[Marxism] Das Kapital – 150th Anniversary of a Milestone in Class Struggle

[RKOB via Marxism]

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https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/150-years-das-kapital/

--
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(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
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Re: [Marxism] Alexander Cockburn on the Alt-Right: A Prophecy or Fallacy?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/13/17 9:54 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote:

May I present Exhibit A:

antiwar.com

If you oppose war you are promoting a Leftist position.


A "leftist" position? By that criterion, Charles Lindbergh was a leftist 
because he opposed intervention in 1940. But what kind of leftism is it 
that is based on sympathies for Hitler? Lindbergh was to Hitler as 
people like Vanessa Beeley and Tim Anderson are to Assad. We are 
interested in revolutionaries, not "leftists". We are obligated as 
Marxists to take the side of revolutionary forces in Syria even though 
they have been marginalized by 6 years of scorched earth tactics by the 
regime and reactionary backing of Islamists from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and 
Turkey. I am not particularly interested anyhow in "leftists". The 
masked idiots who punched out photographers in Berkeley are on the left 
but they are also an obstacle to building the kind of left we need. We 
need to build a revolutionary socialist movement, not some misbegotten 
"leftist" movement that keeps shooting itself in the foot. I lived 
through that with the Weathermen, the Maoist idiots and the Trotskyist 
cults of one sort of another 45 years ago. Let the dead bury the dead.

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Re: [Marxism] Alexander Cockburn on the Alt-Right: A Prophecy or Fallacy?

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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You say the Libertarians are doing the right thing - Who do you include
among the "Libertarians" and what "right things" are they doing?

On Sep 13, 2017 4:25 PM, "Andrew Stewart via Marxism" <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
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++

May I present Exhibit A:

antiwar.com

If you oppose war you are promoting a Leftist position.


-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Fwd: 'The Deuce' is critical of the sex industry, whether liberal America likes it or not

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Indeed, most articles I read about The Deuce insisted the women depicted 
were empowered — not victims, but agents. Referencing a scene where 
Gyllenhaal’s character takes a nervous teenager up to a seedy hotel room 
for what is assumed to be his first time (a birthday gift from his 
friends), Erik Adams at The A.V. Club writes, “When Candy is giving Stu 
the ‘feels good’ and ‘that’s nice,’ it’s evident that the businesswoman 
is in control.” At Flavorwire, Jason Bailey helpfully reminds us, “Of 
course, that not everyone involved in pornography, even in this period, 
was at their absolute rock bottom; some people liked to have sex, liked 
to get paid for it, and liked the drugs and the pseudo-celebrity and the 
life.” At Refinery 29, Rebecca Farley calls C.C.’s “bottom bitch,” 
Ashley, his “girlfriend and employee,” jokingly adding, “an H.R. 
nightmare if you ever did see one.” That quip is even more “funny” 
considering a later scene where C.C. slices up Ashley’s armpit with a 
switchblade after she comes in from the cold rain, soaked, complaining 
that she doesn’t want to work anymore that night. Farley later refers to 
Darlene’s violent regular as having “out-of-the-ordinary requests,” 
claiming he only “pretends to slam Darlene into the wall and rape her… 
accidentally bruis[ing] Darlene’s cheek.” Of course, the violence isn’t 
“pretend” at all. It certainly isn’t an “accident.” Darlene may well be 
paid to endure that violence, but the violence remains real.



full: 
http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/09/11/deuce-critical-sex-trade-whether-liberal-america-likes-not/

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Re: [Marxism] Alexander Cockburn on the Alt-Right: A Prophecy or Fallacy?

[Fred Murphy via Marxism]

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You say the Libertarians are doing the right thing - Who do you include
among the "Libertarians" and what "right things" are they doing?

On Sep 13, 2017 4:25 PM, "Andrew Stewart via Marxism" <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> http://washingtonbabylon.com/alexander-cockburn-on-the-alt-
> right-a-prophecy-or-fallacy/
>
> --
> Best regards,
>
> Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Leftbook

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This is basically a day-to-day compilation of comments made on Facebook, 
including mine, as a pdf.


https://leftbookdigest.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/wallace-and-hino-leftbook-digest-2016-2017-final-pdf2.pdf
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[Marxism] Alexander Cockburn on the Alt-Right: A Prophecy or Fallacy?

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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http://washingtonbabylon.com/alexander-cockburn-on-the-alt-right-a-prophecy-or-fallacy/

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Walker and Trump’s Foxconn Deal May Be Worst in American History

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://ourfuture.org/20170913/walker-and-trumps-foxconn-deal-may-be-worst-in-american-history?utm_source=progressive_breakfast_medium=email_campaign=pbreak

Now that Wisconsin is thoroughly softened up by repeated defeats for 
labor, several years of successful anti-worker moves, in comes their 
ultra-right-wing Governor Scott Walker arm-in-arm with Trump and 
Foxconn, the Taiwanese company which brought China mass suicides and 
long, unhealthy, onerous working conditions. Foxconn relocates to 
Wisconsin because they're being offered a $3 billion subsidy to relocate 
to that state that they couldn't refuse, paid for by Wisconsin 
taxpayers, along with the inevitable repatriation of profits drained 
from Wisconsin inhabitants, not even due to be circulated in their own 
area but to the coffers of the stockholders of this giant predatory 
foreign corporation. That plus a leg up on the race to the bottom for 
another segment of US workers due to be underpaid and overworked, who 
were once schooled to expect a race to the top and now will be that much 
closer to their counterparts in China on wages and working conditions.


It's well to keep in mind, though, that we are in a sustained economic 
slump with an increasingly debt-encumbered and insecure working class 
and inexorable increase in automation across the spectrum as capital 
scrambles for diminishing market share - and that following the 1929 
crash, joblessness, homelessness and Hoovervilles, it took a period of 
years before the workers managed to organize and fight back. We can work 
towards that and hope, but this time around for nothing less than a 
united global fight-back. That will take in this country disillusionment 
with the prospect of a working class divided from and opposed to foreign 
workers and sharing in the rip-off from their cheaper labor. Anything 
short of that, with the mobility and power of concentrated capital 
increasing constantly and spreading globally, is pyrrhic.





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Re: [Marxism] I'm the Jewish Banker Behind the Soros Fortune | Spengler

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/13/17 2:41 PM, MF Kalfat via Marxism wrote:


I'm the Jewish Banker Behind the Soros Fortune | Spengler

The Internet is crawling with loonie stories alleging that liberal funder
George Soros is a frontman for the Rothschild banking family, in the
service of a conspiracy for world government. In the 19th century, to be
sure, the Rothschild bank exercised enormous power at the peak of British
an...

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2017/09/03/im-jewish-banker-behind-soros-fortune/


I've had my own beefs with Soros over the years, mostly because he 
funded Bard College's colonizing efforts around the world in pursuit of 
advancing his Karl Popper ideology and because he is a scoundrel whose 
financial chicanery has caused immense suffering. That being said, I 
back the Central European University staying in Hungary despite the 
government's attempts to close it.


Here's something I wrote about Soros supposedly trying to foment a 
"color revolution" against Trump that addresses the anti-Semitism angle:


https://louisproyect.org/2017/01/25/is-george-soros-promoting-a-color-revolution-against-donald-trump/
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[Marxism] I'm the Jewish Banker Behind the Soros Fortune | Spengler

[MF Kalfat via Marxism]

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I'm the Jewish Banker Behind the Soros Fortune | Spengler

The Internet is crawling with loonie stories alleging that liberal funder
George Soros is a frontman for the Rothschild banking family, in the
service of a conspiracy for world government. In the 19th century, to be
sure, the Rothschild bank exercised enormous power at the peak of British
an...

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2017/09/03/im-jewish-banker-behind-soros-fortune/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Deuce | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I have just spent probably the longest 90 minutes of my life watching 
the first episode of “The Deuce”, an HBO series that examines 
prostitution and pornography in New York City in 1971. The show is 
co-written by George Pelecanos and David Simon, the creative team behind 
“The Wire”, another highly acclaimed HBO series that I could never stand 
for more than 5 minutes. Both shows are highly exploitative. In the name 
of gritty realism, they pander to the tastes of an educated urban 
middle-class that gets its kicks out of gaping at society’s 
lower-depths, especially African-American petty criminals who are 
stereotyped in this fare. In “The Wire”, it was drug dealers; in “The 
Deuce”, it is pimps and prostitutes. Despite the lofty pretensions of 
the men and women behind this series, it is nothing but exploitation. 
All this would be forgivable if there was something dramatic going on. 
Watching the first episode was analogous to watching paint dry, to use a 
hoary cliché. How something as lurid as pimps and whores going about 
their business could turn out to be so humdrum and predictable indicates 
to me that Simon and Pelecanos’s reputation has been overblown to the 
nth degree.


“The Deuce” includes Richard Price and James Franco as executive 
producers, who likely had an influence on the story’s narrative arc. 
Price, a one-time very good novelist, began a steep decline once he 
began writing policiers like “Clockers”, a 1992 novel based on the 
cat-and-mouse games played by cops and African-American drug dealers. 
Expecting something approaching Dostoyevsky based on the rave reviews, I 
couldn’t get past page 50 or so. This novel evidently qualified Price to 
begin writing for its first cousin “The Wire” ten years later. Price 
also adapted the very fine British Criminal Justice TV series about a 
young man falsely accused of murdering a woman he met on a one-night 
stand into the mess called “The Night Of”. Like “The Wire” and “The 
Deuce”, it was mostly a way for Price to highlight repulsive and 
grotesque African-American characters.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2017/09/13/the-deuce/
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[Marxism] passing for white

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Today's selection -- from *Our Kind of People* by Lawrence Otis Graham.


 "Although I spent six years researching *Our Kind of People*, I could
never have been prepared for the controversy it elicited from various
groups upon its initial publication." So wrote Lawrence Otis Graham in the
most recent edition of his hotly debated 1999 book. In this book, Graham, a
Harvard-trained lawyer with an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a
best-selling author of 14 books, wrote of class divisions within black
society. In one particularly controversial chapter, he wrote
of light-skinned black Americans who attempted to "pass" as white. To do so
they often "divorced" from family and friends to help ensure that they
weren't discovered while trying to create a new life as a white person. In
one heartbreaking story, he tells of a black woman growing up in the 1950s
and 1960s whose father went to great lengths to hide not only his own skin
color, but hers as well:


"Unfortunately, there is a high price to be paid by family members­ --
particularly the children of blacks who pass. There are many stories of
families who have been polarized on the issue of racial passing.


https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3420
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[Marxism] Fwd: Iran 'cashes in' on Syria intervention with Aleppo utilities contract

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/9/13/iran-cashes-in-on-syria-intervention-with-aleppo-contracts
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Re: [Marxism] How Civilization Started

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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For some pioneering work on the nuts and bolts of this critique, see the
work of Marshll Sahlins, particularly his _Stone Age Economics._.
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Re: [Marxism] Amazon's robotics

[David McDonald via Marxism]

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We buy eggs from a farm that has the following setup. A large chicken coop
with some kind of loose flooring is mounted on wheels. It is pulled through
a field by a very very slow solar-powered computer-operated tractor. The
chicken poop falls through the bottom of the coop and fertilizes the field.
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[Marxism] The US and Europe have almost zero media presence to the vast majority of Russians

[Thomas Campbell via Marxism]

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This is something I wrote on Facebook the other day in response to news, as
reported on Meduza, a Russian news website in exile in Latvia, that the US
government would be investigating Sputnik. This goes to the question of why
people like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky are impelled to appear on RT.

___

"Meduza reviews the case against Sputnik and examines the consequences it
could have for U.S. media outlets in Russia."

What US media outlets in Russia? The US and other western countries have no
outlets that are broadcast to the general Russian public at all in any way.

Back in the day, you could listen to Radio Svoboda and BBC World Service on
AM radio in the big cities, but those days are long gone.

There have never been any US or western TV channels on the free-to-air
airwaves, except for the incredibly lightweight Euronews, which has now
been cancelled.

In terms of print media, The St. Petersburg Times bit the dust two or three
years ago, The eXile even longer ago, and The Moscow Times has been reduced
to a website-only publication.

It's worth bearing in mind that none of these outlets just disappeared from
Russia by themselves. The Russian government deliberately pushed them out,
shut them down or drove them onto the Internet, where they are mostly
invisible to everyone, except the oddballs who go looking for them. I would
hope there are many such oddballs, but my sense of how Russians consume
media is that only Russians who are completely fluent in foreign languages
bother to force themselves to read, say, The New York Times.

It's always easier to read media in your own language, and that doesn't
just apply to Russians of course.

Most Russians live utterly free of any contact with US or other western
media outlets.

When Putin erects a Chinese-style firewall between Russia and the rest of
the world next year, as one of the crackdowns he'll unleash, I predict, to
"celebrate" his "victory" in the presidential elections, that will put an
end to even the unbelievably slight influence western media has on how
Russians perceive the world.

"Quality serials," as viewed on Amediateka, Netflix, et al., and otherwise
downloaded from the web, are a whole different story, but they're a form of
escapism, not a form of engagement with the wider world, its politics,
conflicts, and different ways of thinking and talking about those things.


_


P.S> As for the Voice of America, Ralph Johansen, I have never seen any
evidence that Russians listen to it at all. Probably because they
technically can't, unless they're short-wave radio buffs. How many
short-wave radio buffs do you know?


VOA is a relic of the Cold War, even if it nominally exists somewhere out
there in the ether or the internets.


Foreign media mostly have no impact on how Russians view the world for the
simple reason that most Russians don't speak foreign languages.


So all the poisonous voices of the western mainstream media are lost on
them.


But they are prone to the voices of the Russian mainstream media, which
have become so nazified in the last ten years that you can hardly believe
what you're watching and reading is real.


So, I get a little miffed by the idea that Russians should have to foot the
bill for neo-Nazi propaganda, on the Russian-language channels they have
easy access to at home, while also footing the bill for the festival of
free speech on RT, which they have much less or no access to at all.


If western leftists really do have trouble getting their ideas across to
the general public, they should ask a people oppressed by a corrupt,
violent tyranny for the last eighteen years, to do it for them.
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements? by Gary Werskey

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://human-nature.com/science-as-culture/werskey.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Purged Facebook Page Tied to the Kremlin Spread Anti-Immigrant Bile - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The notice went out on Facebook last year, calling citizens of Twin 
Falls, Idaho, to an urgent meeting about the “huge upsurge of violence 
toward American citizens” by Muslim refugees who had settled there.


The inflammatory post, however, originated not in Idaho but in Russia. 
The meeting’s sponsor, an anti-immigrant page called “Secured Borders,” 
was one of hundreds of fake Facebook accounts created by a Russian 
company with Kremlin ties to spread vitriolic messages on divisive issues.


full: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/us/politics/russia-facebook-election.html

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[Marxism] Macron Faces First Big Street Protests, a Challenge to His Labor Overhaul

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Sept. 13 2017
Macron Faces First Big Street Protests, a Challenge to His Labor Overhaul
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and AURELIEN BREEDEN

PARIS — Thousands turned out Tuesday for mass demonstrations intended to 
protest the country’s new labor code, but by day’s end the anger seemed 
directed more specifically at its author: President Emmanuel Macron, 
whose ambition for change has unnerved many in France.


The rallies were the first major street protests faced by Mr. Macron, 
and a barometer of the public’s reaction to him. The crowd size was 
about what had been expected, and smaller than demonstrations last year 
against changes in labor laws.


But they nonetheless indicated the challenges ahead for Mr. Macron, who 
has seen his popularity plunge since he upset France’s political 
landscape in May by winning the presidency and creating a new political 
party, which won a majority of seats in Parliament.


On Tuesday, Mr. Macron was nowhere near the protests, but rather was 
visiting the French islands of St. Martin and St. Barthélemy in the 
Caribbean after they were hit by Hurricane Irma last week. Still, the 
president was ever-present in the streets.


He, rather than any specific change to the labor code, was the most 
frequent target of criticism, particularly over what has been perceived 
as a dismissive and insulting attitude toward workers. That included 
recent remarks that were interpreted as implying that opponents of his 
labor law were lazy.


Toting signs and chanting, people seemed more preoccupied with Mr. 
Macron than with the law. “Macron you are rotten, the slackers are in 
the streets,” some chanted at rallies in Paris.


The taunt played on remarks Mr. Macron made last week in Greece, saying 
he was determined not to cede anything, “neither to slackers, nor to 
cynics, nor extremists.”


Although Mr. Macron didn’t specify exactly to whom he was alluding with 
the remark, he later claimed that he meant “all of those who for the 
past 15 years have said we mustn’t move in France and in Europe.” Many 
opponents of his changes nonetheless felt personally outraged and aggrieved.


“I’ve been working for the past 32 years. I wake up everyday at 5 a.m. 
I’m no slacker and my work is hard,” Serge Amely, 50, a nurse’s aide, 
said at the demonstration on Tuesday, adding that he felt the comments 
were “unworthy” of a leader.


In addition to union members, some supporters of the far-left France 
Unbowed movement, which is headed by the former presidential candidate 
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also turned out for the march.


Their focus, too, appeared to be less the labor law and more the future 
belt-tightening that Mr. Macron has promised, as well as his style of 
governing.


Organizers said they would stage more demonstrations in the coming weeks 
— the next one on Sept. 23. That leaves open the possibility that 
numbers in the streets could build.


More than 60,000 people demonstrated in Paris on Tuesday, according to 
unions, who called the protests a success. The Paris police prefecture 
said the figure was closer to 24,000. There were smaller protests in 
more than 180 cities, towns and communities around France.


The overall mood was calm, though law enforcement officials used tear 
gas and protesters sometimes threw rocks during sporadic clashes on the 
fringes of the main march in Paris. Last year, weeks of protests against 
similar labor changes were sometimes marred by violence.


The changes to the labor code would loosen regulations for small 
companies, make it easier to hire and fire employees, and enable 
businesses to negotiate certain workplace issues at the company level 
rather than having to abide by industrywide agreements.


Mr. Mélenchon said on Tuesday that Mr. Macron “can and must back down.”

“This isn’t our last stand,” Mr. Mélenchon told reporters at a 
demonstration in the southern city of Marseille, part of the area he 
represents in the lower house of Parliament. “We are organizing a 
relentless defense of the labor code.”


But the government is not expected to budge. Mr. Macron is enacting the 
overhaul to the labor rules by decree, and the changes are expected to 
be implemented this month.


Undercutting the protests’ impact are union divisions, with only one 
major union mounting full-throated opposition.


Only the hard-line General Confederation of Labor, or C.G.T., called on 
its members to demonstrate on Tuesday. Several other major unions chose 
to compromise with the government and try to shape its policies to make 
them more acceptable to workers.


Alain Cure, a 66-year-old elementary-school principal in Paris and a 
union member, 

[Marxism] How Civilization Started

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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New Yorker Magazine, 9/18/2017
HOW CIVILIZATION STARTED.
By: JOHN LANCHESTER

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Was it even a good idea?

Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps 
even as twins, as parts of STEM (for "science, technology, engineering, 
and mathematics"). When it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern 
world—as the supercomputers in our pockets communicate with 
satellites—science and technology are indeed hand in glove. For much of 
human history, though, technology had nothing to do with science. Many 
of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific 
method behind them. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and 
ships' masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been 
crucial to human and economic development, and none historically had any 
connection with what we think of today as science. Some of the most 
important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption 
of the scientific method. I love my laptop and my iPhone and my Echo and 
my G.P.S., but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give 
up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that 
I'm still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit 
typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses. Soap prevented 
more deaths than penicillin. That's technology, not science.
In "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States," James C. 
Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, presents a plausible 
contender for the most important piece of technology in the history of 
man. It is a technology so old that it predates Homo sapiens and instead 
should be credited to our ancestor Homo erectus. That technology is 
fire. We have used it in two crucial, defining ways. The first and the 
most obvious of these is cooking. As Richard Wrangham has argued in his 
book "Catching Fire," our ability to cook allows us to extract more 
energy from the food we eat, and also to eat a far wider range of foods. 
Our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, has a colon three times as 
large as ours, because its diet of raw food is so much harder to digest. 
The extra caloric value we get from cooked food allowed us to develop 
our big brains, which absorb roughly a fifth of the energy we consume, 
as opposed to less than a tenth for most mammals' brains. That 
difference is what has made us the dominant species on the planet.
The other reason fire was central to our history is less obvious to 
contemporary eyes: we used it to adapt the landscape around us to our 
purposes. Hunter-gatherers would set fires as they moved, to clear 
terrain and make it ready for fast-growing, prey-attracting new plants. 
They would also drive animals with fire. They used this technology so 
much that, Scott thinks, we should date the human-dominated phase of 
earth, the so-called Anthropocene, from the time our forebears mastered 
this new tool.


We don't give the technology of fire enough credit, Scott suggests, 
because we don't give our ancestors much credit for their ingenuity over 
the long period—ninety-five per cent of human history—during which most 
of our species were hunter-gatherers. "Why human fire as landscape 
architecture doesn't register as it ought to in our historical accounts 
is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and 
were accomplished by 'precivilized' peoples also known as 'savages,' " 
Scott writes. To demonstrate the significance of fire, he points to what 
we've found in certain caves in southern Africa. The earliest, oldest 
strata of the caves contain whole skeletons of carnivores and many 
chewed-up bone fragments of the things they were eating, including us. 
Then comes the layer from when we discovered fire, and ownership of the 
caves switches: the human skeletons are whole, and the carnivores are 
bone fragments. Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch.


Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly two hundred 
thousand years. For most of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers. 
Then, about twelve thousand years ago, came what is generally agreed to 
be the definitive before-and-after moment in our ascent to planetary 
dominance: the Neolithic Revolution. This was our adoption of, to use 
Scott's word, a "package" of agricultural innovations, notably the 
domestication of animals such as the cow and the pig, and the transition 
from hunting and gathering to planting and cultivating crops. The most 
important of these crops have been the cereals—wheat, barley, rice, and 
maize—that remain the staples of humanity's diet. 

[Marxism] Fwd: A Question of Class. A New Class Politics – A Connective Antagonism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Today, the class question is no longer associated with left-wing, but 
rather with right-wing protest. While the membership base of parties 
such as the Alternative for Germany or the Front National, and of 
movements such as Pegida or “Manif pour tous” (opponents of homosexual 
marriage in France), consists largely of groups from the economically 
secure middle classes or the petty bourgeoisie – and mainly of men –, 
these parties and movements are now able to attract a relevant number of 
workers and unemployed persons as well. Didier Eribon (2013) calls this 
electoral decision in favor of the radical right an “act of political 
self-defence” – a measure taken in order to feature within political 
discourse at all, if only in the form of “negative self-affirmation”. 
Eribon's autobiographical self-experiment, his Returning to Reims, was 
no doubt the surprise bestseller among last year's political books. A 
book on his return to his parental home, which he had left as a “class 
refugee”, in order to be able to live out his homosexual orientation and 
become a professor of sociology – and not to return for decades. The 
many-faceted book, which narrates tales of shame, of the life and 
nightmare of the working class, and especially of women, attempts to 
furnish elements of an explanation why a working class that once voted 
left – at least to a significant degree – is now voting right. Sold out 
by social democracy, disappointed by the ineffectiveness of the 
Communist Party, many turn to a powerful new narrative: that of 
defending hard-working people, the nation and culture against others, 
“Islam”, “immigrants”, globalization, gay and LGBT persons, the 
“moralizing members of the 1968 generation”, who are now in power, etc. 
Eribon strikes a nerve.


full: 
http://www.transform-network.net/blog/article/a-question-of-class-a-new-class-politics-a-connective-antagonism/

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Re: [Marxism] Makarov: Russia Is God’s Last Hope on Earth (The Russian Reader)

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Dostoevsky must be rolling in his grave.
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[Marxism] Fwd: California’s Wine Industry was Built on Slave Labor

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/californias-wine-industry-was-built-on-slave-labor-10
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Re: [Marxism] "Why George Bernard Shaw Had a Crush on Stalin"

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math


-- Original Message --
From: Gary MacLennan via Marxism 
To: Jim Farmelant 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] "Why George Bernard Shaw Had a Crush on Stalin"
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 19:31:26 +1000

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Someone once said (was it Malcolm Muggeridge?) that Shaw was more
intelligent than wise. How apt.

Comradely

Gary


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<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 10:22 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/why-george-
> bernard-shaw-had-a-crush-on-stalin.html
>
> The analysis doesn't go very deep, but IMO we should use this op-ed to
> lobby the publisher of Paul's book on the subject to put it back in print.
>
> Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union
> 1929-1941
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How To: Revitalize Your Body's Energy Source
LCR Health
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/59b91e6ef26001e6e1443st04vuc

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Re: [Marxism] "Why George Bernard Shaw Had a Crush on Stalin"

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math


-- Original Message --
From: Gary MacLennan via Marxism 
To: Jim Farmelant 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] "Why George Bernard Shaw Had a Crush on Stalin"
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 19:31:26 +1000

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Someone once said (was it Malcolm Muggeridge?) that Shaw was more
intelligent than wise. How apt.

Comradely

Gary


Virus-free.
www.avg.com

<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 10:22 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/why-george-
> bernard-shaw-had-a-crush-on-stalin.html
>
> The analysis doesn't go very deep, but IMO we should use this op-ed to
> lobby the publisher of Paul's book on the subject to put it back in print.
>
> Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union
> 1929-1941
> _
> Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
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Actress Tells All: "I Felt Bloated, Tired...Now I Know Why"
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[Marxism] Fwd: Untangling the Controversial Legacy of Sigmund Freud

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On January 24, 1895, in a letter that was kept unpublished for nearly 90 
years, Sigmund Freud wrote nervously about a dangerous experiment he was 
planning to embark upon. “Now only one more week separates us from the 
operation,” he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, who would be 
performing the surgery. “My lack of medical knowledge once again weighs 
heavily on me.”


The patient who would be undergoing the procedure, Emma Eckstein, came 
from a well-regarded family in Vienna and began analysis with Freud when 
she was about 27. She complained of stomach and menstrual issues that 
made even walking a pain. Freud and Fliess believed that Eckstein’s 
suffering was related to her masturbation, which she discussed with 
Freud during their psychoanalytic sessions. It was a dubious logical 
path, but Freud and Fliess’s solution was almost comically unfounded. 
“Girls who masturbate normally suffer from dysmenorrhea,” Fliess later 
wrote in reference to Eckstein’s menstrual pains. “In such cases, nasal 
treatment is only successful when they truly give up this aberration.”


Freud believed that the sexual organs were connected to the nose, and 
sexual “issues,” particularly masturbation, were principle causes of 
neurotic maladies, and that they could sometimes be solved by nasal 
surgery. With the exception of Fliess, Freud’s contemporaries mostly 
found this theory to be bizarre and potentially harmful; and, as is 
evidenced by his 1895 letter, even Freud began to think that he might be 
out of his medical depth. Nonetheless, his convictions outweighed his 
doubts.


full: 
https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/sigmud-freud-making-of-an-illusion-book.html

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[Marxism] Makarov: Russia Is God’s Last Hope on Earth (The Russian Reader)

[Thomas Campbell via Marxism]

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This is probably why ordained minister Chris Hedges doesn't mind getting
his paycheck from the Kremlin.

Don't forget to go to the article at the link. Otherwise, you'll miss the
colorful pictures, including photos of real live Cossacks marching down
Nevsky.

For those of you with no knowledge of Petersburg politics, Vyacheslav
Makarov has a reputation as an extremely corrupt wheeler-dealer and serial
nepotist who would have found kindred spirits in Tammany Hall.

I don't remember when he got on the mystical mumbo-jumbo Russian Orthodox
fascism train, but it's all a put-on, part of the theatrics
​ ​
and scare tactics needed
​ ​
to get Putin re-elected next year (maybe even crowned tsar?), and keep the
ultra-corrupt Putinist machine in power in perpetuity.

On the one hand, it's all a fiction. On the other hand, the regime is
pushing all the most reactionary buttons it can get its hands on to blot
out and besmirch the idea of revolutionary change in 2017, the centennial
of the Russian Revolution.

Knowing all that, any progressive or leftist would want to steer of allying
themselves with the Kremlin, including boycotting RT. But no, Hedges and
Chomsky and lots of other
​ ​
comrades just plunge right
​ ​
in, seemingly heedless of the notion that there might be people in Russia
fighting against this reactionary regime
​ ​
who
​ ​
could use, at least, their tacit, passive
​ ​
solidarity.





https://therussianreader.com/2017/09/13/makarov-russia-is-gods-last-hope-on-earth/
Makarov: Russia Is God’s Last Hope on Earth

Legislative Assembly Speaker Vyacheslav Makarov Calls Russia God’s Last
Hope on Earth
Delovoi Peterburg
September 12, 2017

As reported on Fontanka.ru on Tuesday, September 12, Vyacheslav Makarov,
speaker of the Saint Petersburg Legislative Assembly, called Russia God’s
last hope while addressing participants of a religious procession that had
marched down Nevsky Prospect.

“Russia has its own special mission in the world. The meaning of Russia’s
existence is to solve problems that no other country can solve. Russia is a
world power, God’s last hope on earth! That is why the Lord invisibly
protects Russia from enemies and safeguards its little world for a
salvational outcome in order to protect our country in its heavenly and
earthly dimensions,” Vyacheslav Makarov said.

He noted the adversities that have ravaged Russia are bound up, among other
things, with the murder of the tsar and his family.

“Exactly one hundred years separate us from events that radically changed
our Fatherland, a great, multi-ethnic country, events that plunged it into
the madness of civil war, in which children rebelled against their parents,
and brother fought against brother. And the subsequent losses and sorrows,
trials and tragedies through which the people passed were predestined by
the destruction of the state, the murder of the tsar and his children, and
militant atheism,” said Makarov.

In turn, Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko noted that Alexander
Nevsky had chosen the right way for building the state, had repelled
outside aggressors, and had helped the Russian people maintain its identity
through Orthodoxy.

Today, Petersburg held a citywide religious procession in honor of the Day
of the Translation of the Relics of Alexander Nevsky. The sacred procession
went down Nevsky Prospect from Kazan Cathedral to the Alexander Nevsky
Monastery. According to the regional directorate of the Interior Minister,
over 100,000 people took part in the event.

Translated by the Russian Reader
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Re: [Marxism] "Why George Bernard Shaw Had a Crush on Stalin"

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Someone once said (was it Malcolm Muggeridge?) that Shaw was more
intelligent than wise. How apt.

Comradely

Gary


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On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 10:22 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism <
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>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/why-george-
> bernard-shaw-had-a-crush-on-stalin.html
>
> The analysis doesn't go very deep, but IMO we should use this op-ed to
> lobby the publisher of Paul's book on the subject to put it back in print.
>
> Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union
> 1929-1941
> _
> Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
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