[Marxism] Struggles New and Old: Yellow Vests, the French Revolution and 21-Century Anti-Capitalism | Keith Mann | Radical Political Economy
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://urpe.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/struggles-new-and-old-yellow-vests-the-french-revolution-and-21-century-anti-capitalism/ Sent from my iPhone _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Anglos, Hispanics and the Formation of America
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 Sunday Book Review, March 10, 2019 Anglos, Hispanics and the Formation of America By Julio Ortega EL NORTE The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America By Carrie Gibson Illustrated. 560 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $30. One hundred years before the arrival of the Pilgrims, Mexicans were already here. (With typical dark humor they used to say that when God ordered Fiat lux!, Hispanics were late with the bill for the electric company.) Carlos Fuentes was 10 years old when his father, a Mexican diplomat in Washington, took him to see a film that included the secession of Texas from Mexico; the boy stood up in the dark and cried, “Viva Mexico!” It was a sense of duty he carried all his life. Gabriel García Márquez journeyed to the South, following in Faulkner’s footsteps. In his own Faulknerian accounts of too many years of solitude he adds that the Americans, with the excuse of eradicating yellow fever, stayed in the Caribbean far too long. Fuentes was once forbidden to disembark from a ship in Puerto Rico, and García Márquez was asked to strip naked at customs. “El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America” is the book that Americans, Anglo and Hispanic, should read as an education on their own American place or role. The author of “Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day,” Carrie Gibson takes on the task of accounting for the relevant and telling cases of our modern process of national formation and regional negotiations. This is a serious book of history but also an engaging project of reading the future in the past. Crossing borders has become a formal rite de passage toward identity, and Latin Americans are experts in dealing with the walls, fences and barriers of misreading — as Mexican, Hispanic-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Caribbean and Latin American, not to mention Latino, mestizo, mulatto, Native and every other wall of misrepresentation. This formidable display of categorization has produced a complex and intricate cultural system of representing ethnic territories, racial mappings and exclusionary perceptions. To split the atom has proved to be easier than to split a prejudice. The civil society reinforced what is not-inclusive: skin color, religion and language. Identity was forged from the color of the others, languages of origin, religions and bone size. Gibson recounts this forgotten epic, but one can also read her story as a reliable travel guide, a long ride along the path of an elusive but powerful history. And even if that history is new to most of us, it is a familiar tale for many nations moving beyond the walls into a territory of common goals. In most of the cities there have been people writing and protesting, forging from modest presses a regional demand for a possible public space, voices of a civilization and of a law against intolerance and violence. They are the forgotten heroes of the press, journalists and chroniclers, travelers and booksellers. Some of the cases in “El Norte” are more tragic than others, like the painful history of Puerto Rico, where the Arawak people, or Tainos, the pacific society that Columbus encountered, had an easy laugh and were as curious as children. We now know, thanks to the Spanish historian Consuelo Varela, that Columbus stopped their baptism as Christians in order to sell them as slaves; he even managed to get a percentage from the first bordello in the Americas. The Tainos, of course, disappeared, but others in the Caribbean did not. They didn’t appreciate Columbus’s gifts of marbles, and they would have returned to Donald Trump the paper towels he threw to the victims of Hurricane Maria. History repeats itself, now as shame. Image What is particularly fascinating about this book is that its encyclopedic project is not a rewriting of history but a recitation of readings. Almost each historical event is retold through memory, recording, evaluation and discussion. This is history as dialogue. It leaves the mourning authority of archives and takes its place as a long conversation, presupposing that truth can be reached through an extended pilgrimage, a journey through violence, discrimination, racism, exploitation and the inferno created by occupation. The narrative becomes not a tribunal but a hospice to language, shelter to the loss of meaning imposed by violence. Mexico lost half its territory and many lives, but the voices of Thoreau and Lincoln are here to sound an alarm and to hope. The model of replacing a tribunal with a conversation is reminiscent of Montaigne: Lacking
[Marxism] Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive
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, March 10, 2019 Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive By Nellie Bowles SAN FRANCISCO — Big wealth doesn’t come in monthly paychecks. It comes when a start-up goes public, transforming hypothetical money into extremely real money. This year — with Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates, Pinterest and Airbnb all hoping to enter the public markets — there’s going to be a lot of it in the Bay Area. Estimates of Uber’s value on the market have been as high as $120 billion. Airbnb was most recently valued at $31 billion, with Lyft and Pinterest around $15 billion and $12 billion. It’s anyone’s guess what prices these companies actually will command once they go public, but even conservative estimates predict hundreds of billions of dollars will flood into town in the next year, creating thousands of new millionaires. It’s hard to imagine more money in San Francisco, but the city’s residents now need to start trying. Welcomed finally into the elite caste who can afford to live comfortably in the Bay Area, the fleet of new millionaires are already itching to claim what has been promised all these years. They want cars. They want to open new restaurants. They want to throw bigger parties. And they want houses. One recent night, in a packed room with a view of the Bay Bridge and an open bar, real estate investors gathered. Standing at the front presenting was Deniz Kahramaner, a real estate agent specializing in data analytics at Compass. “Are we going to see a one-bedroom condo that’s worth less than $1 million in five years?” he asked the crowd. “Are we going to see single family homes selling for one to three million?” No, he said, not anymore. The energy rose as he revealed more data about new millionaires and about just how few new units have been built for them. San Francisco single-family home sale prices could climb to an average of $5 million, he said, to gasps. Each week, you'll get stories about money, power, sex and scrunchies. “All cash. These are all cash buyers,” he said. “It’s just going to be astounding.” Now, seemingly the whole city — and not just the financial planners and the real estate agents and the protesters who block tech buses — is scrambling to prepare. Housing Madness As the idea of the coming I.P.O.-palooza took on currency, sellers started pulling their houses off the market. The broader California housing market has softened, and home sales are down, but here’s one fix for that. “Even if just half the I.P.O.s happen, there’s going to be ten thousand millionaires overnight,” said Herman Chan, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s. “People are like, ‘I’m not going to sell till next year, because there are going to be bajillionaires everywhere left and right.’” One of those is his client Rick Rider, a 61-year-old C.E.O. who decided not to publicly list his Bay Area house until some of the I.P.O.s have happened. “Our particular house is not a family home. It’s a Double Income No Kids sort of home,” Mr. Rider said. “So it would potentially play well for a lot of the people that would be benefiting from the I.P.O.s.” The spending wars will likely stay close to work. “The millennial tech workers are really looking for convenience,” said Christine Kim, the president of Climb Real Estate. “They seem to not want to own cars, and food deliveries are really easy now, and they want to be close to entertainment, so they’ll stay in the city.” When Google in Mountain View and Facebook in Menlo Park went public, their workers were spread across the Bay Area, and so the impact on housing was diffuse. Now, many of the biggest start-ups are based in San Francisco, in part thanks to the city’s tax breaks. Brokers say San Francisco is where the workers want to stay. Allegations In 2018 there were 5,644 properties sold in San Francisco and only 2,208 of those were single family homes. Software employees represent more than 50 percent of those buying, according to Compass. One real estate firm estimates an average one-bedroom in the city now rents for $3,690 per month. (Another firm puts that average at $3,551.) “Now you’ve got all these I.P.O.s at the same time, and we’ll potentially have thousands of young people, all now with money, looking to buy homes,” said Shane Ray, a real estate agent. “You’ll be able to feel it.” Those in the market for a house are trying to buy them fast while the inventory shrinks but before the wave hits. “I had this sense of existential dread that if we didn’t buy before all the I.P.O.s, we would forever be priced out,” said Tom McLeod, the
[Marxism] Revolutionary and political prisoner Kobad Gandy on India's lack of emocracy
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://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/democracy-freedom-and-seventieth-year-of-the-republic/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Top Marx for Pluralism
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. * One immediate puzzle is why capitalists invest in capital when it’s going to reduce their profits. There are two main answers. Firstly, even if the RoP falls total profits can rise. If a firm is investing £100 and making £140, they have a 40% rate of profit. If they then double their investment but only make a 30% rate of profit, they will now make £60 in profit. Total profits rising over time therefore does not (as is often thought) falsify Marx’s theory. Despite this, it is reasonable to suggest capitalists care about the rate of profit too – after all, businesses pursue returns as well as overall profit – so why do they bother with labour-saving technology anyway? http://www.socialisteconomist.com/2019/03/top-marx-for-pluralism.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] facingextinction
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * “The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble.” –William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1 For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky. Now I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a diagnosis of late stage pancreatic cancer. Is it definite that the person is going to die soon? No, not definite. Is it highly probable? Yes, one would be wise to face the likelihood and put one’s affairs in order. First, let’s look at climate data. Over the past decade I have been studying climate chaos by reading scientific papers and listening to climate lectures accessible to a layperson. There is no good news to be found there. We have burned so much carbon into the atmosphere that the CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the past three million years. In the last decade our carbon emission levels are the highest in history, and we have not yet experienced their full impact. If we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, we are still on track for much higher heat for at least ten years. And we are certainly not stopping our emissions by tomorrow. This blanket of carbon in the atmosphere has triggered, and will trigger, further runaway warming systems that are not under our control, the most deadly of which is the release of methane gases that have been trapped for eons under arctic ice and what is now euphemistically known as permafrost (much of it is no longer permanent frost). Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon, and much faster acting. In the first twenty years after its release into the atmosphere, it is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Whereas the full effect of heat from a carbon molecule takes ten years, peak warming from a methane molecule occurs in a matter of months. The Arctic and Antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these regions, bubbling out of Arctic lakes (and hissing out of seas and soils worldwide). Some scientists fear a methane “burp” of billions of tons when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs, something that has not happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate within months. This alone could be the extinction event. The Arctic summer ice is currently two thirds less than it was as recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a full summer melt is likely within the next five years. The continent of Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of 280% in the last forty years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such as the breaking off the Larsen B ice shelf defied scientific predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of 2017, was 2,200 square miles in size. The Arctic ice has been the coolant for the northern part of the planet and it impacts worldwide climate as well. Its white surface also reflects back into space much of the heat from the sun, as does the Antarctic ice. As the ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs the heat and the warming ocean more quickly melts the remaining ice. Over the past three decades, the oldest and thickest of the Arctic sea ice has declined by a whopping 95%, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2018 annual Arctic report. The U.S., Russia, and China are now vying for hegemony of the Arctic region in order to get at the massive reserves of oil that exist there and will be accessible as the ice melts. Aside from the real possibility of military conflagrations over control of the region, moving tankers through and drilling in this sensitive eco-system would cause the dual destructions of rapidly deteriorating whatever ice is left, thereby speeding up the release of methane; and then burning all that stored carbon of newly found oil reserves into the atmosphere. These and all the other warming feedback loops are now on an exponential trajectory and becoming self-amplifying, potentially leading to a “hothouse earth” independent of the carbon emissions that have triggered them. Each day, the extra heat that is trapped near our planet is equivalent to four hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. There are no known technologies that can be deployed at world scale to reverse the warming, and many climate
[Marxism] The Primitive Accumulation debate | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I want to alert my readers, especially those living in Europe, about a conference being held on May 9-11, 2019 at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam on the topic of “Toward a Global History of Primitive Accumulation”. Among the speakers are people I have a strong affinity with, including Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, Edward Baptist, and Dale Tomich. They are scholars who tend to identify with the definition of primitive accumulation in chapter 31 of V. 1 of Capital (Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist): The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. While I doubt that any of the sessions there will directly address the Political Marxists, they implicitly challenge its premise that primitive accumulation refers exclusively to the emergence of agrarian capitalism in late 15th century England, the lynchpin of Robert Brenner’s scholarship. For Brenner and his acolytes, slavery and all that do not enter the picture. It is only when land was enclosed in England as part of the rise of tenant farming that the “social-property relations” unique to capitalism kicked in. When a tenant farmer began to hire wage labor to milk cows, shear wool, and take a sickle to wheat, it set into motion the competitive drive that allowed England to rule the world. All that cotton being picked by slaves was “pre-capitalist” and if it hadn’t been fed into the maw of emerging English capitalism, it would have gone to waste in Spain or Portugal that were only interested in using the gold and silver extracted from Bolivia, Peru and Mexico to buy silk pantaloons from India and Oolong tea from China. England was the proverbial ant and the Iberian empires were the proverbial grasshoppers. full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/03/10/the-primitive-accumulation-debate/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Sci fi rock and roll
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2019/03/hijack-starship-major-tom.html?m=1 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Political expression at Carnival
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.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/08/rio-carnival-turns-political-as-barbie-fascists-defend-womens-rights Brazilians demand answers for Marielle Franco's murder at Rio carnival https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/05/brazil-rio-carnival-marielle-franco https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Carnival-2019-Brazil-Sambas-for-Lula-Marielle-Franco-Against-Neoliberal-Vampires-20190305-0005.html One of this year's favorites to win the 2019 carnival contest is the Estacao Primeira de Mangueira, a samba school whose routine in the parade told "the stories that history does not tell" — that is, "the story about the country's important characters who are not portrayed in the books: the Indigenous, Black and poor people," as Folha do Sao Paulo reported. "It was exciting to see the school's colors, it's flags bearing the face of Marielle Franco, a social leader killed almost a year ago." _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Reflections from the Oakland teachers Picket Line ? Commune
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. * This was a good article that confirmed my experiences in the strike also. I live near Oakland High and was picketing at the grade school in the same district. The picket line there was very solid also. The main thing, though, is this: I think socialists - and all trade union activists - have to reflect on what steps can and need to be taken to take strikes to the next level as far as being effective, meaning more disruptive. At the risk of being repetitious, I think in the case of the Oakland teachers strike that (1) the daily rallies should have been held in the street, specifically in the intersection of 14th St. and Broadway - *the* central intersection downtown. (2) From there, we should have occupied some of the banks downtown. (3) We should have marched on the Port of Oakland and shut it down. I think if we had done those things, the city and the state would have suddenly come up with millions to meet the teachers' demands. John Reimann -- *“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black Jacobins" by C. L. R. James Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] On racist workers, journalists and beggars
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. * Having suffered a double whammy of unambiguous racist attacks almost a year - one by a "progressive" journalist - it was only this weekend that I finally decided to commit the experience to "paper". Though I still love Kramer, I can't say the same for the closeted racist that played him. "This brings to mind the case of Michael Richards, who played Cosmo Kramer in the US sitcom *Seinfeld*, one of my most favourite TV shows. Although I was partial to Elaine “He took it out” Benes, not to mention George “It shrunk” Costanza (played, respectively, by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander), I also loved the mad-cap way Richards portrayed the Kramer character. Alright, then, I loved Richards. And then he let rip with a tirade of racist abuse after he was heckled on stage by an audience that included black people. Not unlike Mr Reporter, you only had to scratch the surface for the hidden racist to jump out at you." https://www.ebeefs.com/beefs/2019/3/9/of-racist-workers-journalists-and-beggars JLSamboma _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Labour and Antisemitism
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.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/march/labour-and-antisemitism _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Reflections from the Oakland teachers Picket Line • Commune
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://communemag.com/reflections-from-the-picket-line/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The U.S. Blamed Maduro for Burning Aid to Venezuela. New Video Casts Doubt. - Video - NYTimes.com
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.nytimes.com/video/world/americas/10006385986/the-us-blamed-maduro-for-burning-aid-to-venezuela-new-video-casts-doubt.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
