Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made
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 problem with any American examples is that Lewis and Clark or others of the first whites recording their impressions of an area new to them were actually looking at the result of several generations of collapsing human populations. This isn't to dismiss the anecdotal evidence, but to put it into context. On the other hand, even the earliest agriculture--and what came with it--had a serious impact on the environment. George Perkins Marsh compiled a lot of information on the deforestation of the Levant for his _Man and Nature_ (1864). Recent work also indicates large populations and agriculture in central Asia contributed to its desertification. Not that we have any choice at this stage. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] The Struggle Continues: From the ISO to Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists | Left Voice
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. * When I was urging socialists to support the Greens a few elections back, I was told that they wouldn't back anyone but a socialist. So, they backed Bernie Sanders. There just aren't enough feet on the ground to provide the grounding for them to tell left from right. _ 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] Trump's route to yet another victory | Richard Seymour on Patreon
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'll ask that resistance always defers to the Democrats. And the Democrats generally defer to the most conservative among them. If they foist Biden on the base and lose, they will wind up blaming Bernie, Ralph Nader Jill Stein or anybody on the "Left." On Fri, Jul 5, 2019, 9:40 AM Michael Meeropol via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > sad but true --- > > One caveat -- I think "the resistance" is broader and stronger than the > writer allows that's DESPITE the Democrats, not because of them ... > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ 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] Democratic Party debate
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 thought there were several surprises in the debate. My initial response was that of the professional pundits, though for different reasons: the women did superbly on many levels. Despite polls showing virtually all of the leading Democratic contenders defeating Trump, the DNC and the media has presented Biden as the only candidate that can beat Trump. The decision to isolate Warren from the other leading contenders by putting her in the first group was a transparent attempt to insulate Biden. In terms of rhetoric, Warren is fundamentally indistinguishable from Sanders. People do need to remember that she described herself as a Republican as late as 1996, explaining this by citing the party's friendlier embrace of "the markets." So every time I hear her, I have to wonder how serious she is after the years of Reagan-Gingrich "supply side" "trickle-down" voodoo. Sanders' use of "socialism" weighs nothing--and probably a bit against him. Wanting to spend time debating the meaning of a word in the present circumstances indicates a real failure to understand those circumstances. Worse, I think his making an issue of the term is a purely electoral stroke on his part to recover the kind of support it garnered him four years ago. Still worse, his version of "socialism" is--as Howie Hawkins just reminded us all--a rewarmed liberalism. But back to the debate . . . despite that stacking of the deck in favor of Biden hardly kept the other participants did a very decent job of mopping the floor with him, albeit it in short sweeps. Harris' exposure of his Thurmond-esque appreciation of states' rights on busing was brilliantly done, for which the media and commentators have made an issue of her lack of clarify over health care. I was particularly impressed with Bennet's quick cut to the core commentary on Biden's BS about bipartisan "compromise" with McConnell--a compromise that amounted to the kind of surrender we're used to seeing by the "New Democrats." In the end, it seems clear that the DNC, MSNBC, etc. are hell-bound to foist Biden on the party's base . . . because they don't really have any other viable alternative to the candidates who are trying to channel an angry and thoughtful electorate. At least, they don't really have one yet. And, as a candidate, Biden is as flawed in his way as Trump or was Clinton. This means that all the Sturm und Drang by the more "progressive" candidates will boil down to supporting Biden (or, if necessary, a stand-in for Biden) as a "lesser evil." Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] Interview on the Great Cowboy Strike (Thanks to Chad)
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.lawcha.org/2019/06/01/the-great-cowboy-strike-an-interview-with-mark-lause/?fbclid=IwAR1ypG2kSSht3s6ZjSDdNKwiT7lgxgZ00jdW2bXV7zZ0iu8uFstoWh2RmEk _ 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] Socialist Alternative just sent me this
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 excuse that the Democrats can''t reciprocate by endorsing Sawant because their bylaws forbid endorsing candidates of the rival "Socialist Alternative Party" is so sleazy and dishonest that I wonder if some old SWPers reincarnated as Democrats came up with it. _ 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] Socialist Alternative just sent me this
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. * It looks pretty self-explanatory. The folks who scorned the idea of supporting the Greens because they weren't "socialists" now seem to be sharing their contributors list with the Democrats. https://southseattleemerald.com/2019/05/17/opinion-the-socialist-alternative-and-the-37th-district-democrats-at-endorsement-meeting-monday/?fbclid=IwAR0ESgfwr1CVJguTkxX8mGlSOT-wcmUuRWQboLtzVPcaaB5XT6El6Ve6nP8 _ 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] Academics should write for the public for political, personal and practical reasons (opinion)
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. * A big part of the problem has always been a lack of outlets that have a readership . . . . On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 4:53 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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 also write for the public because I see my work as part of a long > tradition of black activist scholarship that was never fooled by the > idea that intellectual, practical and political work should be kept > separate. As an educator with expertise on racial inequality, I see my > responsibility extending beyond the classroom, even if I don’t yet have > tenure. W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the prototypical public sociologist, > neatly encapsulated this view of the necessity of public engagement when > he said, “One could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while > Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.” The racial problems Du Bois > identified are still with us, and we can help eradicate them by engaging > in the type of committed public writing that Du Bois modeled. > > > https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/05/17/academics-should-write-public-political-personal-and-practical-reasons-opinion > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com _ 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] Andrew Johnson and the correct reasons to impeach
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. * It's worth noting that adherents of the First International and sympathizers became actively engaged in the impeachment effort, Colonel Richard J. Hinton playing a particularly prominent role in organizing people to lobby fence-sitters. ML _ 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] Trump and the reluctance to reckon with something fundamentally new
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. * Perhaps my point about the Congress wasn't clear enough. If it were possible to have a single renegade officeholder, the situation of the Congress makes explicitly clear that that's not the situation we face. If Trump represented some kind of renegade from the broad agenda of the American ruling class agenda, the financial base of his drones would shrivel like an old prune. Not only hasn't this happen, but it remains as likely as not that they're going to be able to carry the next election. (This is particularly so given the DNC-Pelosi strategic hope to avoid anything that would "alienate the Trump voters." And if Trump is getting played by the capitalist oligarchs of Russia on a range of issues, it doesn't necessarily place him beyond the broad parameters of what the American ruling class sees as its mainstream. And when he has gone too far on some things--like not imposing the sanctions the Congress voted on Russia--the rest of the government has pulled him into line. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] Trump and the reluctance to reckon with something fundamentally new
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. * Just a couple of admittedly superficial observations on this. Capitalism has changed radically over the course of American history--and since the days the first Marxist observers talked about divisions in the ruling class. Most clearly, it has become increasingly more integrated internally. However, divisions are relative. We can't see much daylight between the White House and the Republican officeholders in general. That's a reflection of, among other things, donor dollars and their expectation. And we see this ratified by the corporate media and the "mainstream" of Democratic officeholders who are themselves timid to the point of complicity. Are there institutional changes taking place? Yes, but there always has been. On the generational watch of the Boomers, the presidency has continued to accrue vast new powers. This was done mostly, but not exclusively, by Republicans--Nixon, Reagan, Bushdaddy, Dubya, and Trump. And Democrats accepted it at every step, every seizure of new power. And the liberals accepted it and sanctioned it. And most of the self-identified Left found excuses for the liberals. And those that didn't were preoccupied with sectarian wranglings to no substantive purpose. So, the process forms something of a continuum, in which there are certainly leaps. But we're a far cry from analogies to the disruptions (and opportunities) of the Civil War and the Reconstruction. But, as old Karl suggested, the point is not to solve the world but to change it. People have probably never had less faith in the institutions of capitalist rule. Yet, where are the ongoing mass mobilizations? And what are radicals doing to encourage them? These seem to be more productive avenues to explore. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] Happy anniversary
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. * Hear! Hear! On Wed, May 1, 2019, 11:25 AM Patrick Bond via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: > 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. > * > > Yes, and more than merely keeping the list going, I don't know anyone > whose suggestions for linked readings - and spicy commentaries - have > been so valuable as Lou's. > > Keep 'em coming! > > Patrick > > On 2019/05/01 5:04 PM, Michael Yates via Marxism wrote: > > Let's raise a glass to Louis on this May Day. Through thick and thin, he > has kept this list going. Congratulations and Happy Birthday! And > solidarity to all! > > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ 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] A progress report on "Utopia in the Catskills"
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. * For those unfamiliar with Cole's "Course of Empire," see his series at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings) _ 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] President Bernie Sanders?
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. * Well, McGovern's oppositon to the war was highly touted, but Gene McCarthy got there sooner and was also in the running in '72. So was Ramsey Clark. And I think Shirley Chisholm was a more progressive option than any of them. _ 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] President Bernie Sanders?
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. * Through the entire history of the party, its leadership has actively nobbled the efforts to make nominations they don't want and, failing that, a willingness to step back and let a candidate they didn't want go down to defeat. Indeed, they've done this with candidates that they've wanted but weren't especially enthusiastic about--like Gore, who won the 2000 election and was as much a victim of legal malpractice by the Democratic campaign as anything else. I think they'll stop at nothing to destroy the Sanders campaign. And the news coverage theyve been giving him reinforces this sense But we'll see. ML _ 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] President Bernie Sanders?
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 don't equate acknowledging the history and experience of Democratic politics with seeing it as "too late" for us to do anything in politics. In many respects, Trump has represented a progression of--rather than a serious break from--the recent trends in American politics, particularly in Republican circles. Aside from his personality problems (coupled with signs of dementia), Trump won the Republican nomination not over the resistance of its dominant currents but by extending them. In particular, I mean the "free-market," anti-regulatory dogmas of Reaganomics and the militant corporate Christian Right. Indeed, the most committed to one or another of these fundamental tenets of Republicanism, the most they tend to defend Trump. If we want to learn from experience, we have to acknowledge that the Democrats have not, in our lifetimes, ever nominated for president the most progressive of their options. Not once. And, in the end, we all know that Sanders will--as he is already pledged to do--endorse Biden or whichever of the Clinton lite alternatives the party thinks it can run without alienating the 1%. Trump is so awful that they may well elect such a candidate in 2020, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that any such option is going to make any serious change. And that candidacy will also give Trump his best chance of winning another term. And, if that happens, I have no doubt that the Democratic establishment and its media voices will blame it on forces to their left. Maybe the legions of Sanders supporters who didn't vote or voted for Trump, or perhaps the black voters or white women or workers or others who failed the Democratic party again by not showing up in enough numbers. And certainly the Greens. Maybe even Ralph Nader's residual influence. The Left will go nowhere if it can't deal with the material realities we face. On another note, some time back I asked for a single instance where the American movement ever did a serious balance sheet on its experience in its national electoral work. I got one response from a comrade with a document from outside the U.S. This tells us something about our capacity to critically evaluate socialist electoral projects, of which the episodic hallucinations about FDR are a tragic aspect. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] President Bernie Sanders?
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 think it's more likely, the Democrats would nominate the corpse of Lyndon LaRouche, because it would be less likely to say something objectionable. Should Sanders start winning primaries, the DNC will simply start changing the rules governing the selection of delegates--the old trick from 1968. And, if hell should freeze over and Sanders were to win the nomination, the DNC would surely hold a celebratory parade for him through Dallas . . . right past the school book depository. Of course, should the Democratic Party actually nominate even a nominal socialist, it might well require a reassessment of our understanding of the political order. I don't see any reason to expect that will happen. _ 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] Krugman on two parties
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. * Both parties defend "American value," as defined by centuries of practice. :-) On Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 10:38 AM Richard Fidler via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: > 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. > * > > But it's all about the Republicans -- and thus an apparent argument in > favour of the Democrats as the party that will still defend "American > values." > > -Original Message- > From: Marxism [mailto:marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu] On Behalf Of > Anthony Boynton via Marxism > Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 10:29 AM > To: rfid...@ncf.ca > Subject: [Marxism] Krugman on two parties > > 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. > * > > Despite the bullshit, Krugman’s analysis of the two parties is > substantially correct. > > > > The Great Republican Abdication: A party that no longer believes in > American values. > > New York Times by Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist April 22, 2019 > > > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com _ 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] Revolutionary strategy and the electoral road | John Riddell
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. * Realizing that this is a regrettably short note, I am compelled to ask what sort of strategic balance sheet have any of the groups engaged in electoral politics ever written? Or even a serious non-cheerleading analysis of their work after the end of a particular campaign? I suspect we know the answer. _ 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] Why I voted to dissolve the ISO – Revolutionary Socialist
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. * What never ceases to amaze me is that absolute unwillingness of people putting so much into the building of these groups to learn about previous failures. It really is a fundamental refutation of the very assumptions of . . . not just Marxism, but any substantive legacy of the Enlightenment at all. The ISO flared into prominence pretty quickly and really occupied the niche that the SWP/YSA had held for some years earlier. As soon as the group began claiming a membership of "about 3000," I thought to myself that they were going to hit the same glass ceiling that blocked the continued growth of the SWP. I pointed this out. I tried to talk to people in the ISO about it. Nobody wanted to hear it because, like good little children of the great ahistorical American empire, they instinctively saw everything as a one off. And they made many of the same suicidal mistakes that the SWP did.. The sad thing is that it really didn't have to happen. Even now, the former members of the ISO who are complaining bitterly about how the organization failed them (as though it wasn't also the other way around) just don't want to hear from anybody who challenges them to reach beyond their posturing and faux rage to a serious analytical discussion. And that really bodes poorly for the future. Comradely, Mark L. _ 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] Moderator's note
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. * Will do. This was the result of my using email via the phone, with which I'm not familiar (nor particularly happy). On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:25 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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 just purged a number of messages from A. Stewart and J. Pasco from the > moderator's queue because they had more than 3 recipients. In the > future, please stay within 3 recipients if you want to avoid being held > in a moderator's queue. > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ 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] The AnftiFa Antimonies, Part 3 | Washington Babylon
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 muddle that is Antifa's "organization" seems to reflect the obvious lack of coherence around a strategy. So much so that Brother Masko can only make assertions about who they are and how they feel . . . and not why they do what they do or what they aspire to achieve. Anyone else remember the schoolteacher in "All Quiet on the Western Front"? He urged others to put themselves at risk, while he himself was not going to join them or even to explain why they should do so. _ 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] The AnftiFa Antimonies, Part 3 | Washington Babylon
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. * Ok, so you're not interested in discussion. Thanks for clearing that up. On Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 2:41 PM Jeffrey Masko via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > Sorry to bother the collective buttlicking of idiots like Chris Hedges, you > can continue your dogpiling now as it is clear none of you are interested > in engaging those who believe in antifa tactics. Btw, I don't overall, but > have and continue to work with those that do, in order, to one- find out > what they really think aside from what people say they think or stand for- > and two, in order to not further alienate young organizers and activists by > curt, snobbish and uninformed opinions based on limited experience. > Moreover, it seems most how post on this list are more concerned about > their version of what the left is or should be and not with what is > actually happening. And folks wonder why they are being regarded as > dinosaurs. Good luck with that. > > Direct questions? To the best of my ability since I would never term myself > antifa. > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ 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] The AnftiFa Antimonies, Part 3 | Washington Babylon
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. * Really? You want a discussion of ideas. Dandy. That'd be a first for antifa apologists. Are you willing to answer some direct questions on the subject? _ 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] The AnftiFa Antimonies, Part 3 | Washington Babylon
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 antifa eagerness to choose abuse over engaging around ideas is a clear demonstration that Trump is just a symptom of a disease in body politic that is broadly and deeply pervasive. And fundamentally a faith-based response to reality. On Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 11:44 AM Jeffrey Masko via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > "Throwing these security agencies a bone by linking BIPOC organizers with > public hooliganism exhibited by a bunch of suburban revolutionaries who > have credit scores and the ability to very easily avoid serious > repercussions for said misbehavior is the height of petit bourgeois > posturing." > > Typical generalizations from someone who has limited experience. Stick to > talking about RI., you know nothing about actually anitfa groups outside > your immediate experience from what you write, yet you generalize this to > all antifa groups (??). I don't have much respect for antifa formations, > but what you write is so far off-base (like my quote above), it's no wonder > you use a hack like Chris Hedges as support, since you sound so much like > his whinging from the days of Occupy. > > Further, you post a copy of Bray's book, but don't even take the time to > critique it, which is quite easy due to his omission of any overlap of ML > and Anarchist theory just to begin with. > > Thanks for the same trite bullshit I can read damn near anywhere. > > j.masko > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ 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] Sanders started a revolution in 2016. In 2020, he can finish it | Bhaskar Sunkara | Opinion | The Guardian
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. * And, of course, I guess the non-officeholders and non-celebity mudsills plugging away for decaddes did nothing. That attitude really reveals something fundamentally laughable about this approach to class. On Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 10:50 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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/commentisfree/2019/feb/19/bernie-sanders-2020-election-democrats > > "But Bernie did run in 2016 – and not just for a single campaign, but > something far greater. Sanders reintroduced working-class politics in > the US." > > What fucking idiocy. Working-class politics means the self-organization > of workers, like the strike committees of the 1930s in places like > Flint, Michigan. When a genuine revolution begins to take shape in the > USA, you can bet that the Democrats will call out the cops and the > military to suppress it. > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com _ 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] Flirting With Liberals
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. * As an fyi, the DSA Refoundation dissolved last November. https://dsarefoundation.org/2018/11/11/dissolution/ Also, in a general sense, members declaring the DSA or any other organization as being in the wrong class is not only an abstraction but raises the question of why the hell anyone in the working class is in it. Too, isnt a left-wing caucus just going through the motions unless we reach out to the left-wingers in the DSA? And doing so with a plan of action for what we want the DSA to do in the here and now to move forward? And what we can do within the DSA to move the DSA that direction? _ 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] Roger Stone on Lyndon LaRouche
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.youtube.com/watch?v=PBsybNtzL58 _ 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] I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you
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. * He has risen! On Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 2:10 PM Jim Farmelant via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > > Yesterday evening, the Wikipedia page on Lyndon LaRouche had him as dead > for a while. That was later removed. Looking at the Talk page for that > article, apparently Chip Berlet had made that edit. Other Wikipedia editors > removed that edit on the grounds that news of LaRouche's had not appeared > in any reliable news sources. Chip Berlet insists that word of his death > has appeared on a number of Internet sources connected to the LaRouche > network. I suspect that Berlet, who has been studying LaRouche and his > followers for many years has gotten this right. > > > Jim Farmelant > http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant > http://www.foxymath.com > Learn or Review Basic Math > > > -- Original Message -- > From: Louis Proyect via Marxism > To: Jim Farmelant > Subject: Re: [Marxism] I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you > Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2019 18:15:43 -0500 > > 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. > * > > On 2/12/19 4:53 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: > > > > A message from Helga Zepp-LaRouche > > > > With infinite sadness I report to you that Lyn passed away this morning. > > There are no words to describe the loss to humanity. He left us, but he > > lives in the simultaneity of eternity. It is now up to us to realize his > > life‘s work. Helga > > > > > > May be bogus. Shit. > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/farmelantj%40juno.com > > Sad News For Meghan Markle And Prince Harry > track.volutrk.com > http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5c646b2839cfa6b287603st01vuc > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ 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] A Green New Deal Is the First Step Toward an Eco-Revolution
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. * It seems to me a very good first step in terms of getting climate change on the agenda . . . as with health care, wealth inequality, etc. Sure, I'd rather the independent Left be doing it, but it seems to have not known how to do so. Thus, we struck with what has been able to get those issues on the agenda--a bevy of new Democratic Congresswomen who have gotten down to addressing serious questions in the middle of the silliest political atmosphere in recent American political history. I think it's useful to see this as an essential step. I mean, we have always known that the first mass response when these issues surfaced on the grand scale was that voters would look to the Democratic party for relief. This is something through which we are destined to pass. *No amount of repeated denunciations of this course is going to make this phase shorter or less painful*. Indeed, watching the Democratic experience with those good "reasonable" candidates that don't scare the "moderate" voters is playing out in Virginia . . . and will continue to do so. And, at some point, Shumer and Pelosi will present the new members of Congress (and their many, many followers) with an ultimatum or a series of ultimatums. That will be the signal for us to have some useful advice and initiatives, where possible. Of course, we wanted to have positioned ourselves to have a more serious influence on these things, the various kibbles and bits of the far left could have started cooperative efforts to launch independent electoral interventions . . . or done it through the Greens or some other such vehicle. Given that this did not happen--and doesn't look very likely to happen now--we are left to buckle up and ride out this period. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] Impeach Trump Now - The Atlantic
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. * If you think we've seen gridlock in Washington now, just put Pence in the White House. Combine the authoritarian impulses and arrogance of media celebrity of Trump with the self-righteousness of an evangelical. Mind you, I prefer gridlock. There are few there who place any priority on doing us any good. (With a few exceptions, those eager young "progressives" who've appeared since the election mostly just look "progressive" standing alongside the Trumpified Republicans.) Whenever the bulk of them agree on something--that's the majority of the Congress, the White House, and the judiciary--it's almost always going to be bad for us. I mean, they've created the greatest structural polarization of wealth in history. And it still wasn't enough, so they had to do that "tax reform." And worse, nobody with any clout knows how to fight it or just doesn't want to fight it. . . . And I don't mean going to the polls and voting for more of the same. The official labor movement is so dead useless on this scale that you have Republican congressman quietly hoping the air traffic controllers will strike. A nice 24-hour general strike would be a damned good start to getting our brothers and sisters now forced to work for nothing some assistance. (btw, didn't we fight a goddamned civil war over that "involuntary sevitude" crap?) Or even a mass march on Washington--I mean hundreds of thousands of millions and not just paid lobbyists with a few celebrities. But, of course, such things would scare the crap out of almost all of them . . . which is exactly what we need to do . . . if we're serious. _ 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] John Salter Jr./Hunter Bear bio
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. * He was a gem of a fellow and certainly one of the most memorable people I've encountered in the movement. Hunterbear was incredibly generous with his time, advice and encouragement with anyone smart enough to seek him out. _ 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] Race, class and the DSA | 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. * Well, as has cropped up in other discussions here, racism is so pervasive in this society that no persons or currents should be trusted on the question until they're properly vetted by apologists for the party of Indian removal and genocide, Anglo Manifest Destiny, slavery, secession, segregation, and Japanese internment. _ 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] The Historical Profession is Committing Slow-Motion Suicide
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. * Agreed. . . . generally. Here, students can meet any history requirements by taking courses with a BoK [Body of Knowledge] designation as providing HP [Historical Perspectives]. What this means is that if people in an entirely unrelated field want to teach a course on the Beatles, it will pass muster as meeting a history requirement if they obtain an HP designation--and historians have no control over that. (And don't even get me started talking about what they've done to the language departments.) AP credit in history has done most of the immediate damage in this state. These are offered high school students and almost never taught by people who would be teaching a college level course. Students come out of it almost entirely ignorant of the most basic facts of history. Of course, the right-wing politicians mandate all sorts of crap because nobody ever pushes back--and those who find it inconvenient to push back is a long and tangled list. Administrators regularly try to act in anticipation of what they think the board or legislators might. As a result, they regularly initiate the most draconian measures--measures that are sometimes even more draconian would otherwise be the case . . .. . In terms of the role of faculty in all this, I have rarely seen much of an effort to push back on any of these things. And while college professors are certainly as much a part of the work force as anyone else, I have to add that they are probably the biggest flock of Scissorbills I've ever worked with. :-) Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] The Historical Profession is Committing Slow-Motion Suicide
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 a big subject, but this approach reflects a very much a top-down assessment . . . ie., that student demand is the engine behind all this. The fact is that the colleges and universities have followed the lead of secondary schools, etc. in dropping the history survey requirements. Permitting AP (advanced placement) for entering freshman has also enabled students to meet what were once college requirements in history or other subjects by taking an often half-assed silly "course" on the side and passing it. These always accounted for the largest single chunk of history enrollment. They've also cut back on other requirements that have encouraged people to get around the humanities. This reflects institutional priorities rather than those of students. And those institutional priorities reflect the class priorities of those making the final decisions about such things. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] PhD Supervision
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. * Place your issues before whoever is the supervisor. They should find a replacement easily enough. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 4:43 AM Ismail Lagardien via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > Hi Andrew > You asked: "Well, the short answer is "no," but how did you wind up in > such a > position? Nobody here forces anyone to be on a grad student's committee, > much less be an advisor or dissertation director." > I'm not the one who is the supervisor > Ismail > > > > > > Dr Ismail LagardienVisiting ProfessorWits University School of Governance > > Nihil humani a me alienum puto > > > On Sunday, 9 December 2018, 01:51:49 GMT+2, Andrew Stewart < > hasc.warrior.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > -- Forwarded message - > From: Mark Lause > Date: Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 6:33 PM > Subject: Re: [Marxism] PhD Supervision > To: Andrew Stewart , Activists and scholars > in Marxist tradition > > > Well, the short answer is "no," but how did you wind up in such a > position? Nobody here forces anyone to be on a grad student's committee, > much less be an advisor or dissertation director. > > I have never given a good damn about what somebody calls themselves. When > I started grad school, I met a self-described "Marxist" who voted > Republican. And then, there's good history written by people who would > probably never call themselves "Marxist." In academe, the term is > practically meaningless. > > Finally, considering who's already there, we shouldn't see ourselves as > gatekeepers of the Holy Chamber. For years, the most widely interviewed > professional historian in the U.S. was Newt Gingrich, a first rate dummy > with all the ethics of an alley cat that joined the Mob . . . wait, I want > to retract that statement, which is really unfair to alley cats. > Cheers,Mark L. > > > > -- > Best regards, > Andrew Stewart > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com _ 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] PhD Supervision
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. * Well, the short answer is "no," but how did you wind up in such a position? Nobody here forces anyone to be on a grad student's committee, much less be an advisor or dissertation director. I have never given a good damn about what somebody calls themselves. When I started grad school, I met a self-described "Marxist" who voted Republican. And then, there's good history written by people who would probably never call themselves "Marxist." In academe, the term is practically meaningless. Finally, considering who's already there, we shouldn't see ourselves as gatekeepers of the Holy Chamber. For years, the most widely interviewed professional historian in the U.S. was Newt Gingrich, a first rate dummy with all the ethics of an alley cat that joined the Mob . . . wait, I want to retract that statement, which is really unfair to alley cats. Cheers, Mark L. _ 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] Video-Clip of Uniting of Yellow Vests and CGT March on 1.12.
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. * Here's the same thing at a Strasbourg demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M38Mi74L4U ML PS: I am just finishing a course on 1968 and events could have hardly been more useful. :-) _ 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] A Gravestone for Covington Hall (1871-1952)
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. * There's an effort to mark the grave of our comrade and fellow worker, the IWW poet and an unsung hero of the labor movement in the Deep South. Here's the GoFundMe site. We are over half way there . . . . https://www.gofundme.com/help-set-a-marker-for-covington-hal?utm_source=internal_medium=email_content=campaign_link_t_campaign=welcome=IwAR08nardwzH5Xyvc9lFej0QXALr4ivp_XVoL-oe6KpHk_NeGE_VhTWBPxeM For some background on him. . . . https://solidarity-us.org/atc/104/p621/ _ 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] My recent piece marking the centenary of the end of WW I
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. * hear! hear! Gread job. On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 1:04 PM Dennis Brasky via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > Excellent! Thanks comrade! > > On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 12:25 PM Allen Ruff via Marxism < > marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > > > > > https://solidarity-us.org/atc/197/end-of-great-war/ < > > https://solidarity-us.org/atc/197/end-of-great-war/> > > > > > > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Why are Democrats okay with losing? | 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. * In the end, Mike, I don't think it's a matter of the dangers of Trump and "Trumpism," but the effectiveness and seriousness of the Democratic Party in opposing it. I'm sure we're all agreed that the Democrats coauthored what we all agree to be the curse of neo-liberalism and of plaguing the planet with more and more intense wars. I think we are also agree that neither earned any praise for directly addressing the persistence of systemic racism and sexism. They never do without a massive and insistent pressure from the people. The key question is what have the Democrats done over the last half century to justify our seeing them as a viable vehicle for opposing Trump. The record certainly indicates that they were utterly incapable of thwarting the Trump ascendancy, a task rather easier than unseating an established wrong. Indeed, they boasted that they would not hold Bush to account for his WMD lies, something that the most minimal requirement of their oaths of office required. But, then again, they didn't even investigate Reagan's criminal activities with any seriousness and they dropped their investigation of Nixon's activities once he decided to leave office. Can you provide a single case of the Democratic party nationally accomplishing something for the laboring people of this country? (The nationalization of Romneycare--the implementation of Nixon's old proposal doesn't count.) And, if you can't do that, give me one real reason to justify any faith in a party that has embraces and celebrates the same ideology and practice of the Republicans--from trickle down economics to war drones--and hasn't really even felt much of an impulse to do anything substantive for us since the civil rights legislation of the middle 1960s . . . half century ago. Comradely, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Why are Democrats okay with losing? | 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. * Mike's position reminds me of the story I've told before--brace yourself, you're going to hear it again--about when I asked a great uncle why he voted Republican. He told me about his grandfather and Abraham Lincoln and how, in his youth, he got inspired by Teddy Roosevelt. Well, I was just a wee sprout at the time, but knew that Abe Lincoln was dead about ninety years before and Teddy Roosevelt had almost forty years before. Nowadays, every time I have a serious discussion with someone who thinks we should vote Democratic, they tell me about FDR, a mere eighty years ago or maybe LBJ half a century in the rear view mirror. In the end, though, Mike's presented no real evidence for this fanciful interpretation of WWII (which really fleshed out the American empire), much less addressing the situation we face right now. several generations later. . . . Because the Democrats have changed very fundamentally . . . according to the Democratic movers and shakers themselves. This is often seen as a superficial shift to the right, but it reflects a series of deliberate structural changes in the character of the party to promulgate a new strategy. Cheers, Mark L. PS: As to whether that pits us against "the resistance" . . . .well, let me take a page from Mike's approach and go back to WWII. If a French person grumbles about the German occupation but supported the Vichy as a "lesser evil," would you take that as the position of "the resistance"? _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats Were Not "the Lesser Evil" for the Migrant Caravan
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. * Since the 1980s, Democratic strategy has implicitly embraced defeat. To remain the "lesser evil," they don't have to do anything but allow the Republicans to be worse. Democrats don't even have to promise anything or even commit themselves to anything other than not letting the Republicans be quite as awful as they're inclined to be. Not only is this a very undemanding strategy, but even defeat holds the expectation that unchecked Republican awfulness will stampede people to the polls to vote for Democrats. Indeed, letting the Republicans be as beastly as they want to the old Democratic base means that the Democrats themselves don't even have to make a special effort to mobilize workers, blacks, women, Latinos, etc. The most obvious problem with this strategy is that works less well the farther we get from civil rights legislation, the war on poverty, etc. Much as they're touting success in the mid-terms, their showing was pretty pathetic when you consider what they were up against. I can't understand how you could run a pet rock against Donald Trump and lose, but the Democrats found a way to do it in 2016, and they've found a way to minimize their possible successes in 2018. And they draw no lessons from any of these experiences. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Mueller Probe
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. * It's probably still appropriate to call it a "probe," but they've cranked out enough indictments and gotten some convictions with guilty pleas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_(2017%E2%80%93present) I don't honestly think that there's any "alleged" about criminal activities by the Trump machine in cooperation with the Russians, though we have yet to see how extensive it was. I personally think the whole lot of them think themselves above the law. We should view the Mueller investigation pretty much like the investigation of the state of Illinois into what they accurately called the "police riot" in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National convention. What Mueller and his people find (or any Congressional committee may find) could lead to either criminal prosecution or impeachment and removal from office. (The prosecution of a seated president is rather controversial and remains to be settled.) Your discussion of a two-thirds vote of the Senate indicates that you mean to be asking about the trial of a president after articles of impeachment are adopted by the House of Representatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_States An honest investigation would get the truth--the kind of investigation Illinois did in 1968 but the Democratic-dominated Congress didn't really do over Watergate, hardly pretended to do with Iran-Contra, and didn't even bother faking it over the WMD lies of Dubya. Are you asking about the "practical value" of the truth? Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Midterm elections | Richard Seymour on Patreon
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 geniuses on MSNBC this morning are of one mind. Yesterday, it was one thing, but this morning they're talking as though the Democrats didn't really do that well and it was all the fault of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, etc. Remember these are the same numbskulls who blamed Nader for Gore's loss (which wasn't a loss) in Florida back in 2000. You're never going to be "not too progressive" enough for these people. And, of course, they share the perspecti9ve of the Democratic establishment. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Liberal jubilation
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. * What i've found amusing is how many of the pundits and Democratic mouthpieces are now talking back the expectations that brought out many of those who voted for them. They're already yammering about how the parties have to work together. And look at all the women elected--who may also be ex-military and ex-National Security functionaries. And let's not be "confrontational" dealing with the the Trumpster fire. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] a protest
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. * (trying again . . .. .) As in 2016, the results pose the question as to whether Donald Trump is a political genius or the Democrats function rather like the Three Stooges trying to build a house. I know which option makes the most sense to me. By all accounts on the ground, the Democrats did few of the things they needed to do to maximize the outcome. In Texas, where Latino votes were key, the party did nothing to organize transportation for people to get to the polls. That used to be the bare minimum the organization would do. Various organizations here and there have tried to pick up the slack--the NAACP here, for example, but the results have been spotty. This really reflects the transformation of political parties in the U.S. which have come to function mostly as fund-raising organs that funnel money into television advertising. Look at how some of the Democratic candidates like Stacey Abrams, Beto O'Rourke, and Andrew Gillum have earned a reputation as exceptionally charismatic, etc. What makes them stand out from the others seems to be their ability to actually stand up and talk to other sentient human beings. A commentary on the state of political affairs here. (btw, Ted Cruz has just been declared the winner in Texas, assuring Republican control of the U.S. Senate.) Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Colbert's "Our Cartoon President"
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.youtube.com/watch?v=25mArQYdnjg=3=PLZ8c54cxQG2Er3jT_VcduPQWzeNMvvrzl _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sussex Uni professor tweets ‘Israelis blew up Twin Towers’
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'm suspicious of the idea of that students as a group can be brainwashed by anybody. In fact, I don't think that brains can generally be washed. :-) Not even with Purell. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump
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. * Democrats aren't opposed to protests, but on their own terms. Not overwhelming in numbers (because that makes them more difficult to manage). Something like the Kavenaugh protests were ideal. Noisy mass lobbying. Something to get the TV cameras swinging away from the latest Trump tweet to refocus on the designated Democratic spokesperson. And they don't want them repeated. No sooner than Occupy bubbled up, the Democrats sent AFL-CIO officials and others with very sharp pins to puncture them. That they appeared made the point the Democrats were happy to see made, but they didn't want anything aimed at an ongoing mass movement. Let's recall the massive, wonderful potential of those women's marches that greeted Trump's inauguration. Nobody seemed to know who was behind them beyond the usual Democratic front groups. And they drowned that potential no sooner than they revealed it. Democrats didn't want a genuinely independent movement around civil rights or against the Vietnam War and were trying to thwart it continually. At this stage, what forces are there to build such a movement beyond the very limited perspectives the Democrats would find permissible? The various socialist organizations? Militant community organizations? Churches? We are up against a network of institutions and institutional responses the Democrats have been repairing and extending since the 1970s. Solidarity, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump
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. * . . . and this--alas!--seems to be the one simple and obvious insight that none of the groups in the U.S. seem capable of reaching. Imagine, if you will, that the ISO and Solidarity took a notion to work on this sort of project together. Would it not have had an effect on Socialist Alternative and the other groups otherwise responding to different influences, whether the apparent allure of the fleshpots of the Democratic party or the attraction of getting to achievements by the eternal jihad against the deadly menace of creeping Pabloism. And, if something like the DSA is an apt reflection of where we are right now, what would it look like had something like this were undertaken--or had been undertaken. I think that, at the very least, we'd have a venue for the kind of discussion, the absence of which John rightly deplores. I'm not even talking regroupment--which I have favored for decades--just cooperation on an electoral project. Everybody would still get to be the top dog in their own little kennel . . .. they'd just have to spend a wee bit of time, energy and effort on doing something with the larger movement in mind. In places, it might have made sense to work through the Greens or Peace and Freedom. (In places--New York, for example--it might still make sense.) Elsewhere, other venues may be of service. Or we can sit it out and condemn everything, deploring the dunderheadedness of the working class that looks to electoral politics as a means of influencing their future and struggling to find a "lesser evil," partly because the socialist left hasn't figured out to put together a viable positive good at its disposal. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump
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. * Please, God. Let's not go jousting windmills in search of a precise definitions of class and classitudity (or classitudityness). What matters isn't our fine tuning these things among ourselves but addressing how people who are not on this list address these things. Finally, I'm astonished by the idea that I've never been a member of a working class organization. I have been in any number of unions over the course of the last 50+ years, but none of them ever shared a class perspective or outlook. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump
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. * SAlt? Say it ain't so . . . . :-) I saw a video of them singing "the Internationale" at their convention. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump
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. * Thanks, Richard. An interesting piece. I agree with the points made about the necessity of independent mass movements, etc.--but I think that we're finding ourselves in a very different situation than the old road maps would have indicated. There are lots of reasons for this, but I'll try to avoid tangents. The biggest single problem we've faced over the last few decades has been the smudging between mass movements and protests (I similarly think that the idea of building a party with protest votes is equally problematic.) The big women's march after Trump's election and some of the later actions, including the Kavenaugh protests, recycled an idea that came out of Occupy. We have protests that are essentially one-offs, and exist mostly at the whim of the Democratic Party or sections thereof. Part of this likely draws on the desire for television wallpapering comparable to that provided by the earlier Tea Party B.S. that Republican lobbyists funded and fielded. These never really amounted to much as a movement in the streets, but it was heavily hyped, widely discussed and treated as a serious "movement" by those who wanted the Republican Party to pursue its mad agenda. In the process, the very idea of what a movement was and is supposed to do seems to have been taken out of our hands and translated into something of a ritualized street theatre that existed to frame whatever B.S. the politicians wanted to hype. That kind of non-movement "movement" isn't going to give rise to independent political action--no more than building a fanciful "wing" of the Democratic party is going to lead to the emergence of a mass party of the working class. A major priority would seem to me to involve our regaining control over what a movement is and what it needs to do. In that sense, independent political action can play something of a role on that question right now. Conversely, not doing anything about it cedes the venue to the dead end of "lesser evil" politics and whatever degree of conservatism is passing as "liberal" these days. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump
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 bottom line is there should be some sort of national progressive alternative. Whether it calls itself socialist or labor or anything isn't as important as challenging the dictatorship of capitalism. This could have happened and it didn't. Notwithstanding complaints about Our Revolution or the ambiguities of the DSA--and let's throw in the almost religious flakiness of the Greens--something could have been done about this. And years ago. There are literally thousands of us ready to throw ourselves into such an effort. This could have happened easily if two or three or more of the various socialist tiddlywinks clubs had decided that building this alternative--even temporarily. Doesn't it make you wonder? :-) Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Cesar Sayoc, pipe bomb suspect, arrested: what we know - Vox
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. * As an fyi, Sayoc also started a Facebook site "Kill all socialists." Nice that we're being thought about. Also, the images he put on the side of his van included not only Democratic politicians and people associated with the Democratic Party (as seen through a rifle scope) but Jill Stein. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Has America Become a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy?
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 think we'd have made more money in the religion biz and, there, you don't have to produce anything new . . . not even a magazine. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Has America Become a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy?
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. * Well, the trouble is that this rhetorical appeal for a return to "the good ol' days" is hardly peculiar to Trump or the Right or the Republicans. The never-Trumpers in the GOP, the moderate (ie value-free and value-less) Democrats, and the liberals are all whinging on about the good old days before Trump and the idiots came out of nowhere and spoiled that wonderful idyllic political utopia they imagine the United States to have been. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] A New Chapter in the Police Department’s Crackdown on the 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. * Like so many of what passes for movement groups today, Antifa finds itself in a situation where anybody can do things in their name. We've seen this over the years with all sorts of currents. There are a large number of considerations that created this state of affairs, but it will continue until they figure out that the only real answer is broad-based, democratic mass movements, transparent in terms of their decision-making and eager to share their rationales with as broad a circle as possible, including through the media. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founder
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. * David, I think it would be very useful for you to write up this experience. We are getting to the point where these kinds of things are rapidly passing into history, and this is a subject rich in usable lessons. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump | The New Yorker
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. * There was a very telling exchange at one point where MSNBC was interviewing Jill Stein. The script centered on her visit to Moscow (a dunderheaded idea), but stein pointed out all the myriad ways in which the system (including the "liberal media") stacked the deck in Trump's favor. The commentator cut her off with the comment, "yes, but what we're discussing here is Russia." If we consider Putin that the oligarchs as part of the same game that the oligarchs here at home play with electoral politics, it's quite possible to see both the decisive role of Russia in tilting the election and the way that this is used as a distraction from the broader questions about the game itself. I think we should condemn Putin for his role in stealing the election process as thoroughly as we should condemn the Koch brothers and others who've regularly done the same thing. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] From inside the White House
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. * An insider in the Trump administration questions his capacity for office and says that there are discussions now about removing him for incapacity. This would allow the government--both parties--to avoid the troublesome matter of emoluments, corruption, obstruction of justice, the Russian brew-hah, etc., etc., etc. ML " many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. " I would know. I am one of them." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] After a professor wrote about hating white people, Rutgers considers the limits of free speech - The Washington Post
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. * It's so, so tough for the oppressed white people. They, like "Christians," have somehow managed to find themselves discriminated against and maligned as well. So someone patiently explained to me not that long ago. My response was that any group that constituted the preponderant majority with a stranglehold on the dominant institutions of power and wealth proved to be so stupid as to find themselves so sorely put upon were probably ripe for replacement or absorption . . . . . _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] David McReynolds in the context of American radicalism | 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. * Thanks for this, Louis. It confirmed my impression of him from the wilds of the Midwest. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?
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. * You seem to be reading a great deal more coherence into the DSA than I see. I decided early on that I would not try to play any kind of leadership role in a body that seemed to me to be so incoherent. All of us can influence the atmosphere among some members and in those parts of the organization that we can each. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] ARE THE THIEVES FALLING OUT?
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. * Yes, both the fascists and the Nazis politically purged their police and military forces. Remember that scandalous practice Hitler introduced of swearing fealty to him rather than to the nation? But, even if there were serious extralegal armed bands operating with impunity on a large scale, Trump simply doesn't really have the attention span for it. Trump and his circle have utter contempt for anyone who actually knows how to do something. This covers the kid bagging groceries to the woman at the McDonald's window giving the Secret Service limo the president's Big Mac . . . and all civil servants or all sorts, including those who have spent their lives performing roles the State once viewed as essential. We're getting the pushback because the childish tantrums are infringing on the well-established practices of the intelligence community and law enforcement. And, btw, the Republicans are useless as a pet rock in protecting those practices, so who rises to defend the imperialist structure, eh? :-) Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?
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. * There's no reason not to do things just because the leadership doesn't want to take the initiative. Everywhere it can be done, people should set up.or involve themselves in classes around basic political questions . . . And get to know the more militant minded. On Thu, Aug 16, 2018, 4:32 PM David Berger via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > > To: John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> > Subject: DSA > > In my opinion, you need to split and form a new branch. > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?
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. * Certainly so. The natural dynamic about the credulous is to expand their appreciation of Ocasio-Cortez to candidates who are not in the DSA . . . and then other "progressive" Democrats, whether they actually are "progressive" or not . . . And we're already hearing the Old Guard rallying to Nancy Pelosi, explaining that hostility to her is all due to Republicans or those left-wingers echoing the Republicans. On the other hand, they say, "boy, can she raise money." And that's the bottom line. The Democrats cannot accommodate socialism any more than socialists can ultimately accommodate the Democratic Party. Cheers, Mark L. . _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?
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. * People join the DSA not the Young Democrats. This is a conscious choice. The fossils hallucinators of FDR notwithstanding, the predispositions at the base have a dynamic towards independent action. I have written some longer things on this, but the basic argument we need to understand is that they must learn the pitfalls of the Democratic Party through experience, regrettable though that may be. I can sit down with my long white Grand Army of the Republic beard and tell them about Gene McCarthy, etc. But that's unfortunately not how people in large numbers tend to learn these things. Btw, this is what I mean when I wrote that the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others represents a real victory for us. This experience--and it will not encourage faith in the Democratic Party--will mark a new stage for us, one which we have not seen in our lifetimes thus far. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] SCOTUS upholds Muslim Ban
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. * For the long and very political lead-up to the Santa Clara decision, check out chapter six of _The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West_. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] "Pioneer" monuments are just as racist as Confederate ones
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 think pioneer monuments are actually more of a mixed bag. I'd suggest that a more homogeneous message comes from the even more ubiquitous let's-teach-our-little-boys-to-be-war-heroes monuments. :-) Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Ohio's Special Election Tuesday
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. * We had a special election in very Republican and very gerrymandered district a few days back. The outcome is still in doubt because the count is so close, though it looks as though the Democrats lost by a very tiny margin. Delaware county-- the wealthiest in the state (and one of the richest in the nation) with a median household income well into six digits--provided the overwhelmingly Republican numbers that secured this apparent victory. Two points . . . . . So the national media's that declined to dirty their hands covering the Green campaign has been whinging endlessly how the Greens are responsible for the loss. That same media described Delaware County as both "rural" and "working class"--another case when realities are shoehorned into a narrative whereby the uneducated middle-of-the-country rubes were upsetting the applecarts of the enlightened. People should remember this next time their tempted to echo that drooling media idiocy about the dangers of "populism." Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance wows SF’s Mission. Her speech not so much. - Mission Local
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. * Since her victory, I think Bernie and the other fossils have taken her under their wing and persuaded her that FDR was really a closet socialist (albeit also a warmonger and a segregationist) . . . And that the Democratic decision to purge the party of the more radical New Dealers with the Red Scare really didn't do much of any harm to it . . . And the later decision to go back after 1972 and exorcise the ghost of liberalism from the party somehow just didn't take . . . And that Carter, Clinton, and Obama were all very, very radical but just didn't do anything about it. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance wows SF’s Mission. Her speech not so much. - Mission Local
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 think that's not an unreasonable response to socialism as a "label." Rather than fighting over vocabulary like adysfunctional English Department, the fight should be around the political question of power, no? Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance wows SF’s Mission. Her speech not so much. - Mission Local
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 don't think there's any inconsistency between electoral politics in the here and now with "pragmatism." Her explicit falsification of Democratic party history--I think that was at that recent conference of "progressive" Democrats--was absolutely BS. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Trumpism: The Real Danger of Donald Trump
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. * Not a quibble. I agree entirely that the Wallace campaign represented the last gasp of the New Deal . . . and a forlorn hope for heading off the social insanity of the Cold War. You don't get a glimmer of its resurgence until the Great Society, bloodied by Vietnam and the repression of the black movement . . . and the Democrats battered that flicker to death after 1972. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Trumpism: The Real Danger of Donald Trump
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. * A thoughtful piece well worth the reading. To my mind, "Trumpism" always struck me as a fevered attempt to create a kind of zombie McCarthyism. People tend to remember that scoundrel time as one of ideological anti-Communism, aimed first at the USSR and its presumed allies, including the "home grown" subversives. But the organized Left were never large enough to be posing a serious threat. It did tremendous damage to what remained of the radicalization of the 1930s and 40s, but it began in Truman's effort to marginalize the diehard New Dealers and, later, by McCarthy and other opportunists to bully their way into a stronger position in the governing structure. All of this involved conjuring an "international Communist conspiracy." For believers, that conspiracy centered on fears of "the deep State," the unelected, appointed Federal bureaucrats attempting to feminize America, destroy national virtue with its international influences, impose restrictions on business, put chemicals into the water, etc. To defend an idea of freedom that embraced their own right to be free from any altenrative ideas of arguments, they ritually victimized individuals exercising their right to speak freely or organize or just be different. It was as anti-science and as anti-rational as anything the Trumpwads have conjured. And--in the complete absence of the organized Left in that repressive context--the right-wingers enjoyed a monopoly in focusing class resentments. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Why the Russia-Trump Collusion Conspiracy Theory Isn’t Catching On
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. * It seems reasonable that the Russian government used Wikileaks, which always saw its mission essentially as airing whatever came its way. Interesting how easily the right-wing was able to use this to its own purposes. And when all is said and done, the bottom line is going to be asserting the primacy of the State against "non-State actors." _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA: Don't Endorse Cynthia Nixon or any Democrats. Ever.
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. * We want them to vote for a working class alternative. Canvassing people to vote Democratic is "organizing" people to vote Democratic. What's wrong with this picture? _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA: Don't Endorse Cynthia Nixon or any Democrats. Ever.
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 think being in the situation where you are in the polling place with nothing but a Democrat to vote for is a condemnation of what we've done over the previous months and years. I know people who've spent their entire lives since the 1960s making the argument of "no options, but next time . . . " :-) What would be a lot more productive is trying to figure out what the hell we need to do to influence events in the concrete. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] "We don't care"
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 Democrats will no more nominate a "dangerous leftists" than the Republicans. I was listening this morning to one of the MSNBC former Republicans whining about how free market lunacy has no home any more other than the Democratic Party. This recalls the situation under Dubya when former Reagan Republicans switched to get into Congress as Democrats. Anyone, one of these sages suggested that there would be a major realignment in which the rational capital worshippers could rally 'round the Democratic standard and leave the GOP to the "white Populists," while the Sanders people would start their own kinda leftish social democraticy progressive-ish party. Of course, in a duopoly there wouldn't be any room for the latter. . . . and if Sanders would actually lead a serious bolt. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Why the Russia-Trump Collusion Conspiracy Theory Isn’t Catching On
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. * If you judge the article by the yardstick of the kind of evidence used in a courtroom, you're misunderstanding what you're looking at . . . . The article summarizes the technical evidence as "tracing control of email and social media accounts and a tool for remote internet connections" and specifies bits of what this means. This all; seems quite straightforward to me, with absolutely nothing particularly surprising as to what I'd expect their technological capabilities. Of course, I'd be open to hearing something from a technical expert in the field explain how it was. Still, we'll find out soon enough. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Why the Russia-Trump Collusion Conspiracy Theory Isn’t Catching On
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.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-cyber/u-s-indictments-show-technical-evidence-for-russian-hacking-accusations-idUSKBN1K32X1 On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 4:12 AM, Michael Marking via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > > Yes! Where’s the real evidence? > > Crossing a thread line here, I agree with Louis Proyect, who wrote on > Friday 2018.07.20, “Frankly, I don't care if Russia helped Trump get > elected or not.” Nor am I convinced that a Clinton victory would have > made much difference. > > Trump has performed a great service to the leadership and backers of > both parties: he has provided a highly effective distraction. While > various supporters and opponents have vociferously made their views > known – and garnered a lot of media coverage in the process – the > main event, the looting of the main body of the people, has gone or > continued pretty much unnoticed in the press and among the people in > the street. It’s all about tweets and abuse of expense accounts and > Russian collusion, and not about the deeper story. Yes, Trump represents > the ruling class, in the same way that a clown represents a circus. It > doesn’t matter whether he does it intentionally or knowingly or not, but > he does it anyway. He’s a great distraction. > > This whole matter of Russian collusion and the purloined DNC files > serves as a good example, as a part of the distraction. Whether the > collusion issue matters or not in the grand scheme of things, it has > resulted in the insanity of just about everyone. Maybe I’m missing > something here, so someone help me, but where is the evidence for any > version of this story? I looked at the indictment: it has allegations, > but no evidence. I looked at the DNI report: the same story. The gold > standard for forensic evidence would be Clinton’s server, but, as Trump > asked, where is it? (I doubt if Trump really comprehends the > significance of his own question here.) Destruction of evidence is a > crime, too, but does anyone care? I’m certainly not defending Trump > here, but I don’t believe any statements by anyone from the FBI, CIA, > NSA, or anyone else in the so-called intelligence community, nor do I > have any confidence in whatever Putin or just about anyone else says. > This whole thing is just a big show. > > When I tell someone I can’t accept the official version of this or that > story (the JFK assassination, the 2001 WTC demolition, and so on), and > people ask me what really happened, I almost always have to answer, “I > don’t know, but the official story doesn’t work, it isn’t consistent > with the facts”. But people have an extremely difficult time accepting > that. It’s as if people demand an answer, even a wrong one, and refuse > to be put into a position of ignorance. They’d rather be wrong than > ignorant. > > I’m new to this Marxism thing. Somehow, until the last two years, I’d > never been exposed to it. But it works well for my minimalist approach > to certainty. It doesn’t matter if Putin helped Trump or if Wikileaks > got the DNC files from any specific person or what really was behind > any gas attack in Syria: the class analysis subsumes these things. It > has been a little like reading Einstein’s General Theory: it encompasses > the Special Theory, which generalizes Newton’s laws, and so on. It makes > predictions which can be tested. It’s not complete, as we still don’t > have a grand theory of everything, but it’s up the ladder. > > Of course, I get sucked into these ancillary questions, too. It’s fun, > I’m a sucker for unsolved puzzles, and I like a good story and > appreciate entertainment. Meanwhile, as Michelle Wolf pointed out at the > White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the folks in Flint still don’t have > clean drinking water. And, I might add, they’re still dying and > otherwise suffering all over the world. > > I’m not asking anyone to drop these topics. As I said, I enjoy them. > I’ve stopped reading some “news” sites since I began reading this list: > it’s a great source of links to news and more. > > So I ask all you old-timers, in all humility, what have I been missing? > Where is the real evidence that Julian Assange was or wasn’t duped, > that he colluded or participated? While I’d find it hard to swallow a > line that the Russian state didn’t fool around
Re: [Marxism] Why the Russia-Trump Collusion Conspiracy Theory Isn’t Catching On
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. * Right now, there's breaking news that Michael Cohen asserts that Trump knew about the 2016 meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower before it took place. The entire Russian association is real and important, though it's essentially a sideshow for the general carnival of corruption around the president and his minions. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Liberal Blind Spots Are Hiding the Truth About ‘Trump Country’
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. * Much of this is also very obviously sectional, as well as class-based. It's amusing that two New York figures ran against each other and the outcome is said to express the will of the Midwestern, white "working class" voters and their unreasoning "populist" hostility to the well-educated, well-informed designated decision-makers. :-) _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The excuses some Marxists make for voting Democratic (part one) | 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. * If you're correct, this is a model for stopping something awful from continuing (and I'm not sure that, in this case, it actually did) rather than accomplishing some of the very basic things that \we need to be accomplished for us. Then, too, this is a model that's been implemented now for as long as I've been alive. And if we have to stretch back nearly half a century for a case where this model worked . . . kinda, sorta . . . .what does that tell us? What accomplishes things is to mobilize masses of people and get them into the streets in large, self-organized actions. The politicians will follow, as they did in during the antiwar movement and the movement to defend and expand the rights for African Americans, Latinos, women, and LGBT. No? _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Helsinki: Was it "excellent"? Should we care?
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 think the development if very important as well, though Trump still represents the mainstream of the U.S. ruling class. He's not a rogue actor, though he plays one on TV. The American masters engineered the greatest polarization of wealth in all of human history. We've seen. We watched it. We couldn't figure out and implement a plan to prevent it. No matter. Trump slapped the icing on the cake with his "tax reform." I think Trump could pop out of a cake naked in the middle of the Oval Office and the ruling class would be just fine with it. He's their fair-haired (or bewigged) boy for the present. The fact that the Democrats have been dead useless as an opposition and the Republicans have cheered him on reflects that. More telling, the great American Bullshit about economic prosperity is pretty much accepted as real and circulated widely. His attempt to be of service to Russian oligarchs as well as American oligarchs doesn't necessarily cause problems for them. Helsinki caused a brief problem, but the mere show of a walk back pretty much settled things. . . . for the present, at least. We now seem to have moved on to Playboy models, payoffs and Cohen tapes. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The excuses some Marxists make for voting Democratic (part one) | 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 think it's accurate to say that the DSA is much like the old SDS in its relation to the Democratic Party. It is both inside the Democratic Party and outside of it. The best way to think about this is probably not what radicals shouldn't be doing in terms of electoral politics, but what they SHOULD be doing. If anyone can show me one single example of radicals going into the Democratic party and building something useful to them (and not just useful to the Democrats), I'd be quite willing to sit down and take a look at it. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Breaking news: From the start, Trump knew about covert Russian efforts on his behalf
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/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] He'll Sink-ee?
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. * Looks as though President Trump has finally overplayed his hand, doesn't it? The "resistance" has, not surprisingly, taken the form of an adulation of--and appeals to--the alleged integrity of the very institutions that placed a particularly stupid and self-interested Robber Baron in the presidency. That said, the collapse of his presidency will not restore faith in those institutions--not the parties, not the Justice Dept., not the intelligence community. Cheers, Mark L. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/trump-putin-meeting-us-russia-helsinki-finland-summit-live-updates-today-2018-07-16/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] “It Really Comes Down to Empowering the Working Class”
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. * Today, I've seen tweets indicating that the DSA is now up to 45,000 and still growing. It has been generations since so many Americans have joined an organization self-described as "socialist." One of the great mistakes the socialist movement (with a few exceptions) made in my youth was to dismiss the SDS for its disorganized thinking about electoral politics. The place of socialists was to be in there making the case for class politics. And I don't mean this in a sectarian way. As with the SDS, the real key involves actions beyond the electoral arena that make subservience to the Democratic Party an increasingly obvious contradiction. Cheers, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] EPA chief Scott Pruitt flees Washington eatery after woman cradling toddler confronts him, says he's 'harming' children - NY Daily News
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. * That's the guy with the two dozen bodyguards or something . . . to keep environmentalists from yelling at him when he shows his mug in public. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] SCOTUS upholds Muslim Ban
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. * Indeed!"Corporations are people,too." But people are only people insofar as they can pay for it. :-) On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 8:20 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote: > how about "discovering" that the 14th Amendment applied to CORPORATIONS!! > > On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 7:37 AM, Mark Lause wrote: > >> That the court isn't or wasn't political has been one of the great >> mythologies of American politics. >> >> This is most dramatic in the shifts in its interpretations of the 14th >> Amendment in terms of school desegregation. 180 degree turns that make >> sense only in reference to politics. Or anything from the Warren Court >> through Rowe v. Wade . . . .. >> > > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] SCOTUS upholds Muslim Ban
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. * That the court isn't or wasn't political has been one of the great mythologies of American politics. This is most dramatic in the shifts in its interpretations of the 14th Amendment in terms of school desegregation. 180 degree turns that make sense only in reference to politics. Or anything from the Warren Court through Rowe v. Wade . . . .. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected
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. * Nothing done by Bush was done without active Democratic collusion. Don't rely on your member to go back past 2004. Talk to someone who was around at the time or read a book. The threat on the Right argument has been absolutely central to the Democratic strategy for decades. God knows, it's not as though they even bother to promise us much any more in terms of new policies. On Sun, Jul 1, 2018 at 5:54 PM, Michael Meeropol wrote: > MAYBE in 2004 --- I don't remember worries about incipient fascism before > that --- (maybe 1984??) > > in 2000 virtually the entire left argued that a vote for Gore was > worthless ...most of us didn't think Bush would be as bad as he turned out > to be ... > > It is possible that Bush's policies in office spooked a lot of lefties > into wanting to get into bed with liberals --- I confess I'm guilty --- > hence the fears expressed in 2004 and the (now ridiculous) enthusiasm for > Obama in 2008 > > But anyone with eyes and ears in 2016 should have seen fascism coming in > the person of Trump and his coalition ... > > On Sun, Jul 1, 2018 at 5:43 PM, Mark Lause wrote: > >> We've heard this "true danger of fascism" argument every election in my >> lifetime. >> >> Aside from his record-level miserable character, Trump's been able to be >> as awful as he has been precisely because the Democrats have been >> > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected
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. * We've heard this "true danger of fascism" argument every election in my lifetime. Aside from his record-level miserable character, Trump's been able to be as awful as he has been precisely because the Democrats have been playing dead for decades. All this current hoo-haa about the Supreme Court is taking place because the Democrats under Obama didn't fill the seat they had open. True, they asked, but the Republicans said no, so . . . . But all of this comes from the central Democratic strategy, which they've pursued religiously for the last 30-40 years. Indeed, the only Democratic strategy . . . . ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Opinion | The Millennial Socialists Are Coming - The New York Times
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. * All careers are still in the making. It's worth recalling that Debs was older when he was winning reelection as a Democratic legislator back in Indiana. On Sun, Jul 1, 2018 at 5:12 PM, MM via Marxism wrote: > 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. > * > > > On Jul 1, 2018, at 6:41 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < > marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > > > > We've come a long way from what Max Horkheimer once wrote: > > > > "a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, > interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, > ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an > almost superhuman belief.” > > It seems most likely that most of the dreams of most of those who are > currently elated will eventually be crushed. But if the message of the hour > is “This almost certainly isn’t going to work,” then surely it’s fair to > ask whether the people who need to hear that message are more likely to > hear it, and draw the right lessons, from people who’ve rolled up their > sleeves and are down in the trench digging alongside them—with nothing but > “an almost superhuman belief” to keep them going—or from people standing on > the high road above them, looking down with a battle-weary and > well-footnoted sneer. > > Misery indeed. Oh, but for a little company. > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/ > options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected
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. * Well, sometimes doing what we have to do requires us to learn how to handle rattlesnakes. We have to be clear that these efforts--exceptions or not--are going to slam right into that usual Democratic brick wall. And we have to be honest with those engaged in such campaigns. But to dismiss the many tens thousands of people who call themselves socialists and are misplacing their hopes in such thins as "liberals" or "merely Democratic voters" strikes me as seriously mistaken. I would regard them as comrades engaged on a mistaken course. And what they're doing is unleashing a process that will have a dynamic of its own, that will work immensely to our benefit. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Live by the State, Die by the State
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. * We need to start a class struggle left wing in the professor's unions. Then, we finally levitate the Pentagon. On Fri, Jun 29, 2018, 9:55 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > CUNY radicals criticize the PSC leadership, calling upon the > rank-and-file professor to re-energize the union in face of the Supreme > Court Janus ruling. Good luck with that. > > https://cunystruggle.org/2018/06/27/live-by-the-state-die-by-the-state/ > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected
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 very big victory. And an essential art of the process . . . . Putting her into the U.S. Congress as a Democrat will no more change things than electing Bernie Sanders president as one would have changed things. There are a certain number of people in the American working class who understand this--larger than most of you would say, but still microscopic compared to the working class in general. The vast majority of the working class that are not entirely warped by reactionary prejudices, racism, sexism, jingoism, etc. believe that change can be effected through the Democratic party. This idea is full of crap and will never really work, though efforts to do this may have ripples that move things far beyond the intentions of those making them. The problem is that the masses of workers interested in serious change will not learn this lesson by our repeating what we have been saying for decades. They're going to have to learn this for themselves. Given that, the movement is simply going to have to go through a process of trial and error with these things. This is not going to be like Bernie Sanders, whose campaign actually offered us nothing particularly new in terms of the Democratic experience and did nothing in terms of the problems of being and having a socialist in office under the Democratic label. Her election and her experience--and the obstacles the Democrats will throw her direction--will enter into the material, concrete experience of the DSA. Like I said, it's save them a lot of time if they'd just move independently. But those that we'd be able to convince with words have been convinced. There is now emerging a very broad current that's trying to build a movement and learn from the experience. Our job is not going to be an easy one. But this is part of the process that will educate by experience many more than can be educated by our words. Comradely, Mark L. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
