[Marxism] POUM: Those Who Would?
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. * Nearly 80 years ago, the Spanish Civil War began following a fascist military coup against the Republic. The resulting war unleashed a far reaching revolution and ignited the passions of the left, and even today, the causes of defeat remain hotly debated. Could the left-wing party, the POUM have provided the leadership necessary to bring a different outcome? Communist historian Doug Enaa Greene leads a discussion on the history of the POUM and the lessons to be drawn for today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6XXChf6WDI Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math Odd Trick Fights Diabetes #34;Unique#34; Proven Method To Control Blood Sugar In 3 Weeks. Watch Video. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/54a927b96d90227b93961st03duc _ 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] Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted
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 dominant left narrative is that Viktor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s version of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a “popularly elected” (as Stephen F. Cohen puts it) president whose decision to reject a deal with the EU in favor of a better deal with Russia made him the target of a conspiracy of local fascists and Western imperialism. Furthermore, if not for protesters being killed by snipers “hired” by the Euromaidan protest leaders, the “putsch” would have not succeeded. This is the story put forward by RT.com and echoed by WSWS.org, Global Research, and other websites too numerous to mention. A deeper investigation reveals that it was his own erstwhile backers who were decisive in his ouster. In a maneuver that evokes Mubarak’s removal in Egypt, elements of the “pro-Russian” oligarchy decided to throw Yanukovych to the wolves in order to deflate the mass movement and make continued oligarchic rule possible. As Don Fabrizio put it in Giuseppi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/03/30/yanukovychs-ouster-the-myth-and-the-reality/ --- NY Times, Jan. 4 2015 Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted By ANDREW HIGGINS and ANDREW E. KRAMERJ KIEV, Ukraine — Ashen-faced after a sleepless night of marathon negotiations, Viktor F. Yanukovych hesitated, shaking his pen above the text placed before him in the chandeliered hall. Then, under the unsmiling gaze of European diplomats and his political enemies, the beleaguered Ukrainian president scrawled his signature, sealing a deal that he believed would keep him in power, at least for a few more months. But even as Mr. Yanukovych sat down with his political foes at the presidential administration building on the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 21, his last authority was fast draining away. In a flurry of frantic calls to opposition lawmakers, police and security commanders were making clear that they were more worried about their own safety than protecting Mr. Yanukovych and his government. By that evening, he was gone, evacuated from the capital by helicopter, setting the stage for the most severe bout of East-West tensions since the Cold War. In Kiev, Ukrainians argued with police officers during a rally in front of Parliament.News Analysis: The Next Battle for Ukraine JAN. 3, 2015 Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster to what it portrays as a violent, “neo-fascist” coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising. The Kremlin has cited this assertion, along with historical ties, as the main justification for its annexation of Crimea in March and its subsequent support for an armed revolt by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east. Violence resumed in Ukraine on Tuesday with an attack at the headquarters of the party of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, among other clashes. Video by Carrie Halperin on Publish Date February 18, 2014. Photo by Sandro Maddalena/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin’s line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely. An investigation by The New York Times into the final hours of Mr. Yanukovych’s rule — based on interviews with prominent players, including former commanders of the Berkut riot police and other security units, telephone records and other documents — shows that the president was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies’ desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych’s own efforts to make peace. At dawn on the morning of Thursday, Feb. 20, a bedraggled pro-European protest movement controlled just a few hundred square yards, at best, of scorched and soot-smeared pavement in central Kiev. They had gathered there the previous November, enraged that Mr. Yanukovych, under heavy pressure from Moscow, had abruptly turned away from a long-planned trade deal with the European Union. Their fortunes dimmed further on Thursday morning when a hail of gunfire cut down scores of protesters as they pushed to break out of
[Marxism] Fwd: Sweden to become a Third World Country by 2030, according to UN
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.454/sweden-to-become-a-third-world-country-by-2030-according-to-un.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] Sweden to become a Third World Country by 2030, according to UN
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 perfectly good country, Ingrid Carlqvist, a journalist said. ”A rich country, a nice country, and in a few years' time, that country will be gone. Ingrid Carlqvist is not ”a journalist” but a virulent Islamophobic hack linked to the far right/neo-fascist Sweden Democrats. This is the completely dishonest slant given to a report which doesn’t say anything of the sort. (That Sweden does have problems, I’m the last to deny. For instance a school system destroyed by neoliberal profit and ”free choice” thinking. Finland, who copied Sweden’s then centralized, egalitarian system some 20-30 years ago now has the best school system in the world.) Website: http://filmint.nu/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FilmInt Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/FilmInt 4 jan 2015 kl. 17:49 skrev Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu: POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.454/sweden-to-become-a-third-world-country-by-2030-according-to-un.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/daniel.lindvall%40filmint.nu _ 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] Fwd: A university president gave up $90, 000 to give his minimum wage workers a raise - 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. * http://www.vox.com/2014/8/4/5967181/kentucky-state-university-president-minimum-wage _ 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] Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia
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. * Sunday NY Times Book Review, Jan. 4 2015 ‘A Tale of Two Plantations,’ by Richard S. Dunn By GREG GRANDIN A TALE OF TWO PLANTATIONS Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia By Richard S. Dunn 540 pp. Harvard University Press. $39.95. For enslaved peoples in the New World, it was always the worst of times. Whether captured in Africa or born into bondage in the Americas, slaves suffered unimaginable torments and indignities. Yet the specific form their miseries took, as the historian Richard S. Dunn shows in his painstakingly researched “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia,” depended on whether one was a slave in the British Caribbean or in the United States. The contrasts between the two slave societies were many, covering family life, religious beliefs and labor practices. But one difference overrode all others. In the Caribbean, white masters treated the slaves like “disposable cogs in a machine,” working them to death on sugar plantations and then replacing them with fresh stock from Africa. In the United States, white masters treated their slaves like the machine itself — a breeding machine. Dunn began working on this comparative study in the 1970s, around the time historians like Winthrop D. Jordan, Edmund S. Morgan and Eugene D. Genovese were revolutionizing the study of American slavery. Drawing on Freud, Marx and other social theorists, these scholars painted what Dunn calls the “big picture,” capturing the psychosexual terror, economic exploitation, resistance, and emotional and social dependency inherent in the master-slave relation. Decades of extensive research led Dunn, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, in a different direction, away from making large historical claims or speculating about the “interiority” of slavery’s victims. Instead, he’s opted to stay close to the facts, using demographic methods to reconstruct “the individual lives and collective experiences of some 2,000 slaves on two large plantations” — Mesopotamia, which grew sugar on the western coastal plain of Jamaica, and Mount Airy, a tobacco and grain estate on the Rappahannock River in Virginia’s Northern Neck region — “during the final three generations of slavery in both places.” In Jamaica, Joseph Foster Barham I and his son Joseph Foster Barham II presided over Mesopotamia during its most profitable decades. Absentee but involved masters, they supervised the plantation’s progress from their homes in England, approving new planting fields, reviewing the amount of sugar boiled and rum distilled, and auditing the ledger books. The one thing they believed they had no control over was life and death. During the seven decades Dunn studies (1762 to 1833, the year Britain abolished slavery), Mesopotamia recorded 420 births and 751 deaths, figures that do not include abortions, miscarriages or, for the most part, stillbirths. At a time of rising production, the data “show twice as many deaths as births, and a high proportion of the slaves who died during these years were children, teenagers or young adults.” The younger Barham said he took seriously his responsibility to improve the material and moral condition of his slaves. And his agents in Jamaica told him they did everything they could to increase the survival rate of newborns, including lightening the work burdens of expecting women. Nothing helped. As the ratio of deaths to births remained high, slaves themselves were held to blame. “The Negro race,” Barham wrote, “is so averse to labor that without force we have hardly anywhere been able to obtain it.” He is referring to the labor of sugar production. But the sentiment covered white opinions regarding the labor of slave reproduction. Women were punished for miscarrying, sent to the workhouse or to solitary confinement. Yet despite the death rate, the plantation’s population increased, replenished by new captives purchased from slave ships or other Jamaican estates. In Virginia, John Tayloe III, master of Mount Airy from 1792 to 1828, bred horses and slaves. The horses he raced, earning him the reputation “as the leading Virginia turfman of his generation.” The slaves he worked and sold. “There were,” Dunn counts, “252 recorded slave births and 142 slave deaths at Mount Airy between 1809 and 1828, providing John III with 110 extra slaves.” Tayloe, a fourth-generation enslaver, moved some of these surplus people around his other Virginia holdings and transferred others to his sons. The rest he sold, providing Tayloe with both needed capital and an opportunity to cull unproductive
[Marxism] Empire of Cotton
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. * Sunday NY Times Book Review, Jan. 4 2015 ‘Empire of Cotton,’ by Sven Beckert By ADAM HOCHSCHILD EMPIRE OF COTTON A Global History By Sven Beckert Illustrated. 615 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35. The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity. The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.” In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf. In his important new book, the Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton. “Empire of Cotton” is not casual airplane reading. Heavy going at times, it is crowded with many more details and statistics (a few of them repeated) than the nonspecialist needs. But it is a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s “launching pad.” More than that, “Empire of Cotton” is laced with compassion for the millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and mill workers whose labors, over hundreds of years, have gone into the clothes we wear and the surprising variety of other products containing cotton, from coffee filters to gunpowder. Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant. “Until the 19th century,” Beckert explains, “the overwhelming bulk of raw cotton was spun and woven within a few miles from where it was grown.” Nothing changed that more dramatically than the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence. As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa. Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process. The search for more good cotton-growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.” Beckert’s coinage seems not far-fetched when he points out that by 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century. And who structured the bond deal for the Louisiana Purchase, which made so much of that possible? Thomas Baring of Britain, one of the world’s leading cotton merchants. Beckert practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events not limited to one country or continent. The perspective serves him well. For it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere. When he talks about the rise of late-19th-century American Populism (driven in part by the grievances of small cotton farmers), he also mentions parallel movements in India, Egypt and Mexico. And it was not only white Southerners who were responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors as well. With sons strategically stationed in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, the Brown family — patrons of the Museum of Natural History in New York and the corporate ancestors of Brown Brothers Harriman — owned more than a dozen Southern cotton plantations
[Marxism] Empire’s Crossroads
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. * Sunday NY Times Book Review, Jan. 4 2015 ‘Empire’s Crossroads,’ by Carrie Gibson By ELIZABETH NUNEZ To get from the airport on the former British West Indian colony of Dominica to the capital, Roseau, the birthplace of the novelist Jean Rhys, one has to travel through narrow winding roads with a sheer drop to the sea on one side and impenetrable forest on the other. Halfway along this road one is suddenly flung backward in time, seeing faces that have a startling resemblance to the indigenous people of the pre-Columbian era. They are the Kalinago people, or Caribs, as the Europeans called them. Carrie Gibson’s readable book, “Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day,” tells of the Europeans’ first encounter with these and other Amerindians, and she explores the lingering impact of colonization on the island territories today. Gibson’s research is thorough: She studied the history of the Spanish and French Caribbean for her Ph.D. at Cambridge University. And there is much for the historian and academic to chew on, including 352 pages of Caribbean history, eight pages of bibliography (merely some of the recent books she consulted), 44 pages of notes and an index covering 27 pages. But the nonspecialist need not be daunted; Gibson knows how to hold the reader’s interest, and before you get too entangled in her meticulous research, she offers gems, sometimes poetic prose, often fascinating facts. The story of the Caribbean, she writes, is “dappled, a ramble with shadows and light rather than a march to triumph under a blazing sun.” She also describes the statue of Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife, Josephine, which stands in the capital of Martinique — now beheaded, the body smeared with red paint, it faces the tourist beaches of Trois-Îlets. Josephine was suspected of persuading Napoleon to reinstate slavery in the French colonies as proof of her loyalty to France and the purity of her European blood. The portrayal of Columbus as the discoverer of the Caribbean islands has already been debunked, but Gibson goes further, presenting the Europeans as ruthless invaders whose only goal was to pillage the Caribbean islands for gold and silver; finding little metal, they enslaved the Amerindians for forced labor on sugar-cane, cocoa and tobacco plantations. Slavery, Gibson tells us, was well within the moral codes of the Old World, as the Portuguese had been enslaving Africans with the approval of the pope. Persuaded that the Amerindians were cannibals, Europeans found additional justification to subjugate and, eventually, eradicate most of them. It was Columbus and his men, though, who not only gave the Amerindians their names, but divided them into peaceful and warmongering groups — a division that Gibson contends was a mere reflection of the European success or failure in controlling them. Although “there is no evidence that anyone on any island” ate human flesh, the fearsome Caribs were believed to be cannibals, a myth that persists to this day. Europeans met with resistance in the Caribbean, and Gibson debunks yet another myth of the naïve native welcoming the white man. She also points out that geography and climate were major forces on the side of the natives, deterring the conquest of the islands: volcanoes, hurricanes, suffocating weather, swampy terrain, not to mention all sorts of insects, like the malaria-carrying mosquito. (Gibson notes that the Mosquito Coast got its name from the Miskito people, who early on successfully fought the Spanish.) Jamaica is hilly, so many Africans and Amerindians were able to escape slavery by hiding in caves in the hills. The density of the forest in Dominica, observable on the route from the airport to the capital, allowed many Kalinago people to survive, undetected among the thick trees. Alas, some terrain proved too hospitable; blessed with flat lands, Barbados was the perfect site for planting sugar cane, and the proximity of hardwood forests near the coast of Honduras made that country ideal for logging. There are intriguing chapters in this book about the European wars on the seas, as the English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch fought over territories and trade routes. This was the time when sailors attacked ships to plunder their goods. We know them as pirates, but there were privateers, too, with letters of marque from their monarchs giving them permission to raid enemy ships. One such privateer was Sir Francis Drake, whom, as Gibson observes, Spain would have considered a pirate. The most painful chapters in “Empire’s Crossroads”
