[Marxism] South Africa: ANC suffers in local elections, but left scores low
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.greenleft.org.au/node/62513 _ 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] Bernie Sanders and the Rainbow Coalition | 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. * Good post, Louis. Maybe Sanders is too old to go after, nonstop, as much insider attention as he can drum up, as did Jackson. Be nice to think so. I'm not optimistic. On Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at 1:29:10 PM UTC-4, lnp3 wrote: > > > > > https://louisproyect.org/2016/08/23/bernie-sanders-and-the-rainbow-coalition/ > _ 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] John Marciano's new book on Vietnam
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. * Monthly Review Press is pleased to announce John Marciano's fine new book, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration. John is a longtime friend and a great comrade. Recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about the Crime of this murderous war against the Vietnamese people. A must read for millennials moving to the left. http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=36ce609ae68971b4f060ad9c7=bb8de69d11=7c9269ff30 _ 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] new book on inequality
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Thanks, Andrew, for linking to this review of my book. It's always heartening to read a positive review!! _ 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: Bernie Sanders and the Rainbow Coalition | 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. * https://louisproyect.org/2016/08/23/bernie-sanders-and-the-rainbow-coalition/ _ 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] The left face of the Putin regime
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. * Political resolution of the Sixth Congress of the Russian Socialist Movement http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article4666 Since then, support for the existing regime is no longer presented as a rational choice, but as a civic duty, similar to the patriotic devotion to one’s country. This new ideological content was succinctly formulated by Vyacheslav Volodin: "With Putin Russia exists, without Putin there is no Russia." Such a personification effectively means that the figure of Putin as symbolic "father" rises above day-to-day politics. You can be liberal or nationalist, in favour of state control of the economy or a supporter of the free market, demand the resignation of the government, of certain ministers or governors, but the "Putin-Crimea-Russia" link cannot be questioned or discussed. Those who do not fundamentally agree with that simply put themselves outside the boundaries of the Russian political spectrum and become "traitors to the nation". _ 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] new book on inequality
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 Michael Yates https://socialistworker.org/2016/08/23/between-the-rich-and-the-rest-of-us _ 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: Book review of Stuart Jeffries's Grand Hotel Abyss | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review
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 summer of 1923, a Soviet spy named Richard Sorge helped organize the library of a new think tank in Frankfurt, Germany. It was called the Institute for Social Research, and it had a bizarre origin story: devoted to Marxist scholarship, funded by a capitalist, housed in a building designed by a Nazi. Richard Sorge’s association with the Institute didn’t last very long. His handlers sent him on to Britain, China, and ultimately Japan. He sent back the crucial fact that Japan did not intend to join Germany’s invasion of Russia, leaving the Fuhrer’s pincer movement with just one claw. This bit of spying may well have changed the course of the war. It allowed Russia to deploy its anti-Japanese Siberian divisions to the Battle of Moscow for the first, pivotal defeat of the German Army. Sorge was captured by the Japanese, tortured, disavowed by Russia, and hanged in 1944. Twenty years later, the Soviet government recognized him as a “Hero of the Soviet Union.” Sorge was a Marxist intellectual who turned his convictions into deeds. He was nothing like the other Marxist intellectuals with whom he associated briefly in 1923. In Stuart Jeffries’ new history of the Frankfurt School—a group of thinkers associated at various times with the Institute for Social Research—he brings out the contrast furnished by Sorge’s career: While Sorge was slipping across borders in Europe, America and Asia, charged with helping foment world proletarian revolution by the Comintern, and tasked by the Soviet Union with assisting its resistance against Nazi invasion, the Institute remained aloof from the struggle, valuing its intellectual independence, preferring its scholars not to be members of political parties. Jeffries draws this contrast because he thinks that the Frankfurt School embodies a paradox. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse are perhaps the most famous European thinkers of the far left in the 20th century, but, for the most part, they seem to have abandoned a central principle of Marxism: we shouldn’t just try to understand the world but to change it. They were social critics uninterested in social change. According to Jeffries, “to explore the history of the Frankfurt School and critical theory is to discover how increasingly impotent these thinkers. . . thought themselves to be against forces they detested but felt powerless to change.” full: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/patricide-deferred/ _ 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: Child poverty has fallen 5 percent since Clinton's welfare reform - Business Insider
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 the liberal Huffington Post crossposted an article today that claims childhood poverty has decreased even if Clinton terminated AFDC, a clear bid to get out the vote for Hillary. http://www.businessinsider.com/child-poverty-has-fallen-5-percent-since-clintons-welfare-reform-2016-8 The liberal establishment won't be happy until Clinton gets 80 percent of the vote in November, the kind of smashing win she needs to carry out neoliberal "reforms" of the sort that her husband was infamous for. But if you read the article, you discover that it is based on a report prepared by the Manhattan Institute. So what is this innocuously named think-tank all about, you ask. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research The Manhattan Institute was one of the key institutions that pressed for reform of the welfare system in the mid-1990s.[23] Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984) argued that the welfare state had fostered a culture and cycle of dependency that was to the detriment of both welfare recipients and the United States as a whole.[24] Charter schools and vouchers[edit] Former senior fellow Jay P. Greene’s research on school choice was cited four times in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which affirmed the constitutionality of school vouchers.[25] Medicare[edit] The Institute's Center for Medical Progress[26] opposes allowing the federal government to negotiate prices in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program [27] and believes that drug price negotiating has adverse effects in the Veterans Administration.[28] Hydraulic fracturing[edit] The Manhattan Institute is a proponent of the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) method of extracting natural gas and oil from underground deposits. In response to calls to ban fracking in parts of New York, the Manhattan Institute released a report in 2011 projecting that allowing fracking could "inject over $11 billion into the state economy".[29] Funding sources[edit] Foundations which have contributed over $1 million to the Manhattan Institute include the John M. Olin Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, Smith Richardson Foundation, William E. Simon Foundation, the Claude Lambe Foundation, the Gilder Foundation, the Curry Foundation, and the Jaquelin Hume Foundation.[30][unreliable source?] In 2013, hedge fund managers Cliff Asness, Henry Kravis and Thomas McWilliams all cut ties with the Manhattan Institute due to the group's support of the abolition of defined benefit public pensions.[31] _ 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: Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire | Marc Parry | News | The Guardian
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder. “I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”. Elkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about the underside of empire. Enter Elkins. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians. And she didn’t hesitate to speak about that research in the grandest possible terms: as a “tectonic shift in Kenyan history”. Some academics shared her enthusiasm. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Drayton of King’s College London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book whose implications went beyond Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden (now part of Yemen). British soldiers assist police searching for Mau Mau members, Karoibangi, Kenya, 1954 British soldiers assist police searching for Mau Mau members, Karoibangi, Kenya, 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images But many other scholars slammed the book. No review was more devastating than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published in the Journal of African History. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. In compiling “a kind of case for the prosecution”, he argued, she had glossed over the litany of Mau Mau atrocities: “decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women”. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated interviewees. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African Studies Review. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”. Elkins was also accused of sensationalism, a charge that figured prominently in a fierce debate over her mortality figures. Britain’s Gulag opens by describing a “murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people” and ends with the suggestion that “between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for”, an estimate derived from Elkins’s analysis of census figures. “In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out any more evidence than that
[Marxism] Fwd: Returning to Gordon | Michael Roberts Blog
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * That brings me to the main argument offered by mainstream economist, Robert J Gordon, in his magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War. I have discussed Gordon’s thesis before in this blog ever since he first presented it back in 2012. Gordon reckons that the evidence shows productivity growth is currently low because that it is where it is usually. There have been periods of fast-growing productivity when technical advances spread widely across economies, as in the early 1930s and in the immediate post-war period. Productivity growth rose from the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1950s, but has slowed to a crawl since 1970. In designating 1870–1970 as the ‘special century’, Gordon emphasizes that the period since 1970 has been less special. He argues that the pace of innovation has slowed since 1970 and furthermore that the gains from technological improvement have been shared less broadly. full: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/08/22/returning-to-gordon/ _ 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
