


Nowhere is this shift from margin to centre more striking than in the 
career of George Bernard Shaw. Born in Dublin in 1856 into a decayed 
branch of the Protestant Ascendancy, the son of a drunken petty official 
and a mother from the minor gentry, Shaw was in his own word a 
‘downstart’. In this superbly perceptive study, Fintan O’Toole sees his 
teetotalism as a reaction to his father’s drinking, just as his manic 
work rate may have been a riposte to his father’s fecklessness. On one 
estimate he wrote at least a quarter of a million letters and postcards. 
Joyce, also the child of a bibulous father, was something of a downstart 
too; but at least he belonged to the majority Catholic population, 
whereas Shaw was an internal exile from the outset. In fact he was an 
insider/outsider twice over, a peripheral Protestant at home washed up 
in alien London with only his wits and verbal dexterity to hawk. As 
such, he joined an honourable lineage of Irish licensed jesters from 
Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan (Terry Wogan and Graham Norton are 
minor offshoots), men who punctured English pomposity and found moral 
earnestness irresistibly comic, yet whose capacity to amuse rendered 
them more or less acceptable.


It was a perilous role to play, as Shaw’s friend and admirer Oscar Wilde 
was to discover. Both Irishmen used wit and epigram to capture the 
contradictions of the English establishment in an endless flow of 
paradox which entertained as well as unsettled. With characteristic 
impudence, Shaw praised Jack the Ripper for calling attention to the 
dire social conditions of the East End. He and Wilde displayed the 
ingrained perversity of the colonial subject, the urge to be both a 
contrarian and an agreeably exotic house guest of the metropolitan 
nation. The Irish émigré is sufficiently au fait with English 
conventions to manipulate them even more deftly than the natives 
themselves, yet sufficiently estranged from them to be aware of their 
arbitrariness and occasional obtuseness. It is from this tension that so 
much British stage comedy by Irish writers has arisen. If Shaw scoffed 
at Oirishness and the Celtic Twilight, he was also intensely aware of 
his foreignness in the English capital. Even so, he neither suppressed 
his Irish origin like Wilde nor played it up like Brendan Behan, who 
once declared that he was a drinker with a writing problem.


A man who could whistle a number of works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart and 
Beethoven from end to end, Shaw started out in London as a music critic. 
He was already engaged in the project of turning the obscure Bernard 
Shaw into the legendary GBS, a coinage of his own. The epithet ‘Shavian’ 
was another of his inventions. O’Toole sees him as one of the first 
people on the planet to understand how to transform himself into a 
global brand. The tall, gaunt, puckish, red-bearded figure in a Jaeger 
woollen suit and knickerbockers was to become as much of a global icon 
as Mickey Mouse. He was the image of an Edwardian loony lefty. 
Vegetarianism was part of the package: ‘A mind the calibre of mine,’ he 
remarked, ‘cannot derive its nutriment from cows.’ Like today’s 
superstars, Shaw understood that life was every bit as much a 
performance as art, and as a man who called himself both a charlatan and 
a humbug he was never 

[Marxism] Anthropocene Marxism : Mediations : Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/Anthropocene-Marxism
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[Marxism] Nicaragua protest leaders call 24-hour strike to oust Daniel Ortega | World news | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I wonder how many leftists in their 20s and 30s are getting their news 
on Nicaragua from the Guardian. This article 
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/nicaragua-strike-protest-ortega-latest) 
cites Enrique Bolanos who says, "So he must be like Ceaușescu in Romania 
or like Maduro in Venezuela and do everything to stay in power because 
the worst thing [he] can do is quit.”


I have a different memory of Bolanos. He was the head of COSEP that 
along with La Prensa constituted the internal counter-revolution that 
shared Reagan's military goal of getting the people to "cry uncle".


Bolanos was president of Nicaragua from 2002-2007 and then succeeded by 
Daniel Ortega. This "Ceausescu" was elected because the people got tired 
of being hungry apparently.


Here's an article from the 2001 Nation Magazine 
(https://www.thenation.com/article/letter-nicaragua/) describing the 
state of the rural poor in the last year of Aleman's presidency. Bolanos 
was Aleman's vice-president and would succeed him from 2002-2007:


Meanwhile, the situation for some Nicaraguans is desperate. On a trip to 
the city of Matagalpa, I visited a barrio where coffee workers have 
taken refuge after being dismissed by plantation owners in the northern 
mountains. The price that can be had for a 100-kilo sack of coffee has 
dropped from $120 to $50 in the past two years, and drought has also hit 
the area. According to local officials, at least 1,800 families have 
come out of the mountains begging for food. Doribel Blandon, 30, said 
she was born on a plantation and had worked her whole life there until 
recently. “They threw us out three weeks ago,” she said. “The government 
hasn’t given us any idea what we might do. In fact, they haven’t come to 
speak to us.”


She and other internal refugees led me to a house where a local family 
had given shelter to a young woman from a coffee-picking family who had 
given birth two days before. Miglia Zamora, 20, lay in a dark room, only 
a blanket between her and the concrete floor, her infant daughter lying 
next to her. “I don’t know what will happen,” she said. “We don’t know 
where food or clothing will come from.”


One local pro-Bolaños voter, Carolina Escorcia, 20, tells me she has 
been advised by her party that the above scenes are staged by the 
Sandinistas to make the government look bad. But as I’m speaking to the 
former coffee workers, word arrives that food is being distributed 
nearby. With plastic plates in hand, many of the people bolt and go 
sprinting up the dusty street out of sight. They don’t appear to be 
acting. They’re hungry.



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[Marxism] Oskar Lange on Marx's second phase of communism.

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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Oskar Lange on Marx's second phase of communism. From his On the Economic 
Theory of Socialism.

"The idea of distributing goods and services by free sharing sounds utopian, 
indeed. However, if applied to only a part of commodities free sharing is by no 
means such economic nonsense as might appear at a first glance. The demand for 
many commodities becomes, from a certain point on, quite inelastic. If the 
price of such a commodity is below, and the consumer’s income is above, a 
certain minimum, the commodity is treated by the consumer as if it were a free 
good. The commodity is consumed in such quantity that the want it serves to 
satisfy is perfectly saturated. Take, for instance, salt. Well-to-do people do 
the same with bread or with heating in winter. They do not stop eating bread at 
a point where the marginal utility of a slice is equal to the marginal utility 
of its price, nor do they turn down the heat by virtue of a similar 
consideration. Or would a decline of the price of soap to zero induce them to 
be so much more liberal in its use ? Even if the price were zero, the amount of 
salt, bread, fuel, and soap consumed by well-to-do people would not increase 
noticeably. With such commodities saturation is reached even at a positive 
price. If the price is already so low, and incomes so high, that the quantity 
consumed of those commodities is equal to the saturation amount, free sharing 
can be used as a method of distribution . Certain services are distributed in 
this way already in our present society.

"If a part of the commodities and services is distributed by free sharing, the 
price system needs to be confined only to the rest of them. However, though the 
demand for the commodities distributed by free sharing is, within limits, a 
fixed quantity, a cost has to be accounted for in order to be able to find out 
the best combination of factors and the optimum scale of output in producing 
them. The money income of the consumers must be reduced by an equivalent of the 
cost of production of these commodities. This means simply that free sharing 
provides, so to speak, a “socialized sector” of consumption the cost of which 
is met by taxation (for the reduction of consumers’ money incomes which has 
just been mentioned is exactly the taxation to cover the consumption by free 
sharing). Such a sector exists also in capitalist society, comprising, for 
instance, free education, free medical service by social insurance, public 
parks, and all the collective wants in Cassel’s sense (e.g., street lighting). 
It is quite conceivable that as wealth increases this sector increases, too, 
and an increasing number of commodities are distributed by free sharing until, 
finally, all the prime necessaries of life are provided for in this way, the 
distribution by the price system being confined to better qualities and 
luxuries. Thus Marx’s second phase of communism may be gradually approached."
---

Oskar Lange did not cite Ronald Coase's notion of transaction costs here 
(presumably because Coase was still a nobody within economics at that time). 
But Coase's insight that the resorting to the price system and markets has its 
own costs seems relevant to Lange's argument.

Coase's relevance would be this:

In his 1937 paper, The Nature of the Firm, he pointed out that firms internally 
DO NOT work like markets and he made the argument why that should be rational 
behavior on their part, and more importantly, why firms should exist in the 
first place within a market economy.

When he wrote that, Coase was a socialist (he would later become a 
conservative). He was a close friend of Abba Lerner, and like Lerner, was at 
that time very much interested in the "socialist calculation" debate..

One of Coase's concerns at that time was to show how to reconcile the apparent 
economic success of the Soviet Union with the neoclassical economics that he 
was committed to. His paper, "The Nature of the Firm" sketched out the kind of 
economic reasoning which could reconcile support for socialist economic 
planning with a commitment to neoclassical economic theory. For Coase, the key 
concept here was that of "transaction costs", which denoted the costs incurred 
by relying on the market and price system for organizing economic activity. 
It's precisely because transaction costs are often of significant size that 
people turn away from direct reliance upon the market and price system. Coase 
also used the concept of transaction costs in his famous 1960 paper, "The 
Problem of Social Cost", where he presented what has come to be known as 
"Coase's Theorem."

[Marxism] Rep. Steve King Won't Answer Questions About His Neo-Nazi Retweets | HuffPost

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-king-nazi-tweets_us_5b21c0f0e4b0adfb8270cd9e
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