[Marxism] Review of Avital Ronell's 'Complaint'
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. * By Scott McLemee http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/09/07/review-avital-ronells-complaint _ 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] How the Far Right Conquered Sweden
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 7, 2018 How the Far Right Conquered Sweden A bastion of social democracy, the country refused to deal with the realities of mass immigration. By Jochen Bittner Mr. Bittner is a political editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. STOCKHOLM — To understand why Sweden, a bastion of social democracy, might end up with a far-right party in government after national elections on Sunday, you need to take a walk with Ahmed Abdirahman. An American-educated Somali immigrant who works as a policy analyst at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Abdirahman grew up and now lives in the suburb of Rinkeby-Tensta, where some 90 percent of residents have a foreign background, roughly 80 percent live on welfare or earn low incomes and 42 percent are under age 25. It is a violent place: Sixteen people were killed there in 2016, mostly in drug-related conflicts, an unheard-of number in this typically peaceful country. As we walk along one of its main streets at 7 p.m., shopkeepers pull down the metal shutters in front of their windows, while young masked men on scooters start speeding through the streets. A police helicopter hovers overhead. The segregation and violence of Rinkeby-Tensta, and the likelihood that the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party will win the most votes in this weekend’s national elections, are both the result of the country’s long-running unwillingness to deal with the realities of its immigration crisis. For decades, Sweden, once a racially and culturally homogeneous country with an expansive social welfare system, insisted that it could absorb large numbers of non-European migrants without considering how those migrants should be integrated into Swedish society. As they did in cities across Western Europe, migrants tended to cluster in low-income neighborhoods; facing poor job prospects and rampant employment discrimination, they naturally turned inward. More young women have started wearing the hijab recently, Mr. Abdirahman tells me, and more young men “internalize the otherness” — rejected by their new society, they embrace the stereotypes imposed upon them. This can lead to a point where they reject gay rights or liberalism as “white, Western ideas,” and even attack firefighters because they represent the state. As we walk around, Mr. Abdirahman, who is single and childless, confesses: “When I came here in 1998, to me this place was paradise. Today, I wouldn’t want my children to grow up here.” Mr. Abdirahman says he was lucky: His mother encouraged him to contribute to society and get a good education. He earned a degree in international studies in New York, then worked in Geneva and with the United States Embassy here before going to work with the chamber of commerce. Not all immigrants get the same push at home, he says; some parents discouraged their youngsters from going to the city center to mix. Sweden, he is afraid, has entered a vicious circle of immigration, segregation and growing mutual hostility. The situation grew worse with the latest mass influx of refugees, in 2015, after which a number of suburbs became almost exclusively migrant. Considered “no go” areas by some Swedes, these neighborhoods are known to outsiders only from horrific headlines. What people don’t get to see, Mr. Abdirahman worries, is the bus driver or the cleaning lady working themselves ragged to get their children into a university. None of this is new, and yet the government, dominated by the traditionally strong Social Democrats and the centrist Moderate Party, did far too little. That left an opening for the Sweden Democrats, until recently a group relegated to the racist fringe of Swedish politics. In the past few years, the party has recast itself; just like the populist Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany and the Five Star Movement in Italy, it has repositioned itself as anti-establishment and anti-immigrant. The Sweden Democrats accuses all other political actors and the media of “destroying” Sweden, calls for a suspension of the right to asylum and promotes an exit of Sweden from the European Union. The party has clocked up to 20 percent in the latest polls, enough to make a coalition government between the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party unlikely — and raising the chances that one of those parties will have to enter into a government with the Sweden Democrats. “If the major parties had been able to read the majority’s concerns, things would have been different,” Mr. Abdirahman says. Similar stories have played out across Western Europe, from the Netherlands to
Re: [Marxism] How the Far Right Conquered Sweden
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. * Of course, the real reason for the generalized fears that are now turned in the direction of xenophobia and nationalism is the fact that inequality has risen faster in Sweden than in any other OECD country in the last 3 decades. A virtually complete abandonment of social housing policies with a severe housing shortage and skyrocketing prices and rents as a result, the world’s most neoliberal, for-profit school system (basically a copy of Pinochet’s system that has since been scrapped in Chile) and which foreseeably has led to segregation and a drop in results for everyone, zero taxes on inheritance and wealth, corporate taxes almost as low as in Ireland, and so on. And all the usual neoliberal policies, of course, leading to permanent mass unemployment, austerity in the public sector, an ever increasing share of the tax burden falling on the working class etc. > 7 sep. 2018 kl. 18:30 skrev Louis Proyect via Marxism > : > > POSTING RULES & NOTES > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > * > > NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 7, 2018 > How the Far Right Conquered Sweden > A bastion of social democracy, the country refused to deal with the realities > of mass immigration. > By Jochen Bittner > _ 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] What Would a Socialist America Look Like? - POLITICO Magazine
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[Marxism] Operation Finale | 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. * COUNTERPUNCH, SEPTEMBER 7, 2018 Having seen both a documentary and narrative film about Hannah Arendt that focused on her famous (and to some, infamous) reporting on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, I was curious to see what “Operation Finale” had to say. Directed by Paul Weitz, who is best known for commercial work like “American Pie” and “The Twilight Saga”, it chronicles the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960 by a team of Mossad agents led by Peter Malkin, who is played by Oscar Isaac. Ben Kingsley co-stars as Eichmann and makes a trip to your local movie theater worthwhile. Matthew Orton’s screenplay develops the Eichmann character close enough to Arendt’s “banality of evil” to have provoked the Times of Israel to fulminate: Having barely outlined Eichmann’s role in the genocide, the film proceeds to humanize him with the assistance of the Mossad team. Eichmann is spoon-fed like a bird, toasts a L’Chaim with Malkin, and performs calisthenics. There’s also a scene with Eichmann on the toilet bowl, during which he makes the Mossad agents laugh by telling Nazi jokes. I doubt any actor could have done a better job than Kingsley who steals every scene, something not hard to do in a film that has not much to work with dramatically. Making a film about the abduction of Eichmann is hardly the stuff that would draw Mission Impossible fans to a theater. Even if “Operation Finale” devotes an inordinate amount of time in fleshing out the technical details in an elaborate plot to evade Argentina’s police, there is no suspense in a film that has a preordained conclusion. full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/09/07/operation-finale/ _ 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] How Assad Made Truth a Casualty of War | by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA’s Founders
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 is indeed a slander to link the current DSA with Max Shachtman. The main predecessor organization to DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) arose from a personal and organizational split of Michael Harrington with Shachtman, who died in late 1972 or early 1973. Harrington announced his split with Shachtman in an article in the Nation in which he criticized, among other things, Shachtman's support of Richard Nixon in the 1972 Presidential election. Shachtman died in late 1972 or early 1973 but his co-thinkers went on to found the Social Democrats USA. At no time was he linked to the DSOC, let alone DSA. On the other hand, the legacy of Irving Howe - who is mentioned in the post that started this thread - is a real one, at least before the influx of new members. Even so, whatever influence Howe's ideas - or those of Harrington, for that matter - might have on the 50,000 DSA members, would seem to be negligible. SR > On September 7, 2018 at 4:04 PM Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism > wrote: > > This is a lying slime job against the DSA, based on the idea that the > DSA came into the world cursed by the mark of Cain due to Original Sin: > it was founded by the likes of Max Shachtman and Albert Shanker. > > > Joaquín > > > > > > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/srobin21%40comcast.net _ 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 Founders
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 lying slime job against the DSA, based on the idea that the DSA came into the world cursed by the mark of Cain due to Original Sin: it was founded by the likes of Max Shachtman and Albert Shanker. Shactman's accomplishment is especially impressive since he died in 1972 and the DSA wasn't founded until a decade later, in 1982. I've written a response to this and a hatchet job he did on Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I sent it to Counterpunch but I've got to check whether they've posted it, if not I'll just send it here. Joaquín On 8/31/2018 1:15 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/31/grappling-with-the-racism-of-the-dsas-founders/ _ 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] A dishonest sliming of DSA and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
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 also on my blog now: http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-dishonest-sliming-of-dsa-and.html] On August 31, Counterpunch published a bizarre and dishonest racism-baiting attack on the Democratic Socialists of America by Andrew Stewart. “Grappling with the racism of the DSA’s Founders” has the peculiarity that three of the five “founders” of the DSA --described by Stewart as “its early leaders/thinkers”—in reality had nothing to do with the DSA. So much so that one of them –Max Shachtman—had been dead for a decade by the time DSA was founded in 1982. The other two, Albert Shanker and Bayard Rustin, were close associates of Shachtman. Rustin was the head of the Socialist Party and its successor organization, Social Democrats USA. Shanker was president of the New York teacher’s union from 1964 to 1985 and a close friend of Shachtman’s, though as far as I know not actively involved in socialist groups like the SP during those years. By the early 1970s these three were the political enemies of the figure most associated with the DSA’s founding, Michael Harrington. Harrington and those three had all been part of the Socialist Party, a political current of anti-Stalinist socialists. Over time, the SP’s anti-Stalinism increasingly became plain right-wing anticommunism and even in domestic politics the group shed most vestiges of its socialist past, coming out against the antiwar movement and the Black movement. But a small part of the SP led by Harrington resisted the drift to the right and instead began to move to the left under the impact of the antiwar and other protest movements of the 1960s, leading to a split in the early 1970s between the progressive minority that founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, one the organizations that eventually joined to found of the DSA, and the right wing majority which, to make clear that they were not socialist and not a party became “Social Democrats USA” in 1972. Stewart lies by saying the three from the right wing were founders of DSA. They were not. The purpose of the lie is to then saddle DSA with political responsibility for Shachtman’s rabid anticommunism, Shanker’s reactionary teacher’s strike in New York in 1968 against Black and Latino control of the schools in their neighborhoods, and Bayard Rustin’s attacks on Black nationalism taking advantage of his well-deserved prestige as the key behind-the-scenes organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. And if you insist that DSA is somehow responsible for the actions of those who years before the DSA existed were in the same group as Michael Harrington, then why not give DSA the credit for the 1963 “I have a dream" March of Washington, Shachtman’s leading role in resisting the rise of Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the things Shanker did to defend the legitimate interests of New York Teachers? The reason, of course, in that this is an outrageous frame-up, the sort of thing I’d expect from Fox News or Inforwars, not a web site like Counterpunch. Stewart also brings up Harrington’s opposition to the founding Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. But Harrington later reversed course and the DSA was founded by the fusion of DSOC with the New American Movement, a group descended precisely from the early SDS. Stewart begins his Philippic by trying to shield himself from the obvious criticism that this construct of his is based on events from a half century ago, has nothing to do with the real world DSA of today by admitting as much: * * * OK, with a serious dose of honest humility and respect, I will admit readily that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership is doing some great stuff at the grassroots level So this polemic will be relegated entirely to the founding generation of Democratic Socialists of America and its early leaders/thinkers. * * * But he continues by assailing the DSA’s electoral work with the paper-thin disguise of countering “a meta-narrative” supposedly being foisted by Jacobin and other outlets. According to Stewart, this story holds that after decades of failed efforts by everyone from the Greens to the SWP and the Communist Party, in its first try the DSA “has finally … brought socialism into the mainstream electoral realm,” and concluding in ironic bold type: “And with that, dear comrades, we shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!” And, of course, of course, of course, he proceeds to deconstruct to his own fabrication: * * * I am compelled to recall the great quote of Amilcar Cabral, “Tell no
[Marxism] Remembering Jesse Lemisch, Radical Historian | The Nation
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Re: [Marxism] Nicaraguan Contradictions
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On 9/5/2018 11:23 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:
I think socialists really need to reflect on the direction the colonial
revolution has taken over the years, because Ortega is not some lone
exception
How has the colonial revolution degenerated so much? Isn't what we're
seeing visible proof of the theory of permanent revolution? After all, the
leadership of none of these revolutions linked the colonial revolution with
the overthrow of capitalism itself.
I don't think the Nicaraguan revolution "degenerated" at all. It was
defeated, destroyed. Crushed. Drowned in blood and I believe that had
been consummated before the election of Mrs Chamorro.
In the year 2000 I wrote a very long post on this list going over my
experiences in Nicaragua where I lived for several years. About a year
ago I put it on my blog and it is here:
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/from-archives-how-1980s-sandinista.html
Rereading it now, there are a couple of things I remember saying in
other posts from that time. Mainly that there simply was no basis in
Nicaragua for what they were trying to do economically and socially,
though I'm not sure I put it that baldly. The policy of pressured
collectivization ("forced" would be an exaggeration) was a conscious
choice with the idea that this would smooth their transition to a
planned economy, and that the social programs and economic benefits
would help them sell it. Wheelock seemed to be totally committed to it.
This affected not just the worker-peasant alliance but the
"worker-worker alliance." A lot of workers viewed themselves as
displaced small farmers and what they wanted was land and to be left
alone on their little homestead.
I'll repeat what I said in my post from 18 years ago: in four years I
was in Nicaragua I never met a single peasant who had gotten land to
work on his own account from the revolution. On the contrary, I saw the
FSLN oppose movements by agricultural workers to break up cotton estates
and distribute them for their families to work individually. And I was
on the lookout because Mike Baumann and Jane Harris, who preceded me
and my companion as Militant correspondents there, made a point of
telling me that had been their experience.
In 1986 or 1987 the government did make a show of handing out land
titles but to people who had long worked their parcels on the
agricultural frontier and to people on state farms (technically turning
them into cooperatives, a distinction without a difference). It did
not change things internally, it was mostly paper. Although I do think
it is true that it showed the FSLN leadership had realized the problem
with the agrarian reform, and was beginning to change course.
As for the rest of their economic and social programs, they required a
lot of resources from abroad that was increasingly withheld. The one
resource they did have was Cuba, but it could offer mostly personnel,
and Nicaragua had decided to forgo the aid of Cuban civilians (like
teachers and doctors) after the Grenada invasion. In part the reason was
that they could not be armed, but with the war spreading, they were
sitting ducks.
But of course that hit programs in the countryside especially hard
because the Cubans were willing to go places the government had a very
hard time recruiting Nicas for.
So Nicaragua in a lot of ways got ahead of itself, and then was left
twisting in the wind by the Soviets for the Americans to use as a
punching bag. And I mean that quite literally. The Nicas had sent people
to Eastern Europe to train as fighter pilots and helicopter pilots. They
even built a military airport. Only a handful of helicopters had made it
before the Soviets cut them off.
In the CNN documentary series Cold War produced in the 90s there are
interviews with former Soviet foreign ministry officials that confirmed
this is exactly what took place.
Could the revolution have survived if they'd gotten timely military
resources to defeat the contra war? Looking back at the 1990s, I doubt
it. The United States would have strangled them economically. And there
was a very grave economic problem: they had already embarked on the road
outlined in the Communist Manifesto:
* * *
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working
class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win
the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree,
all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of
production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised
as the ruling
