[Marxism] Al Arabiya's exclusive interview with Lebanon's Walid Joumblatt - Al Arabiya English

[MM via Marxism]

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Remarkable interview with Walid Jumblatt from Al Arabiya:


AA: We’ll begin with regional files specifically Syria. Eight years after the 
Syrian revolution, Bashar al-Assad is still on the chair. Was there a mistake 
in calculations or something huge happened and half a million people were 
killed and 12 million Syrians were displaced.

WJ: It’s not a matter of a mistake in calculations but there is a people that 
wanted life and freedom. Some powers came and intervened in favor of the 
regime. First it was the Islamic Republic of Iran then Russia. At the same 
time, the West abandoned the Syrian people. It abandoned the Syrian people and 
did not help them in the civil revolution or even in the armed revolution when 
it was national. Later, outsiders and extremist members entered Syria so the 
regime temporarily succeeded in saying it’s either me or ISIS, either me or 
extremism, and the West just abandoned the people.

AA: Do you think it was possible to topple Bashar al-Assad?

WJ: I think in 2012, yes, but after the chemical agreement was reached, you 
remember, the chemical agreement in Pittsburg between Obama and Putin, they 
completely stopped supporting the Syrian people and the semi-secular national 
powers.

AA: So the price of the nuclear deal between the West and Iran was Syria, or it 
was one of the prices.

WJ: I think back then, revolutions were at their peak. You remember, Bill Burns 
in Oman and others.

AA: So Bashar al-Assad will stay for 20 or 30 years?

WJ: He cannot stay. Stay to rule what? Syria’s rubble? People who are displaced 
in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and across the world? Stay on what? He has stayed as 
a result of armies present in Syria, the Russian, the Iranian army but then 
what?

AA: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir killed half a million people and there’s 
an arrest warrant issued against him, and the international community embraced 
him.

WJ: Did not embrace him.

AA: Would it be possible that the international community will embrace Bashar 
al-Assad and he returns to the Arab League?

WJ: The people’s revolution does not have an accurate calculation. When people 
revolt, they just revolt. They do not have accurate calculations. In Syria, the 
people revolted in Daraa. This is why Bashar does not want all refugees to 
return, and I do not think he can resume this path. Fine, Bashir ruled for 30 
years. Bouteflika ruled for 30 years too. Then people spoke out and said 
enough. There will come a day when the Syrian people will say enough and the 
displaced people outside Syria are already saying enough.

AA: Most of the Sunnis in Syria are with Bashar al-Assad.

WJ: This is not true. Some of the cities’ Sunnis are. This was Hafez al-Assad’s 
plan to gain the Sunni and Christian bourgeois and others in businesses, and 
they left the countryside. But people in the countryside and those who were 
displaced from Ghouta, Daraya and other areas from Homs and Aleppo, you think 
they’re all with Bashar?

AA: But let’s talk frankly. If you look today at the Syrian political scene, is 
there anyone whom you think can lead Syria. Who is the alternative to Bashar 
al-Assad?

WJ: Is it forbidden to have a civil regime in Syria or a civil government? Must 
there be a dictator ruling since 1970, one person governing Syria? Is this 
reasonable? There’s no alternative, a democratic alternative, alternative for 
freedoms, parties exchanging, etc. I reject this logic.

AA: What do you tell the Druze in Syria?

WJ: I tell the Syrian people that one day they will have freedom. Druze there 
are actually Syrian, they are part of the Syrian people. My relation is with 
the Syrian people and their uprising, not only with the Syrian Druze. It’s a 
relation with the Syrian people based on a principle.


Full interview: 
https://english.alarabiya.net/en/features/2019/05/02/Walid-Joumblatt-President-of-the-Lebanese-Progressive-Socialist-Party.html


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Re: [Marxism] Happy anniversary

[Stephen Harvey via Marxism]

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I'm late to the party as usual but just wanted to add my appreciation of 
this list as a resource

which I value highly. Thanks very much, Louis.



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[Marxism] Tucker Carlson Takes On Venezuela Intervention, by Brad Griffin - The Unz Review

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Neo-Nazis hail Tucker Carlson's embrace of Grayzone member's Venezuela 
analysis.


http://www.unz.com/article/tucker-carlson-takes-on-venezuela-intervention/
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[Marxism] NYC event -- Taking the Lead: Labor and Global Warming – Our History, Activism, and Challenges

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Saturday, May 11
10AM - 1PM
The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Bobst Library -- 10th Floor
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY

Sponsors: The New York Labor History Association & the Tamiment Library and
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University

Program:

Our History
Donn Mitchell, on the UAW and the First Earth Day, author of Tread the
City’s Streets Again: Frances Perkins Shares Her Theology
Irene Shen, International Program for Labor, Climate and Environment, CUNY,
on the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy
Jon Forster, DC 37 Climate Justice Committee, on the Labor Network for
Sustainability

Our Activism
Zakia Elliott, Program Coordinator, Philadelphia Climate Works
Christopher Erikson, Business Manager, Local 3, International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers
Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, President, New York State Nurses Association

Our Future / Our Challenges
Eileen Moran, Environmental Justice Committee, Professional Staff Congress
Maritza Silva-Farrell, Executive Director, Alliance for a Greater New York
(ALIGN)
Bruce Hamilton, Vice President, Amalgamated Transit Union

Registration (required) at:
http://events.nyu.edu/#!view/event/date/20190511/event_id/234459
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[Marxism] ‘I still call myself a communist’: Pete Seeger centenary | Peter Frost | The Morning Star

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/i-still-call-myself-communist-pete-seeger-centenary


Sent from my iPhone

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[Marxism] Mark Tauger's Work on the Soviet Famine

[Glenn Kissack via Marxism]

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I’m not competent enough to know what the flaws are, if any, in Mark Tauger’s 
writings, but I read these three articles a while ago and found them to be 
informative:

“Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933"
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/89/90

“Review of Anne Applebaum’s ‘Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine”
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169438

"Review of 'The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933’”
https://eh.net/book_reviews/the-years-of-hunger-soviet-agriculture-1931-1933/

Glenn
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[Marxism] Decade of Fire | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Opening today at the Metrograph theater in New York, the documentary 
“Decade of Fire” tells both the personal story of Vivian Vázquez 
Irizarry, who grew up in the South Bronx, and the South Bronx itself, 
which in the 1960s became a virtual synonym for urban decay. The fire in 
the title refers to the vast number that took place over a decade, 
reducing the housing stock of a once vibrant, working-class area. This 
is not just the story of the South Bronx. It is also about the malign 
neglect that befell many neighborhoods outside the privileged Manhattan 
island that was the site of Woody Allen movies, including a film of that 
title, which was so indifferent to the lives of others.


Irizarry produced, directed and served as narrator for “Decade of Fire”. 
Like many other people in the South Bronx, her grandparents came to the 
USA from Puerto Rico because of jobs disappearing as a result of 
Operation Bootstrap, a version of primitive accumulation that was 
intended to build up the island’s industrial base. As was the case of 
mechanizing the cotton fields in the South, farmers and those not lucky 
enough to find a job were forced to relocate.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/05/03/decade-of-fire/
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[Marxism] Toward Socialist Unity By Bonnie Weinstein

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Toward Socialist Unity
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://socialistviewpoint.org
At the same time faith in capitalism is on the decline, and a revolutionary, 
anti-capitalist socialist alliance is most urgently needed, one of the largest 
socialist organizations in the U.S., the International Socialist Organization, 
voted to dissolve. 
The reasons for the group’s dissolution were partly explained in a post titled 
“Taking our Final Steps,” that appeared April 19, 2019, on the website of their 
newspaper, Socialist Worker and signed by their most current leadership:
“In late March, current and recently resigned members of the International 
Socialist Organization took the highly unusual step of voting to dissolve the 
organization. ...Our newspaper Socialist Worker has ceased production, and we 
are developing a separate, independent body tasked with reporting on the 
botched 2013 sexual assault allegation so that former ISO members and the rest 
of the left might learn from our mistakes. ...Unfortunately, the impact of 
decades of undemocratic practices, including a hostility to caucuses and the 
self-organization of members of oppressed groups, as well as the recently 
revealed egregious treatment of allegations of sexual assault, meant that we 
were not able to recreate ourselves.”1
The demise of the ISO is not an isolated incident of the revolutionary left in 
the USA, and across the globe. The organized, revolutionary socialist left has 
been in decline for decades since the great upsurge beginning in the 1950s and 
into the ’70s that included the Cuban revolution, the civil rights movement, 
the rise of Black Nationalism, the Vietnam antiwar movement, the United Farm 
Workers Organizing Committee strike, the women’s liberation movement, the LGBTQ 
movement, along with the student radicalization and free-speech movement that 
included the May 1968 general strike and occupation of universities and 
factories throughout France. 
The capitalist class did all it could to squash these growing upsurges through 
their systematic divide-and-conquer assault on the working class. Civil rights 
demonstrators were brutally beaten and murdered. In 1965, as Malcolm X and 
Martin Luther King, Jr. were having talks about organizing joint actions, 
Malcolm X was assassinated February 21, 1965. Three years later Martin Luther 
King, Jr., who was in Memphis, Tennessee to support a sanitation workers’ 
strike, was speaking out against the War in Vietnam, and was in the midst of 
organizing a massive Poor Peoples March on Washington, was assassinated April 
4, 1968. Their deaths were a product of the extreme racism and bigotry the 
capitalist system thrives on.
All during those years, the capitalist class was on the warpath to destroy 
organized labor as well. In the 1960s a third of American workers belonged to a 
union. Today, only one-in-ten are in a union. 
What was missing during these times of turmoil—and is still missing today—is a 
class conscious labor leadership—one that recognizes that capitalism itself is 
what’s standing in the way of social justice and economic equality for all 
workers. 
To build such a leadership among the working class, there needs to be a strong 
socialist vanguard that can lead the way—that can expose how class 
collaborationist politics leads only to defeat—and a principled, 
internationalist, anti-capitalist program is the is the necessary prerequisite 
for achieving justice and equality for the workers of the world.
The “branding” of the socialist left
The primary role of revolutionary socialist parties is to nurture 
class-consciousness—the awareness that the very nature of capitalism is the 
enslavement of workers—an economic system that exploits labor for the private 
economic gain of the capitalist class at the expense of labor. The job of 
socialists is to teach that there can be no mutually beneficial alliance 
between workers and capitalists. (Individual capitalists, of course, are 
welcome to participate in and support any of our independent struggles and are 
invited to contribute generously to them.)
However, while most of the revolutionary socialist left adheres to these 
principals they have been unable to unite; and have, instead, fractured and 
dissipated and, in the case of the ISO, actually disbanded. And, already, 
various parties on the left are inviting ex-ISO members to join their party, 
without considering what is really needed in order to win a socialist world. 
So what went wrong with the revolutionary socialist left? Ironically, as the 
left and organized labor has been declining, capitalist competition has revved 
up. 
All products are now 

[Marxism] Drugs, Wars, Prisons and Corporate Wealth By Bonnie Weinstein

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Drugs, Wars, Prisons and Corporate Wealth
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://socialistviewpoint.org
The principle of profit is king holds true for the military and prison 
industrial complexes as well as the healthcare industry and industry in 
general. War, prisons and the healthcare industry all have one thing in 
common—they make money off of human misery.
There’s a multitude of examples of how the quest for higher profits endangers 
the health and welfare of working people. But two recent examples in the 
medical industry stand out.
Pharmaceutical corporations spend tens-of-millions of dollars on 
advertisements—on everything from hemorrhoid ointments to late-stage cancer 
drugs—because they profit tremendously from the sale of them. 
The financial wellbeing of pharmaceutical corporations depends on profits from 
the sale of drugs to individuals, and to insurance companies that insure drug 
coverage. Profit is the purpose of their existence. 
Safety, efficiency and accessibility for the poor to life-saving drugs are only 
important if they make a profit. 
In the case of the manufacturers of opiates that have killed over 70,000 in 
2017 alone,1 addiction is profitable because they can sell more drugs—proving 
capitalism and medicine are incompatible.
The depths of greed
In a January 18, 2019 New York Times article by Danielle Ofri titled, “The 
Insulin Wars,” 
“Between 2002 and 2013, prices tripled for some insulin. Many cost around $300 
a vial, without any viable generic alternative. Most patients use two or three 
vials a month, but others need the equivalent of four. Self-rationing has 
become common as patients struggle to keep up. In the short term, fluctuating 
blood sugar levels can lead to confusion, dehydration, coma, even death. In the 
long term, poorly controlled diabetes is associated with heart attacks, 
strokes, blindness, amputation and the need for dialysis. The exorbitant prices 
confound patients and doctors alike since insulin is nearly a century old now. 
The pricing is all the more infuriating when one considers that the discoverers 
of insulin sold the patent for $1 each to ensure that the medication would be 
affordable.”
This means that people are getting sicker and even dying because they can’t 
afford the insulin they need because the industries’ profit margin is more 
important than their lives. 
In a January 31, 2019 New York Times article by Barry Meier titled, “Sackler 
Scion’s Email Reveals Push for High-Dose OxyContin, New Lawsuit Disclosures 
Claim,” 
“The lawsuit, which was filed in June by the Massachusetts attorney general, 
Maura Healey, claims that Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family knew 
that putting patients on high dosages of OxyContin for long periods increased 
the risks of serious side effects, including addiction. Nonetheless, they 
promoted higher dosages because stronger pain pills brought the company and the 
Sacklers the most profit. ...The lawsuit alleges that the Sackler family 
received more than $4 billion in opioid profits since 2007, when the company 
pleaded guilty. The lawsuit includes claims that McKinsey and Company, a 
consulting firm, prepared reports for Purdue Pharma to develop strategies that 
would increase the prescribing by doctors of the more powerful forms of the 
company’s painkillers. According to the complaint, McKinsey consultants advised 
Purdue Pharma to increase sales by claiming that opioids reduced stress and 
made patients less isolated. Patients on drugs such as OxyContin can in fact 
become socially withdrawn. McKinsey consultants, members of the Sackler family 
were told, also planned to study techniques for keeping patients on opioids 
longer and McKinsey urged Purdue Pharma to fight efforts taken by federal 
agencies to stop illegal drug sales...”
Financial success for the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, in fact, 
contributed to more than 70,200 American deaths in 2017.2 This is nothing short 
of mass murder for profit. And, under the private, for-profit medical industry, 
big business has nothing to lose by people getting sicker while becoming 
addicted to their drugs. It just means more profits for them all around.
Death and incarceration is big business, too, in the USA
War and the sales of weapons—from small arms to nuclear arsenals—is the USA’s 
biggest industry and is underwritten by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $716 
billion for 2019 alone, that includes a 2.6 percent pay increase for service 
members.3 (And this figure does not include the cost of the U.S. police force.)
Meanwhile, the private corporations that manufacture these weapons keep 
increasing their profits while causing death 

[Marxism] Sergei Vilkov: Everything You Thought You Knew About the Russian Working Class Was Wrong

[Thomas Campbell via Marxism]

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On the eve of May Day 2019, journalist Sergei Vilkov took a long look
at the most recent research and statistics on the Russian working
class, showing that nearly everything we thought we knew about it was
wrong.

If you read only one article about Russia this month, this should be the one.

https://therussianreader.com/2019/05/03/sergei-vilkov-russian-working-class/
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[Marxism] Canadians and Americans in Venezuela

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Eyewitness Report from Caracas - Coup Attempt Utter Failure <>
 
https://portside.org/2019-05-02/tidbits-may-2-2019-reader-comments-venezuela-eyewitness-reports-impeachment-debate-anita#4
 

We are a group of US and Canadian citizens in Caracas, Venezuela.

The coup attempt here today has been a complete failure. The streets are full 
of people going to work and going to class. The stores are open.

We are attending a housing conference here in Caracas, on the 8th anniversary 
of the government’s plan to build 5 million housing units by 2025. 2.6 million 
have been built thus far. It is a good example of what the people feel is at 
stake in defense of the Bolivarian revolution.

We woke up this morning to hear grandiose reports of a coup in progress and 
incitements on right-wing media outlets for the military to come into the 
streets to support a supposed popular uprising.  We have seen no such popular 
uprising, at all.

Rightwing leader Leopoldo Lopez was freed from house arrest and was meeting 
with Juan Guaidó, the US puppet, but there was virtually no one by their side - 
only about 20 soldiers that were said to have come to the side of Guaido. But 
the real story is that 15 of the soldiers were tricked into thinking they were 
going to receive a military recognition. The right wing had a video camera to 
fool the public with not thinking an actual coup was under way. Within an hour 
the media event was over.

The coup attempt has been a complete flop, except in the right wing trans 
national corporate media.

We urge everyone to call your congressional representatives, other elected 
officials and the wider progressive movement and media with this message:  No 
US intervention in Venezuela. End the sanctions. There is nothing here that 
needs to be prevented other than US intervention and the right wing attempts 
create a crisis that would justify an intervention.

Pat Fry
Peter Lackowski
Stanley Kaster
Mark Cook
Suzanne Ross
Keith Brooks
Ann Fawcett Ambia
David Thomas 

PLEASE SHARE WIDELY
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[Marxism] Angels and Demons | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Newly released by Zero Books, Tony McKenna’s aptly titled “Angels and 
Demons” is a collection of profiles of some very good and some very bad 
people in the past and present. It is the kind of book that is hard to 
find nowadays and a throwback in some ways to Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent 
Victorians” or Edmund Wilson’s “Axel’s Castle”. Like Strachey and 
Wilson, he evaluates prominent individuals against their social backdrop 
and from a decidedly radical perspective. It is a book that has the 
author’s customary psychological insight and literary grace. As we shall 
see, it demonstrates a remarkable breadth of knowledge about disparate 
cultural, political and intellectual strands that is seldom seen today 
in an age of specialization.


Your natural tendency is to think of human nature when people are 
categorized as either angels like Jeremy Corbyn or demons like Donald 
Trump. However, it is instead powerful historical forces that act on 
individuals and bring out their worst and their best, especially during 
periods of acute class tensions. In today’s polarized world, it is easy 
to understand why we end up with either a Corbyn or a Trump. As William 
Butler Yeats put it, the center cannot hold.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/05/03/angels-and-demons/
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[Marxism] Why No Labor Party Here?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Review of:

Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada
By Barry Eidlin
Cambridge University Press, 2018, 349 pages, $29.99 paperback.

https://solidarity-us.org/atc/200/why-no-labor-party/
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Re: [Marxism] The uses of hunger Stalin’s solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933 | Andrea Graziosi - Academia.edu

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 5/3/19 8:21 AM, Glauber Ataide wrote:


He was the first to LIE about the Holodomor.

There had always been famines in the ex-USSR, but these were not caused 
intentionally by Stalin. That's the great lie.




Right. Stalin did not intentionally carry out policies that were 
designed to kill millions of Ukrainians. He was not much different from 
Winston Churchill who never intended to kill Bengalis during WWII, only 
control grain resources in order to defeat Hitler.


I wrote extensively about the Holodomor in the aftermath of Euromaidan, 
relying in part not on Conquest, who I've never read, but on the author 
of the article I posted a link to.


I debated the idiot Grover Furr on CounterPunch. Here's an excerpt:

Around the time Furr wrote his article, I had already begun reading 
scholarly literature on the Holodomor including everything that Tauger 
had written on the topic. Despite his reputation as a leading authority 
on the famine, he has never written a book about it. At one time, he had 
an archive of his articles on the U. of West Virginia but they seemed to 
have mysteriously disappeared. One hopes that a Pravy Sektor hacker was 
not responsible.


Fortunately, my privileges as a Columbia University retiree has enabled 
me to read Tauger’s articles, including one titled “Natural Disaster and 
Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933” that can be accessed at 
the University of Pittsburgh Carl Beck Papers in Russian and Eastern 
European Studies.


I was surprised, but not overly so, to discover Tauger applying the same 
methodology to other famines in that article. If you are one of those 
leftists who blames British colonialism for the Potato Famine in 
Ireland, he will disabuse you of such foolish notions:


	Consequently an understanding of the Soviet famine, and of the intense 
conflict between regime and peasants over grain procurements emphasized 
in most studies, requires an examination of the causes of those small 
harvests. Two examples from the vast historiography of famines 
demonstrates the legitimacy and importance of such an investigation. In 
the case of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1851, a nationalist 
literature, similar to the Ukrainian nationalist literature on the 
Soviet famine, holds the British government responsible.


The British government responsible? No, we can’t have that. Nor was the 
British government responsible for the 1943 famine in Bengal, according 
to Tauger’s “The Indian Famine Crises of WWII”:


	This “man-made” famine argument, however, rests on uncritical 
acceptance of one set of unreliable statistical data that Sen and others 
have incorrectly described as “production data.” As will be shown below, 
scholars who presented this view of the famine had clear evidence that 
discredited these data, but they did not acknowledge this conflicting 
evidence, let alone address its implications. As a result their 
discussions of the rice harvests in Bengal before the famine have 
misrepresented both the data and the causes of the famine. These 
scholars also claim that Bengal had no shortage of rice during the 
famine, yet they minimize or ignore environmental conditions that did in 
fact cause serious shortages. Much more reliable harvest data from rice 
research centers in Bengal during the famine show that Bengal had a 
major harvest failure in 1942 and a significant shortage of rice.


Of course, it is easy for some on the left to recoil at the idea that it 
was natural causes such as drought or blight rather than British 
colonialism that was responsible for the deaths of millions of Irish and 
Indians. Yet, when it comes to Ukraine, we are used to thinking the 
worst. If Victoria Nuland was on the phone with nationalist politicians 
prior to Euromaidan, it seems reasonable that Stalin was forced to 
unleash a brutal repression in the early 30s to prevent Hitler from 
invading Russia—or something like that.


full: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/24/what-caused-the-holodomor/


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[Marxism] Making and Raising Babies in the USA

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/03/making-and-raising-babies-in-the-usa/

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Re: [Marxism] The uses of hunger Stalin’s solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933 | Andrea Graziosi - Academia.edu

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 5/3/19 2:03 AM, Glauber Ataide wrote:
Are you kidding or am I in the wrong group? This article mentions Robert 
Conquest as a reliable historian.


In addition to being the first historian who wrote about the Holodomor, 
Conquest also wrote about gulags. So what is your problem? That there 
was no Holodomor or gulags and that Conquest made this up? Maybe you got 
your ideas about these matters from Grover Furr or Roland Boer, perhaps?

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[Marxism] Fw: Sri Lanka: behind the Easter Sunday bombings (Green Left Weekly)

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/sri-lanka-behind-easter-sunday-bombings


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Re: [Marxism] The uses of hunger Stalin’s solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933 | Andrea Graziosi - Academia.edu

[Glauber Ataide via Marxism]

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Are you kidding or am I in the wrong group? This article mentions Robert
Conquest as a reliable historian.

Louis Proyect via Marxism  schrieb am Fr., 3.
Mai 2019, 03:45:

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> https://www.academia.edu/38981322/The_uses_of_hunger_Stalin_s_solution_of_the_peasant_and_national_questions_in_Soviet_Ukraine_1932_to_1933
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