[Marxism] Class Carpetbagger | Corey Pein
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. * Good take-down of Pete Buttegieg. https://thebaffler.com/latest/class-carpetbagger-pein\ _ 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] James Burnham and the alt-right
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. * Another tidbit from "Trumpism after Trump": The NatCons were in awe of the great deflection service Tucker [Carlson] provided for the American ruling class: identifying actual material grievances and laboriously laundering them into petty insecurities familiar from the Nineties culture wars. Tucker preached the National Conservatism Gospel even without quite understanding it. The organizers believed he contained a wisdom he himself did not fully recognize, like a fool in Shakespeare. His demeanor was bouncy and cheerful: the vibe was part Groton lacrosse cheerleader, part finance frat boy. His face was ruddied from his summer in Maine, where he’d been communing with his ethnos. His pace was a bit stop-and-start at the beginning—he’d just given up nicotine—but his signature tic was there: the planted joke, followed by the waterfall, throw-back-the-head, court-of-Versailles laugh. He was like a man who looked down at his mouth amazed that it had been transformed into a giant conveyor belt dispensing perfect modules of common sense. His trust in his subjective experience was immense. Tucker had some tough news for the assembled faithful. “Big Business Hates Your Family” was the title of his talk. Monopoly capitalism was real. “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from the government, but comes from the private sector,” Tucker said. “I was trained from the youngest age, from a pup, to believe that the threats to liberty came from government. . . . And so it really took a huge amount of evidence wagging right in my face—not being the brightest person in D.C.—to realize that in 2019 . . . the threats come primarily from companies, and not from the federal government.” He could give examples. “All new Oreos have the label ‘What’s your pronoun?’ A large American company is committing a pretty brazen act of propaganda aimed at your kids, and the message is that the binary gender scheme which we were taught in biology class in seventh grade is no longer operative.” In fighting this, the libertarians would be worse than useless. Their response was, Yeah, well, if you don’t like it, start your own Oreo company. “But that’s not really an operative option in a world of monopoly power. . . . You can’t create your own Google. . . . You have more power vested in fewer hands than at any time in American history. And that itself is ominous and should make all of us cast aside any thread of ideology or theology or whatever, just look at that straight in the face. Are you comfortable with that? You shouldn’t be. Of course you’re not. . . . They can make whole ideas disappear. And there’s some evidence that they’re working to do that.” _ 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] It’s Time for the Left to Build a Force Outside the Democratic Party | Left Voice
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[Marxism] James Burnham and the alt-right
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 is from a long and interesting article in the latest Harper's. You are entitled to read one free one per month and this one is an eye-opener: The Dark Knight overflowed with antiquarian theories and gleanings. His thoughts kept circling back to the midcentury right-winger James Burnham, a hallowed figure among the NatCons. Burnham’s trajectory perfectly matched the moment. He’d begun his career as a mild-mannered professor of philosophy, a genteel Princetonian whom one student described as having walked out of a T. S. Eliot poem, but some vision amid the Great Depression had changed him. Though he was dazzled by his Marxist colleague Sidney Hook, and by his encounter with Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, which he interpreted as a coming attraction for America, it still took a car ride through Detroit, the epicenter of the Depression, to clinch Burnham’s conversion. “The class struggle, the starvation and terror in act” that he witnessed among the city’s autoworkers convinced him that capitalism was ruined forever; he wanted to be a part of what came next. At NYU, Burnham still lectured on Aquinas and Dante, but he was increasingly occupied with drafting strategies for Communist Party discipline. His attacks on Franklin Roosevelt, whom he accused of being an incipient totalitarian, were even more vitriolic than the conservative attacks on the New Deal. Trotsky, in exile on the island of Büyükada off Istanbul, was so taken with Comrade Burnham’s agitprop that he marked him as a protégé. Some organizers around Burnham were put off by his tailored suits, his taste for champagne and baccarat, and his dry patrician monotone, but this was also part of what made him useful; he lent American Marxism a dignified patina. Burnham broke with the Trotskyites over the question of whether the Soviet Union was in fact a worker’s state. Trotsky thought it still qualified despite the corruptions of Stalinism; Burnham thought it did not. From his reading of New Deal critics of the modern corporation, such as Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, Burnham came to believe that the Soviet Union and the United States were converging on a kind of managerialism: two only marginally different planned economies, with little place for individual freedom. He started drifting to the right, and eventually wound up as the in-house guru of William F. Buckley’s National Review. But his professional life did have some coherence over the decades. It was spent taking up positions from various crumbling ideological ramparts to get a better shot in at his lifelong enemy: the liberal elite. Burnham could summon a good word for the Black Panthers, LSD, and Woodstock, which had at least sent some shockwaves to Vital Center Command Control. Refreshingly, the NatCons [the Nationalist Conservatives that includes Trump, Tucker Carlson, et al] and the Dark Knight [the nickname the author gave to an alt-right computer engineer named Curtis Yarvin, who I had never heard of] were interested not in Burnham’s avowedly right-wing phase—when brittle treatises such as The Suicide of the West (1964) appeared—but in his earlier, more ambivalent wartime output, The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943), which were written in an era when Burnham was still contending with “remnants of Marxism.” These books, invoked by NatCons throughout my days in Washington, worked like a back door through which they could smuggle materialism into their program. Other phrases that I did not associate with conservatives were brought out like worn old pieces of family furniture, each brokered by trustworthy conservative middlemen. “The ruling class” was often cited at the Ritz, or, just as commonly, “the ruling class, as Angelo Codevilla calls it”—a reference to the intelligence analyst, conservative professor, and writer for the Claremont Review of Books. Burnham’s chief idea—adopted by Yarvin—was that the American elite had become a managerial class that acted as guardians over institutions, the academy, and the professions. They were not aristocrats, nor were they capitalist tycoons, but rather an office-bound species that merely understood the techniques of governance and as a class no longer bothered with questions of their own legitimacy. Burnham had counseled a kind of equanimity in the face of this technocratic elite—the best you could do was to pit elites against one another in order to create space for concessionary freedoms. But Yarvin was more intent on destroying it. He believed that the United States was simply a more advanced form of
[Marxism] Ray and Liz | 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. * “Ray and Liz”, a 2018 British film, is now being made available as a DVD or VOD by KimStim, a small Brooklyn-based company that specializes in independent, foreign, and documentary film. It was written and directed by Richard Billingham, the son of the eponymous Ray and Liz and older brother to Jason, the three principal characters of this harrowing portrait of people living on the dole in the Black Country of Northern England. Black is not a reference to people of African origins but to the towns just west of Birmingham, named, according to Wikipedia, for the soot from the heavy industries that once covered the area, although a 30-foot-thick coal seam close to the surface is another possible origin. Wikipedia adds, “During the Industrial Revolution, it became one of the most industrialized parts of the UK with coal mines, coking, iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks and steel mills producing a high level of air pollution. full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/02/04/ray-and-liz/ _ 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] article on regenerative farming
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 global ecosocialist network has published a somewhat shortened version of oaklandsocialist's original article on regenerative farming. I think the topic is vitally important and the initiative for this network is also. Here's the article: http://www.globalecosocialistnetwork.net/2020/02/04/regenerative-farming/ P.S. A thanks to David Walters for turning me on to the subject of regenerative farming. 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] Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? | The New Yorker
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[Marxism] Why Economics is an Impossible Science (In One Paragraph) - CounterPunch.org
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[Marxism] » Left Election Strategy: Lesser Evil or Independent Left?
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. * Howie Hawkins answers Michael Albert. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/left-election-strategy-lesser-evil-or-independent-left/ _ 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 1619 Project, the Founders-Industrial Complex, and History Pedagogy – The Tattooed Professor
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://www.thetattooedprof.com/2020/01/29/the-1619-project-the-founders-industrial-complex-and-history-pedagogy/ _ 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
