Re: [Marxism] venezuelan election for the Constituent Assembly
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. * Michael, If you can find the time for an extended piece on the Venezuelan situation that would be deeply appreciated. I was dismayed to note that the radical/progressive Radio Station Novara Media out of London is to arrange a debate on Venezuela - for and against. That to me means that the counter revolutionary forces in Venezuela have been very successful in their self presentation. As I read things, the neoliberal centre is in crisis. The UK is about to undertake the construction of a Keynesian centre, but in South America we apparently are having a doubling down on neoliberalism. I am thinking here of the vanguard role of Pinochet. Is Corbyn the future or is some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born? comradely Gary comradely Gary On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 2:24 PM, michael a. lebowitz 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. > * > > Initial reports from the Electoral Commission is that over 8 million [or > 41% of the electorate] voted. > michael > > -- > - > Michael A. Lebowitz > Professor Emeritus > Economics Department > Simon Fraser University > University Drive > Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 > Home: Phone 604-689-9510 > Cell: 604-789-4803 > > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/gary.maclennan1%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
[Marxism] venezuelan election for the Constituent Assembly
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. * Initial reports from the Electoral Commission is that over 8 million [or 41% of the electorate] voted. michael -- - Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University University Drive Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Home: Phone 604-689-9510 Cell: 604-789-4803 _ 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] US Sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea are an Economic Declaration of War
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.thecommunists.net/worldwide/north-america/us-sanctions-vs-russia-iran-north-korea/ -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT,www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 --- Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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: Loss of Fertile Land Fuels ‘Looming Crisis’ Across Africa - The New York Times
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Re: [Marxism] Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor
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 cheered me up on a foggy Monday morning! Speech writer Richard Nixon, eh? In any case she has Trump down pat. comradely Gary On Sat, Jul 29, 2017 at 5:19 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. > * > > (Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon.) > > WSJ Op-Ed, July 28, 2017 > Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor > Half his tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, shrill little > cries, usually just after dawn. > By Peggy Noonan > > The president’s primary problem as a leader is not that he is impetuous, > brash or naive. It’s not that he is inexperienced, crude, an outsider. It > is that he is weak and sniveling. It is that he undermines himself almost > daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity. > > He’s not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and > determined; he’s whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, > on the body politic. He’s a drama queen. It was once said, sarcastically, > of George H.W. Bush that he reminded everyone of her first husband. Trump > must remind people of their first wife. Actually his wife, Melania, is > tougher than he is with her stoicism and grace, her self-discipline and > desire to show the world respect by presenting herself with dignity. > > Half the president’s tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, > shrill little cries, usually just after dawn. “It’s very sad that > Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very > little to protect their president.” The brutes. Actually they’ve been > laboring to be loyal to him since Inauguration Day. “The Republicans never > discuss how good their health care bill is.” True, but neither does Mr. > Trump, who seems unsure of its content. In just the past two weeks, of the > press, he complained: “Every story/opinion, even if should be positive, is > bad!” Journalists produce “highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting.” > They are “DISTORTING DEMOCRACY.” They “fabricate the facts.” > > It’s all whimpering accusation and finger-pointing: Nobody’s nice to me. > Why don’t they appreciate me? > > His public brutalizing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t strong, > cool and deadly; it’s limp, lame and blubbery. “Sessions has taken a VERY > weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes,” he tweeted this week. Talk about > projection. > > He told the Journal’s Michael C. Bender he is disappointed in Mr. Sessions > and doesn’t feel any particular loyalty toward him. “He was a senator, he > looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ‘What do I have to lose?’ And > he endorsed me. So it’s not like a great loyal thing about the > endorsement.” Actually, Mr. Sessions supported him early and put his > personal credibility on the line. In Politico, John J. Pitney Jr. of > Claremont McKenna College writes: “Loyalty is about strength. It is about > sticking with a person, a cause, an idea or a country even when it is > costly, difficult or unpopular.” A strong man does that. A weak one would > unleash his resentments and derive sadistic pleasure from their unleashing. > > The way American men used to like seeing themselves, the template they > most admired, was the strong silent type celebrated in classic mid-20th > century films—Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Henry Fonda. In time the style > shifted, and we wound up with the nervous and chattery. More than a decade > ago the producer and writer David Chase had his Tony Soprano mourn the > disappearance of the old style: “What they didn’t know is once they got > Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings they wouldn’t be able to shut him > up!” The new style was more like that of Woody Allen. His characters > couldn’t stop talking about their emotions, their resentments and needs. > They were self-justifying as they acted out their cowardice and anger. > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/gary.maclennan1%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
[Marxism] Fwd: Iraq's interior minister meets with Saudi crown prince - The National
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. * So Saudi Arabia meets with Iraqi Shiite politician to shmooze over their mutual interests in the "war on terror". So much for the geopolitical proxy war chessgame politics of Global Research/WSWS.org/Consortium News/Canary/LRB/Mintpress/Off-Guardian/. https://www.thenational.ae/world/gcc/iraq-s-interior-minister-meets-with-saudi-crown-prince-1.610401 _ 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] Soviet economic model
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 7/29/17 5:54 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: I also have high regard for anything written by Moshe Lewin, who started off as a blast furnace operator in a Polish factory during WWII and then became a major figure in academic Sovietology. I read his Russia — USSR — Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate and recommend it highly. I cite Moshe Lewin: https://louisproyect.org/2009/09/14/joseph-stalin-nostalgia/ Stalin’s rule was marked mostly by a lack of planning. Despite the announcement of 5-year plans, the economy had more in common with bureaucratic fiat than scientific planning. All this is discussed in chapter 5 entitled “The Disappearance of Planning in the Plan” in Moshe Lewin’s “Russia USSR Russia”. The Soviet government announced the first five year plan in 1928. Stalin loyalists, like Krzhizanovksy and Strumlin, who headed Gosplan, the minister of planning, worried about the excess rigidity of this plan. They noted that the success of the plan was based on 4 factors: 1) five good consecutive crops, 2) more external trade and help than in 1928, 3) a “sharp improvement” in overall economic indicators, and 4) a smaller ration than before of military expenditures in the state’s total expenditures. How could anybody predict five consecutive good crops in the USSR? The plan assumed the most optimistic conditions and nobody had a contingency plan to allow for failure of any of the necessary conditions. Bazarov, another Stalin loyalist in Gosplan, pointed to another area of risk: the lack of political cadres. He warned the Gosplan presidium in 1929, “If you plan simultaneously a series of undertakings on such a gigantic scale without knowing in advance the organizational forms, without having cadres and without knowing what they should be taught, then you get a chaos guaranteed in advance; difficulties will arise which will not only slow down the execution of the five-year plan, which will take seven if not ten years to achieve, but results even worse may occur; here such a blatantly squandering of means could happen which would discredit the whole idea of industrialization.” Strumlin admitted that the planners preferred to “stand for higher tempos rather than sit in prison for lower ones.” Strumlin and Krzhizanovksy had been expressing doubts about the plan for some time and Stalin removed these acolytes from Gosplan in 1930. In order for the planners, who were operating under terrible political pressure, to make sense of the plan, they had to play all kinds of games. They had to falsify productivity and yield goals in order to allow the input and output portions of the plan to balance. V.V. Kuibyshev, another high-level planner and one of Stalin’s proteges, confessed in a letter to his wife how he had finessed the industrial plan he had developing. “Here is what worried me yesterday and today; I am unable to tie up the balance, and as I cannot go for contracting the capital outlays–contracting the tempo–there will be no other way but to take upon myself an almost unmanageable task in the realm of lowering costs.” Eventually Kuibyshev swallowed any doubts he may have had and began cooking the books in such a way as to make the five-year plan, risky as it was, totally unrealizable. Real life proved how senseless the plan was. Kuibyshev had recklessly predicted that costs would go down, meanwhile they went up: although the plan allocated 22 billion rubles for industry, transportation and building, the Soviets spent 41.6 billion. The money in circulation, which planners limited to a growth of only 1.25 billion rubles, consequently grew to 5.7 billion in 1933. Now we get to the real problem for those who speak about “planning” during this period. As madcap and as utopian as the original plan was, Stalin tossed it into the garbage can immediately after the planners submitted it to him. He commanded new goals in 1929-30 that disregarded any economic criteria. For example, instead of a goal of producing 10 million tons of pig iron in 1933, the Soviets now targeted 17 million. All this scientific “planning” was taking place when a bloody war against the Kulaks was turning the Russian countryside into chaos. Molotov declared that to talk about a 5-year plan during this period was “nonsense.” Stalin told Gosplan to forget about coming up with a new plan that made sense. The main driving force now was speed. The slogan “tempos decide everything” became policy. The overwhelming majority of Gosplan, hand-picked by Stalin, viewed the new policy with shock. Molotov said this was too bad, and cleaned
[Marxism] A New View of Grenada's Revolution | by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
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. * Michael Lebowitz wrote Impossible not to respond to Andrew Stewart's query: "Does anyone have a decent, understandable brief that explains the operation of the Soviet economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going tobe a whole other debate)?" Here was my entry: "Contradictions of 'Real Socialism': the Conductor and the Conducted", published by Monthly Review Press in 2012 (with a Cuban edition in 2015 and revised Spanish translations forthcoming in Chile, Ecuador and Spain) and reviewed nicely by Louis at http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/the-contradictions-of-real-socialism/ and Walter Daum wrote I offer a chapter of my book, The Life and Death of Stalinism, published in 1990: http://lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter5_stalinistcapitalism.pdf. Since then Soviet archives have been opened to scholars, and I believe that the broad ideas in this chapter are illustrated in, for example, the book The Political Economy of Stalinism by Paul R. Gregory, which might be available online. t. I have recently read Michael's fine book and just finished reading Walter Daum's, both for an online discussion group, and I found both enlightening, informative and helpful. Michael's book is the more recent (2012?), containing much food for thought - lessons to be learned, as has been true of all of his books. Walter's was written in the period from 1985-1989 and therefore is kind of prescient. It's exhaustively researched and closely reasoned on the principles of Marxism and on the topic of the rise and fall of Stalinism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. So readem both; they offer somewhat differing views, both worth considering. Walter's is even online yet, and Michael's is very accessible in paperback. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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] [mlg-ics] Lukacs Ontology of Social Being
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. * Hello, Lukács' "Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins" is his great forgotten, undiscovered, untranslated and hidden book. In my view, it is his most important work. It is a shame that his own students simply rubbished the book in their essay-comment, but did nothing to translate the entire work into English. They clearly misjudged the greatness of the Ontology. I have as part of the development of foundations of a Marxist theory of communication discussed Lukács' Ontology in the book "Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet" that asks what we can make of his Ontology-book and other works in the age of the Internet. The Ontology of Social Being-chapter (Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar: Cultural and Digital Labour in the Context of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being) is chapter 2: http://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book1/ I have in this chapter also translated some of what I consider key quotes from Lukács' book from German into English, so it also gives a partial introduction to the Ontology. Similar things said about the Ontology can also be said about Lukács untranslated two volume "Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen". It is sad that when one says Lukács today, the only association for most is and has to be "History and Class Consciousness", which is a great book, but not his greatest Best regards, CF On 29/07/2017 18:46, George Snedeker wrote: Does anyone know of a good discussion of Lukacs's THE ONTOLOGY OF SOCIAL BEING in English? Only three of the eight chapters of Lukacs's last major philosophical work have been translated into English. These three chapters were published as three small books by the Merlin Press. The final three chapters of Lukacs's book: on Alienation, Ideology and The Social Reproduction of Society have not yet been translated into English. The three chapters which have been translated into English as separate books are on Hegel, Marx and Labor.I understand that Brill will be publishing the entire Ontology of Social Being in perhaps 3-5 years. George Snedeker ___ MLG-ICS mailing list mlg-...@lists.andrew.cmu.edu https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/mlg-ics _ 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] Soviet economic model
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. * Obviously there are many books on this issue. Concerning Stalinism and the Cuban economy I would add: Michael Pröbsting: Cuba‘s Revolution Sold Out? The Road from Revolution to the Restoration of Capitalism The book can be downloaded as a pdf here:https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/cuba-s-revolution-sold-out/ Am 29.07.2017 um 23:32 schrieb Andrew Stewart 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. * Does anyone have a decent, understandable brief that explains the operation of the Soviet economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going to be a whole other debate)? -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 --- Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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
