[Marxism] Fwd: The Trump-Putin Fallacy by Masha Gessen | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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[Marxism] Protesters Fume as Zimbabwe Vice President Runs Up a Hotel Bill
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. * Looking at Zimbabwe, we see a true model for Africa: an independent path to progress and equitable development. It is for this reason that the imperial powers look to destroy all that has been built in Zimbabwe…and for this same reason, we must stand to defend her. Eric Draitser, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/05/zimbabwe-the-revolution-continues/ --- NY Times, July 28 2016 Protesters Fume as Zimbabwe Vice President Runs Up a Hotel Bill By JEFFREY MOYO and NORIMITSU ONISHI HARARE, Zimbabwe — The country’s A.T.M.s have run out of cash. Even the police and the army — linchpins of the government’s control — are not getting paid on time. But as economic protests have multiplied and shut down the capital recently, Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko has enjoyed a special privilege, courtesy of the state: nearly 600 nights in the presidential suite of Zimbabwe’s most luxurious hotel while his official mansion is being prepared. The vice president’s extended stay in the Rainbow Towers presidential suite — he checked into the hotel in December 2014, at a taxpayer cost of $1,000 a night, including meals — has drawn regular demonstrations outside the five-star landmark, where visiting dignitaries stay. But Mr. Mphoko and his wife, Laurinda, would not move out, local news reports said, because they kept rejecting official residences as inadequate, too small or too close to the homes of other government ministers. “This hotel is going to break,” Sten Zvorwadza warned last month as he and other demonstrators took over the lobby, threatening to shut down the hotel unless Mr. Mphoko checked out. “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Mr. Zvorwadza continued as the police surrounded him, lifting him in the air and then dragging him across the marble floor. Now, after hundreds of thousands of dollars in hotel bills, Mr. Mphoko’s stay could finally be coming to an end. A local newspaper has reported that Mr. Mphoko is moving to a $2 million mansion in a neighborhood called Highlands. Residents there said that they, too, had heard of the vice president’s impending arrival and pointed to the recent, unexpected filling of potholes on their street as credible evidence. Mr. Mphoko has not commented on his plans. The minister of state in the vice president’s office, reached on her cellphone, hung up. “If he’s leaving the hotel, the country needs to know,” said Mr. Zvorwadza, the leader of the protesters who have held demonstrations outside the hotel since last December. “This is the syndrome we are fighting. A public figure must be accountable to his citizens.” The unconfirmed move — a similar report said that the vice president was bound for a $4 million mansion late last year — could bring some relief to the government of President Robert Mugabe, who is facing an unusually broad challenge to the nation’s crumbling economy. The government is struggling to pay its workers, and for the past two months it has fallen behind on salaries for the army and the police, Mr. Mugabe’s core supporters. Much of the capital, Harare, and other cities ground to a halt this month as Zimbabweans stayed home to protest the deteriorating economy. It was one of the biggest popular protests in years against the 92-year-old Mr. Mugabe, whose increasing frailty has fueled political infighting and instability in this Southern African nation. Given the dire conditions, the vice president’s stay in the presidential suite has even raised eyebrows among the president’s traditional allies. “It’s something unheard-of where a vice president can remain in a hotel for so long,” said Cephas Msipa, a retired politician who was a senior member of Mr. Mugabe’s party, known as ZANU-PF. “His behavior is quite strange.” Responding to local reports that the couple had turned down a $3 million mansion, the vice president sounded annoyed last month. “People don’t know what they are talking about,” he told the state newspaper, The Herald. “The house that the government has bought me is not even worth $3 million. It’s $1 million and something.” The hotel, which used to be part of the Sheraton chain, is owned by the Rainbow Tourism Group, a private company. The government owns the building, which was constructed by a company from the former Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. “Yugoslavia was our fair-weather friend from the war, so they got the contract,” said Ibbo Mandaza, a former chairman of the Rainbow Tourism Group and a political scientist. “That’s before the demise of Yugoslavia as an entity.” Every visiting head of state stayed in the 17th-floor presidential suite, Mr. Mandaza
[Marxism] Hundreds of Sanders delegates walk off Democrat Convention floor to protest 'rigged' election
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[Marxism] After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore
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, July 28 2016 After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and AMY CHOZICK PHILADELPHIA — In a luxury suite high above the convention floor, some of the Democratic Party’s most generous patrons sipped cocktails and caught up with old friends, tuning out Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Monday as he bashed Wall Street in an arena named after one of the country’s largest banks. On Tuesday, when Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee of a major party, a handful of drug companies and health insurers made sure to echo the theme, paying to sponsor an “Inspiring Women” panel featuring Democratic congresswomen. And in the vaulted marble bar of the Ritz-Carlton downtown, wealthy givers congregated in force for cocktails and glad-handing, as protesters thronged just outside to voice their unhappiness with Wall Street, big money in politics and Mrs. Clinton herself. “This is a good place to be — for a lot of reasons,” said former Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, a Democrat now running for Congress, as he glided through the room on Tuesday. “We must have set up five fund-raisers today. This is the bank.” After a wrenching yearlong nominating battle with searing debates over the influence of Wall Street and the ability of ordinary citizens to be heard over the din of dollars changing hands, the party’s moneyed elite returned to the fore this week, undeterred and mostly unabashed. While protesters marched in the streets and blocked traffic, Democratic donors congregated in a few reserved hotels and shuttled between private receptions with A-list elected officials. If the talk onstage at the Wells Fargo Center was about reducing inequality and breaking down barriers, downtown Philadelphia evoked the world as it still often is: a stratified society with privilege and access determined by wealth. “The Clinton people would always argue, ‘Well, there’s no connection between the money and the actions that we take,’ ” said Jonathan Tasini, a liberal organizer and Sanders delegate from New York. “That’s what these cocktail parties and receptions are all about. It’s about access and whose phone calls get answered.” For many Clinton donors, particularly those from the financial sector, the convention is a time to shed what one called the “hypersensitivity” that had previously surrounded their appearance at Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raisers or at her political events, during a period when Mr. Sanders repeatedly attacked Mrs. Clinton’s connections to Wall Street and her six-figure speaking fees from financial institutions. “I think we’re past that,” said Alan Patricof, a longtime donor to Mrs. Clinton, when asked about the need to lie low during the primaries. In Philadelphia, donors were handed preferred suites at the Ritz-Carlton and “Friends and Family” packages created for longtime Clinton hands — some of them also longtime benefactors. Some were granted time backstage or in the Clinton family box with former President Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. Blackstone, the private equity giant, scheduled a reception at the Barnes Foundation on Thursday with its president, Hamilton E. James, one of the leading Wall Street contenders for an economic policy post in a future Clinton administration. The Philadelphia convention offered other symbolic contrasts to the party’s last two gatherings, when President Obama sought, with mixed success, to restrict his party from raising money to pay for the conventions from lobbyists or political action funds. Those shackles were thrown off this year, waving a green flag to Washington’s influence industry. Lobbyists and corporate representatives flooded the city, where much of the Democratic Party’s elite — and potential senior members of a future presidential administration — had gathered. The railway giant CSX brought in old railroad cars for a reception led by Rodney E. Slater, the former United States transportation secretary turned lobbyist, who also headlined a panel on transportation policy in a future Clinton administration. At the Loews Hotel bar on Tuesday night, old Clinton hands, some now working as lobbyists, caught up with Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a longtime family friend and one of the party’s most prolific fund-raisers. At a private luncheon on Wednesday at El Vez, a Mexican restaurant, over a dozen Democratic governors mingled with representatives from a host of labor unions and companies, among them the Apollo Education Group, an operator of for-profit colleges that has faced a series of state and federal investigations
[Marxism] Fwd: Is Trump a Russian Stooge? | Foreign Policy
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. * Let me suggest something: The fact that Trump, after so many attempts and with such warm intentions toward the country, was not able to build anything in Russia– when Ritz Carlton and Kempinski and Radisson and Hilton and any number of Western hotel chains were able to — speaks to his abysmal lack of connections to influential Russians. Since his first foray into Russia in 1987, the head of state changed four times — Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Medvedev, Putin — but one thing stayed constant: In such a deeply personalized system of patronage, nothing could’ve been built without the right people inside the Kremlin helping you maneuver in the complicated web of whose palm to grease. The fact that pretty much every major hotel chain in the world was able to build something in Moscow but Trump wasn’t speaks to his inability to navigate this shadowy world, and to his weakness as a businessman. If Trump truly was in bed with Putin, there would be a Trump Tower in Moscow by now, if not several. full: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/25/is-trump-a-russian-stooge-putin-dnc-wikileaks/ _ 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: Profile of a dedicated Gulenist in Turkey's army
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Re: [Marxism] Erdogan
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. Which again shows it was never correct to see Erdogan's increasing repression over the last couple of years as "Islamist." Actually it was more a reconstitution of the Kemalist state (sure, with a bit of Islamic colouration, and Erdoganist colouration). In particular once the decision was made to abandon the AKP's relatively good (by Turkey's historical standards) Kurdish policy and re-launch the 80-year Kemalist war against the Kurds. The recent foreign policy reversal (rapproachment with Russia, Israel, Assad etc) also fits this same bill. These two articles give more detail about the AKP's growing reintegration of the Kemalist old guard, and its new alliance with the Ergenekon group in particular: http://www.wsj.com/articles/turkish-militarys-influence-rises-again-1463346285 and https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/12/turkeys-deep-state-has-a-secret-backchannel-to-assad/?utm_content=buffer1a643_medium=social_source=twitter.com_campaign=buffer The AKP's Daily Sabah openly now says the Ergenekon trials were wrong, a frame up by the "Gulenists", of course: http://www.dailysabah.com/investigations/2016/04/21/court-overturns-verdicts-in-coup-case-allegedly-tied-to-gulenists Hence the blame for everything on "the Gulenists". Ridiculous, of course, but no doubt half true. Appears to be an odd alliance not based on any political agreement between newer Gulen-connected forces in the state and the most recalcitrant Kemalist elements of the old deep state. Doesn't make a lot of sense for the latter given the AKP was moving their way, but seems the most hard-line element were either going to lose out in upcoming dismissals, or were never in the mood to compromise with the AKP no matter what. One point where they and the Gulen crowd may have lined up was Kurdistan. Despite the AK's renewed war and alliance with the old deep state in this, it was notable that the top military leadership involved in the Kurdish war were heavily involved in the coup. Now there are suggestions that they struck because they feared the AKP would weaken in that war: https://www.buzzfeed.com/borzoudaragahi/document-reveals-what-really-drove-turkeys-failed-coup-plott?utm_term=.fkEpvvXOz. That may be fantasy, of course, and would contradict the direction of the AKP and its reaccommodation with the Kemalist old guard. But then again it could be a wing that preferred to go Assad-style against the Kurds. One clue to that is that the government is re-opening investigations on the terrible Roboski massacre of Kurds of late 2011. As you may guess, Daily Sabah tells us that the massacre was deliberately orchestrated by "the Gulenists" in the military in order to sow discord between the Turkish and Kurdish peoples ... -Original Message- From: Louis Proyect via Marxism My wife just got finished with a Skype call to her mom in Istanbul who reported that Erdogan has released the Kemalist officers who were in prison as a result of the Ergenekon trials in order to use them against the Gulenists. She says that he has begun to adopt Kemalist coloration, even to the point of condemning schools that have an Islamist agenda--of course targeting the Gulenist schools. Is there any politician on the planet today who is more Machiavellian than Erdogan? I can't think of any. _ 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] Al-Nusra breaks with al-Qaeda!
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.middleeasteye.net/news/nusra-front-announces-official-split-al-qaeda-520293064 Nusra confirms split with al-Qaeda 'to protect the Syrian revolution' Abu Mohamed al-Golani says creation of the Levantine Conquest Front aims to 'close the gap' between fighting factions Last update: Thursday 28 July 2016 16:52 UTC Nusra Front leader Abu Mohamed al-Golani confirmed late on Thursday that his group has formally split from al-Qaeda and has renamed itself the Levantine Conquest Front. "The creation of this new front aims to close the gap between the jihadi factions in the Levant," Golani said in his first televised appearance, soon after Nusra released the first photo of the leader ever seen publicly. "By breaking our link, we aim to protect the Syrian revolution." "We thank the leaders of al-Qaeda for understanding the need to break links." Golani's comments come several hours after al-Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared to give his blessing to the anticipated split with its Syrian affiliate in an audio recording released on YouTube. Speculation had been growing in the past week that Nusra Front leaders had decided to cut their formal links with al-Qaeda, with sources close to the group telling Middle East Eye that an announcement was imminent. In a clip within the six-and-a-half-minute audio message attributed to Zawahiri, he said that Nusra should split from al-Qaeda if the decision improved the unity of groups fighting a common enemy in Syria The Nusra Front has long been among the myriad of rebel groups battling both pro-government forces since the beginning of the country's civil war in 2011, often working closely and fighting alongside other groups. "The brotherhood of Islam that bonds us is stronger than any obsolete links between organisations," Zawahiri is heard to say. "These organisational links must be sacrificed without hesitation if they threaten your unity." Also speaking, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, a deputy to Zawahiri, said al-Qaeda approved "any possible action" that would improve the unity among the rebel factions fighting in Syria and form a "new generation" of fighters. "After studying the situation in Syria... we approve any possible action that will preserve jihad in the Levant," Masri said. “We say now to the leaders of the Nusra Front: do what preserves the unity of Islam and Muslims, and jihad in the Levant. “We urge you to take the necessary steps in this direction. This is also a call to all the other jihadi factions in the Levant… You must form one rank to protect our people and our land.” Middle East Eye understands that Masri was present at a 5 April meeting in Idlib city between Nusra members and Taha Rifai, a leading Egyptian Islamist who was trying to convince the group to set aside its global ambitions and focus on fighting the Assad government. Soon after the meeting, Rifai was killed by a US drone strike. Nusra has been one of the most effective anti-government factions in Syria’s civil war, particularly in the country’s north. However, both the US and Russia had designated the group as a terrorist organisation because of its affiliation to al-Qaeda, allowing the countries to bomb Nusra fighters on the ground. The split appears to be motivated by an attempt from Nusra to attract other opposition groups to unify with it just as the US and Russia have reportedly agreed to target Nusra and the Islamic State (IS) militant group. Earlier this week, a writer purporting to be a Dutch associate of Nusra called Al-Maqalaat said that the timing of the decision was "no coincidence". "The overall message of the break with al-Qaeda will be that the US is not enemies with al-Qaeda or any other so-called terrorist organisation, but their animosity is against the Muslim Ummah as a whole, especially the Muslims who are seeking to establish the rule of Islam," Al-Maqalaat wrote. "If the other parties agree to any of these preconditions, then this would be the best deal in the history of Islam, or rather mankind. If the other parties agree to these preconditions, then the breaking of ties between Jabhat Nusra and Al-Qaeda will form a major backlash for the West." 'Playing chess' Analysts say the official split has the potential to drastically alter the dynamics among Syrian rebels depending on which and whether other groups decide to join the new Nusra. "My interpretation is that Nusra was not doing it to avoid being bombed, because it will be bombed either way," said Thomas Pierret, a lecturer in contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, the group is
[Marxism] The Labour Party leadership election in the UK
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 courts have just refused to remove Corbyn from the ballot for Labour Party Leadership. So the election proceeds. The anti-Corbyn forces are faced with a choice now. They seem divided along the lines of Soft-left/Old Right and Blairites. The former got their candidate chosen as the sole candidate over the Blairite choice Angela Eagle. The anti-Corbynites do not know what to do. The Blairites have promised perpetual war. Some of them will try that. But if the Left capture the National Executive Committee in September then I think there is little chance their threats will be tolerated. The Soft-left/Old Right are in a similar bind. What do they do? Their candidate, Owen Smith, has been all over the place. He began by smearing Corbyn as permitting bullying and misogyny and being unpatriotic. Now he is doing imitations of Corbyn and has released policies that are far to the left of anything the Soft-left/Old Right have ever contemplated. So the original excuse for the rebellion against Corbyn's has been quietly buried. We should remind ourselves that this excuse was that Corbyn was unelectable because he was too left wing like Foot and Benn were in 1983. We are now faced with a party contest seemingly between two left wingers. Of course no one believes for a moment that Smith means what he says. He is PR to the core and he realizes that the selectorate - the Labour Party members and registered supporters- are very left wing. The people, and I use that term deliberately, are demanding relief from neo-liberalism. The parliamentarians who have delivered neoliberalism, and who live comfortable lives, are the last to understand that. But Smith knows his market and so has released left wing policies. The problem is that this means there is no reason for a challenge. The party was dragged to the abyss for what? The answer is of course the failed model, that one gets elected by appealing to the centre. One has one third of one's supporters rusted on. There is a third who will never vote for Labour and the party must struggle to win over the swinging third in the middle. However voting is not compulsory in the UK and the consequence is that some four million voters, the rusted on ones, have retreated into apathy and despair. As well a huge swathe of young people - the salariat - have gazed into the future and decided that they do not want to go to Precaria. Yet, that is precisely where the economic crisis is taking them. So the dog days of Neoliberalism have begun, and the status quo cannot be restored easily. If Corbyn can purge the party of the truly recalcitrant and get the Party to adapt a left wing election program; if the economic crisis ripens, and those voters in the middle shrink and the rusted on return, then it is possible that a left wing Labour Prime Minister could emerge. I, myself, think it is more a probability than a possibility given how the Leadership challenge to Corbyn has developed. In other words I see a stronger Left emerging from all this chaos. Paul Mason, Aaron Bastani and others say that the Labour Party most morph into a social movement to succeed. The idea is there now and I feel it will become a material reality. comradely Gary _ 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: Sanders fans start to migrate online to Jill Stein - AOL
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[Marxism] Spain, austerity, reprieve and the EU
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 *Susil Gupta * It seems that the class struggle, or at least the fear of it, is indeed the motive force of history. The EU has announced that it will not, after all, impose a hefty Є2.2 billion fine on Spain for repeatedly missing its budget reduction targets, as it had been threatening to do for months. EU hard-liners, particularly the Germans, were until recently demanding a Є5 billion fine. Spain has now been given another two years to get its finances in order. EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici, who made the announcement, explained that the Spanish people had already made sacrifices and it was not appropriate to demand more of them, particularly at a time when there is a question mark over the entire European project. Why has Spain been shown such largesse, when the Greeks were not? The Greek people also made sacrifices, larger than those imposed on Spain. More significant still is that. . . full at: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/spain-fear-and-austerity-in-the-eu/ _ 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] Notes on super-exploitation
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. * *One of the issues being looked at by the *Imperialism study group* is super-exploitation in/of the Third World. Below are notes to the discussion. Walter asks that readers here keep in mind this is *not* an attempt at a full analysis of super-exploitation; it is some notes contributed to the study group discussion. He (and the rest of us) are keen to get feedback on any material from the study/discussion group, so we look forward to people contributing to the comments section below. We will regularly be sticking up notes by study group participants and reports on the study group.* by *Walter Daum*, July 28 The term “super-exploitation” has often been attributed to Lenin, but I have not been able to find it in his writings. The closest is this: “sections of the working class in the oppressor nations receive crumbs from the super-profits the bourgeoisie of these nations obtains by extra exploitation of the workers of the oppressed nations.” ( “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism,” 1916.) In this context, “extra exploitation” does not simply mean exploitation of additional workers but rather deeper exploitation of oppressed workers; hence the super-profits extracted. Lenin did often use the term “super-profits,” but as we discussed this past weekend, that did not necessarily mean profits extracted from capitalistically employed wage-workers. In the above passage, however, that does seem to be what he is referring to. The specific term “super-exploitation” is of more recent origin, having been introduced by Latin American Marxist economists in the 1960’s. I think the originator was Ruy Mauro Marini. *Defining the Term* There have been basically two definitions of super-exploitation. One might be called. . . Full at: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/from-the-imperialism-study-group-notes-on-super-exploitation/ _ 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: Radical Linguistics in an Age of Extinction | Dissent Magazine
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 early 1990s, a small subset of linguists began raising the alarm, trying to reorient a discipline whose well-meaning focus on elusive and trivial “universals” had led it to ignore actually existing linguistic diversity—an unfortunate legacy left by Noam Chomsky, who was a radical and a linguist but not a radical linguist. The new advocates of “language documentation” convincingly demonstrated that language death—when the last native speaker of a language dies—is accelerating dramatically. Would-be radical linguists, this writer included, have been joining local activists in recording, describing, and maintaining threatened languages, though our numbers and resources are still dwarfed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a Christian organization of missionary linguists, whose ultimate goal is to translate the Bible into every human language. Sources of Radical Possibility There are political, educational, scientific, and cultural reasons to support endangered languages and the communities who speak them. There is the straightforward question of justice and minority rights, since it is always the powerful who impose their languages on the powerless. There are the vast reserves of history, literature, knowledge, and wisdom embedded in these languages, the loss of which leaves all of us impoverished. Children learn best when educated in their mother tongue, but, too obsessed with the imperatives of indoctrination and assimilation, few governments ensure this basic human right. Linguistic and cultural continuity holds people together, boosting the resilience of indigenous communities in crisis. Multilingualism is strongly linked to cognitive development, potentially enhancing our capacity for empathy and open-mindedness. Yet far from being a marker of advanced formal education, multilingualism is actually the preserve of the “bottom billion,” who have no choice but to learn their more powerful neighbors’ languages. Leftists, liberals, and progressives have a bigger stake in the future of language than they know. We hardly realize how deeply embedded capitalist mentalities now are in our very language—the ways we talk about time, space, relationships. Liberals intensely aware of privilege based on gender, race, class, or sexuality seldom consider linguistic privilege—English (or Spanish or Chinese or Hausa) is just the air we breathe. The politics of language, when we practice it at all, has been about framing, about keywords, about sloganeering in the major languages. Meanwhile, the ground is shifting under us. full: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/radical-linguistics-in-an-age-of-extinction _ 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: Cameraperson; Homo Sapiens | 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. * Under consideration in this review are two documentaries that defy conventional expectations even for a genre not particularly known for commercialism. The first is “Cameraperson”, which is basically excerpts from documentaries in which Kirsten Johnson served as lead cameraperson, none lasting more than ten minutes or so and often without providing any kind of context for the excerpted film’s overall design. Although often mystifying, it is never without interest. The second is “Homo Sapiens”, a film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter that has an ironic title given that not a single human being is seen throughout the film. Indeed, it consists of nothing but scenes from abandoned cities and towns across the world and as such has a dystopian quality far more disturbing than any Road Warrior movie since it is all very real. I can recommend both films to students of film, which does not mean that you are enrolled at NYU or UCLA but that you have a taste for the offbeat and especially those works that are trying to get to the heart of the human condition in a world coming apart at the seams. full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/07/28/cameraperson-homo-sapiens/ _ 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: Democrats Begin Guilt Trip Campaign To Pressure People Into Supporting Historically Awful Candidate | Twist The Knife - Fiercely Independent Anti-Corporate Media
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.twisttheknife.com/democrats-begin-guilt-trip-campaign-to-pressure-people-into-supporting-historically-awful-candidate/ _ 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] Engels's reflections on writing fiction
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. * Great letter. (It can also be found at MIA.) What motivated you to post it? On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > Engels to Margaret Harkness > In London > > April, 1888; > > Dear Miss Harkness, > _ 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