[Marxism] ‘Politics of Hate’ Takes a Toll in Germany Well Beyond Immigrants

[Michael Yates via Marxism]

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It is disingenuous for the author of this NYT article to decry the lack of 
understanding among former East Germans about the wonders of democracy. The 
West German state never got rid of its Nazis. Far from it. They regained 
control, if they ever lost it, of their business empires. They were often 
quickly "rehabilitated" and went into politics. They continued to hold sway in 
the German military. This is all not to mention that reunification involved the 
pillage of the E. German economy and the immiseration of most of its people. 
Democracy has little to do with German affairs, just as it has little relevance 
for life here.
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[Marxism] Victoria Woodhull and Cornelius Vanderbilt | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Below you will find an excerpt from Barbara Goldsmith’s 1998 “Other 
Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria 
Woodhull”. It deals with the unlikely hook-up between Victoria Woodhull 
and her sister Tennessee Claflin with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest 
man in America. Woodhull and her sister put out a magazine called 
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly that called for socialist revolution, free 
love and spiritualist values. As I pointed out in a CounterPunch 
article, Marxists in the USA were divided between the “Yankee” faction 
led by her and the “orthodox” faction led by Frederick Sorge and 
supported by Marx. Sorge and Marx led a drive to expel Woodhull and her 
comrades that culminated in them capturing themselves. Despite 
Woodhull’s idiosyncrasies, she was connected to the living pulse of 
America’s most exploited—the women, the African-Americans and the most 
militant workers.


In addition to being the first woman to run for president (her 
running-mate was Frederick Douglass), she and her sister were the first 
women to own a Wall St. stock brokerage. The excerpt shows how they got 
their hands on the money to fund the business and to pay for their 
revolutionary-minded magazine.


It will be immediately obvious that Goldsmith has not written a 
scholarly book. Since her previous biography was about Gloria Vanderbilt 
(the great-granddaughter of the patriarch discussed below), you can 
probably guess that she was writing for the mass market rather than 
Marxist ne’er-do-wells like me.


Apparently the book was optioned to become a Hollywood movie but nothing 
came of that until 2017, when Amazon announced plans to make such a film 
but not based on Goldsmith’s book as far as I can tell. Someone named 
Ben Kopit is working on the script and I wouldn’t expect much. Maybe the 
best bet would be for Paul Buhle to do a comic book since he is a 
Woodhull scholar among his many other assets.


As a mass-market biographer rather than a historian, Goldsmith paints a 
lurid picture but perhaps one not that remote from the reality. To 
balance this book, I also received a copy of Mark Lause’s “Long Road to 
Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left” that deals with the 
Yankee left. Mark has also written a book on “Free Spirits: 
Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era” that I 
am anxious to read.


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2020/02/22/victoria-woodhull-and-cornelius-vanderbilt/

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[Marxism] Chinese Doctors Are Using Cuban Antivirals Against Coronavirus

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/cuban-antiviral-used-against-coronavirus-in-china-20200206-0005.html
 

Cuba produces one of the most potent medicines for the treatment of 
immunological diseases.


The Recombinant Interferon Alpha 2B (IFNrec), an antiviral produced by the 
Cuban biotech industry, is being used by Chinese doctors to treat patients 
infected by the 2019-nCoV coronavirus, which has affected more than 28,000 
people and has killed 564 patients worldwide.

Since Jan. 25, the ChangHeber Company located in Changchun city has been 
producing the famous Cuban antiviral, which is one of 30 medicines chosen by 
the National Health Commission for its potential to cure respiratory diseases.
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[Marxism] A Kenyan Painter Casts a Critical Eye on China’s Role in Africa - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Best seen on NYT website for graphics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/africa/michael-soi-kenya-china.html
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[Marxism] ‘Politics of Hate’ Takes a Toll in Germany Well Beyond Immigrants

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(This article is pretty alarming. It seems that Germany is dealing with 
a much larger threat than in the USA, where SPLC and antifa exaggerate 
the situation. It states that much of the worst violence is taking place 
in the former East German republic, something that supposedly is a 
function of people retaining the authoritarianism of the Stalinist 
system. I have a feeling that the anti-immigrant violence is a function 
much more of the region's economic difficulties than anything else.)


NY Times, Feb. 22, 2020
‘Politics of Hate’ Takes a Toll in Germany Well Beyond Immigrants
By Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy

COLOGNE, Germany — The last time Henriette Reker ran for mayor, she was 
nearly killed.


Ms. Reker was handing out flowers to voters at a bustling market in 
Cologne in 2015, when a man took a rose with one hand and rammed a 
kitchen knife into her throat with the other. He wanted to punish her 
for her pro-refugee stance.


Five years later, Ms. Reker is running again. But she is an exception. 
Since she recovered from a coma to find herself elected, far-right death 
threats have become an everyday reality, not just for her but for an 
increasing number of local officials across Germany.


The acrimony is felt  in town halls and village streets, where mayors 
now find themselves the targets of threats and intimidation. The effect 
has been chilling.


Some have stopped speaking out. Many have quit, tried to arm themselves 
or taken on police protection. The risks have mounted to such an extent 
that some German towns are unable to field candidates for leadership at all.


“Our democracy is under attack at the grass-roots level,” Ms. Reker said 
in a recent interview in Cologne’s City Hall. “This is the foundation of 
our democracy, and it is vulnerable.”


The trend, the local officials and analysts say, reflects a worrying 
breakdown of civility and political discourse in an increasingly 
polarized Germany, where the insidious influence of an angry far right 
is changing the rules of behavior.


Mayors, certainly, have not been the only ones to suffer as Germany’s 
political and social fabric has strained. The shootings this week in the 
western town of Hanau, near Frankfurt, that left 11 people dead were 
just the latest attacks aimed at ethnic minorities.


Germans who openly support immigration have increasingly been targeted, 
too. Given the decentralized nature of Germany’s political system, local 
officials like mayors may be the most important among them. Attacks 
against them take on outsize significance.


Over the last year, there were 1,240 politically motivated attacks on 
politicians and elected officials in Germany, according to preliminary 
figures released this year by the federal police.


A study conducted by the German Association for Cities and 
Municipalities showed that 40 percent of the country’s city governments 
had to contend with stalking, harassment or threats. Of the 11,000 
mayors in the country, at least 1,500 reported concrete threats.


And people have died. In June, Walter Lübcke, a regional official, was 
killed on his front porch by a known extremist, the first far-right 
assassination of a German politician since World War II.


Supporters of far-right ideology were responsible for more than a third 
of the reported episodes, nearly twice as many as were committed by 
supporters of the extreme left, the government said.


But nearly half of all politically motivated attacks could not be 
attributed to any specific group, reflecting what experts said showed 
the erosion of civil norms.


Experts and local officials who have been affected say the violence 
started when the 2008 economic crisis began to bite. But it took on new 
dimensions in 2015, after Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the borders to 
more than one million asylum-seekers, most of them Muslim and many 
fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.


Andreas Zick, the director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary 
Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld, has 
been tracking the mood of German society for decades.


He said he first noticed groups of people calling themselves “concerned 
citizens” who were critical of politicians emerge more than a decade ago.


One of their concerns has now grown into a concerted campaign of hate 
against local politicians and representatives, he said, driven by 
populist forces such as the far-right Alternative for Germany, a party 
known by its German initials, AfD.


“The populists have declared the ‘elites’ as their enemy, and now we are 
seeing the rise of this politics of hate which has infected the center 
of 

[Marxism] Trump's Visit to India

[Marla Vijaya kumar via Marxism]

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Mr. Pankaj Mishra has given a one sided-picture of present-day India. And 
moreover, Neoliberalism is not Trump's patent. Trump 
is only the latest model to come out of the factory called neoliberalism. So is 
Modi.
The Modi government's move on Citizenship Amendment Act is all set to backfire. 
An act, stated to identify Muslim infiltrators from 

neighbouring countries, had actually thrown out much more Hindus than Muslims 
in the the state of Assam, where the exercise was 
done. Some 15% of the state's population are adversely affected and some have 
landed up in Detention Centers, Modi Government's 
name for Concentration Camps. More than a hundred people, both Muslims and 
Hindus died of sickness due to the appalling 
conditions in the Camps.
In a country where births don't get registered and a vast majority of the 
population do not have valid documents for proof of 
residence in the country, any attempt to screen citizens is fraught with untold 
land mines. It is said that some 90% of the people 
have mistakes and inconsistencies in their identity documents. The ruling BJP 
and its shadow authority, the fascist RSS have 
started a viscous propaganda that they are going to weed out 180 odd million 
Muslims and throw them out of India's borders. 
But nobody is sure that if screening were to start, anywhere up to 75% of 
India's population, mostly Hindus will end up losing 
their citizenship. The people are agitated  and Hindus, Muslims and so-called 
Low Caste Dalits have come in to the streets in 
protest. In Shaheen Bag Square in Delhi, thousands of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh 
women have been protesting since the last two 
months, in the lines of New York's Occupy Movement. And similar protest camps 
have come up in hundreds of towns and cities 
all over India. And a campaign by Communists in Bihar had covered the whole 
state of 100 million with public rallies in every 
town in the state. The opposition seems to be mounting with every passing day. 
Half the state governments in India have declared 
that they will not go ahead with the implementation of the Citizenship Act. 
Apparently, Modi has to dismiss the state governments 
and put them under Central Government rule, if he wants to go ahead with the 
implementation of the Act. Not withstanding the 
public stature that the Act will be implemented, come what may, any such move 
is going to land in a major crisis from which 
Modi can not extract himself. The so-called strongman is now standing on shaky 
legs.

Vijaya Kumar M

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Re: [Marxism] What happened to Richard Dawkins? | Overland literary journal

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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A useful expose', thanks.
As a complement see critiques of Dawkins' own reductionist variant of
evolutionary biology by Niles Eldredge.

On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 6:59 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> By Jeff Sparrow
>
> What happened to Richard Dawkins? How did an acclaimed scientist and
> public intellectual transform himself into the dreary boor regularly
> popping up in your social media feed with yet another drunken uncle
> tweet about gender or race?
>
> https://overland.org.au/2020/02/what-happened-to-richard-dawkins/
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[Marxism] Eyal Weizman | The algorithm is watching you · LRB 19 February 2020

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Statement by director of research group that exposed Assad's chemical 
attacks.


https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/february/the-algorithm-is-watching-you
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[Marxism] Louis Althusser's Class Warfare | The New York Review of Books | Daily

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Mitchell Abidor introduces an article by Althusser. Mitchell
was responsible for over 1,000 translations on Marxist Internet Archives 
(MIA) from French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Esperanto, as well 
as a smattering of transcriptions of English articles.


https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/21/what-the-honest-capitalist-will-say/
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[Marxism] ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest and Capitalism: The Storm of History’ by Helen C Scott reviewed by Tony McKenna – Marx

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17723_shakespeares-tempest-and-capitalism-the-storm-of-history-by-helen-c-scott-reviewed-by-tony-mckenna/

My own take on "The Tempest": 
https://louisproyect.org/2016/01/05/deconstructing-cannibalism/

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[Marxism] The growing crisis in cosmology

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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How rapidly is the universe expanding?

Since Edwin Hubble first discovered in 1929 that galaxies are getting 
farther apart over time, allowing scientists to trace the evolution of 
the universe back to an initial Big Bang, astronomers have struggled to 
measure the exact rate of this expansion. In particular, astronomers 
want to determine a number called the Hubble parameter, a measurement of 
how fast the cosmos is expanding as we speak. The Hubble parameter tells 
us the age of the universe, so measuring it was a major goal for many 
astronomers in the latter half of the 20th century.


https://theweek.com/articles/889916/growing-crisis-cosmology
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