[Marxism] The Neo-Marxist Roots of Modern Monetary Theory | Mises Wire

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Meanwhile, over at the Mises Institute:

"The influence of the economics of Michal Kalecki on Modern Monetary Theory 
(MMT) is hard to ignore. With its roots in the Neo-Marxist macroeconomic theory 
of Michal Kalecki, MMT carries with it the heritage of the labor theory of 
value and the Marxist state and class analysis. As a Marxist, Kalecki views the 
economy through the lens that capitalism is a class society. For him, two 
classes operate in the economy: the capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and the 
workers (the proletariat). Kalecki prepared the theoretical groundwork for the 
expansion of government spending, particularly in the countries of the third 
world. Yet while most developing countries have abandoned this theory, it 
celebrates its comeback disguised as “ Modern Monetary Theory ”.

…

“While many developing countries have abandoned the failed approach of 
development by debt and turned to solid economic policies, the opposite is 
happening in the United States and some other parts of the developed world. The 
enthusiasm that met the proposals of free education, health care for all, and a 
fully renewed ecological infrastructure, is a sign utopian wishful thinking. If 
realized, these plans will not bring prosperity and social justice, but 
hyperinflation, economic stagnation, and socio-political chaos."

https://mises.org/wire/neo-marxist-roots-modern-monetary-theory 

Of course, the fine people at Mises are hardly much better informed about MMT 
than many of its critics from the left, but it’s striking that so many of the 
latter seem so comfortable aligning with the Austrians.

Apologies if I’ve gone over the 6-post limit today. I won’t post any more — in 
fact, I don’t think I’ll engage around this topic any further on the list. 
Happy to field good-faith queries off-list.
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Re: [Marxism] MMT in practice

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 8:16 PM, Dayne Goodwin via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> … MMT's apparent claim
> that there is no relationship between the value of a currency and the labor
> theory of value is valid.

I don’t think any of the main MMT proponents holds that view. Here are the 
concluding paragraphs of Randy Wray’s paper, “Theories of Value and the 
Monetary Theory of Production,” in which he embraces and defends the labor 
theory of value: 

"It is frequently argued that the LTV is "metaphysical" (an argument also 
adopted by Robinson 1967, p. xi), or that one could just as well argue that 
capital produces all value, or that petrol does, and so on.31 This involves a 
fundamental misunderstanding of a monetary production economy. In an economy 
that is able to produce, and in which most production occurs on the basis of 
hiring labor at a money wage, wages are simultaneously the major cost of 
production and the source of the revenues that validate production. Labor 
simultaneously produces the physical output–but, more importantly, it sets in 
motion the monetary flows that are the purpose of production. Because the 
majority of worker income will be used to purchase the necessities of life, the 
wage bill returns as capitalist receipts, while the link between capitalist 
income and spending is different because the goal of capitalist activity is 
money and not necessities. In Kalecki's terminology, workers spend what they 
get and capitalists get what they spend; Marx's equivalent expression is "the 
part of the variable capital that A advances at any one time to his workers 
constantly flows back to him from the circulation sphere". (Marx Vol 2, p. 406).

"There are other reasons why adoption of some other "factor" of production as 
the source of value would be mistaken. First, of course, there is the problem 
of adoption of a measure of value that is not itself a value. The separation of 
labor (not a value) from labor power (a commodity with value) provides the 
external measure of value. The problem with trying to use capital as the source 
of value is that it is itself a value, a value that depends on other values 
(for example, prospective profits); further, the heterogeneity problems with 
capital are surely much greater than those encountered in the case of labor. 
(Dobb 1945) Second, the focus on labor is consistent with the observation that 
it is obvious that man as a tool using animal manufactures instruments to 
increase control over nature. Third, the focus on labor and relations of 
production is consistent with the view of capitalist production as the product 
of relations of men with men. Value is not an attribute of things, but is a 
social relation between men. (Dobb 1945, p. 59) It should be noted, however, 
that no claim is made that other "factors of production" are not "productive" 
in a technical sense; even Marx argued that capital produces wealth. Nor is 
there any claim that embodied labor is the only thing commodities have in 
common. It is merely claimed that labor fulfills the requirements of a theory 
of value while other "factors" do not, and that the LTV is consistent with 
Keynes's analysis.

"Similarly, the choice of the money-unit (wage unit) in Keynes's system is due 
to the prominent role given to liquidity preference and expectations. This in 
turn reflects a fundamental characteristic of a capitalist society in which the 
individual faces a type of uncertainty that is unique to an economy based on 
atomistic diffusion of decision making and individual responsibility for one's 
own welfare. This cannot be dismissed by handwaves about the "long run" or 
"fundamentals". In this sense, liquidity preference reflects social relations 
of production in a manner similar to but distinct from the way labor values 
reflect social relations in production.”

Maybe it would be useful if people would offer source references for positions 
they attribute to “MMT,” rather than just pulling stuff out of the air.
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Re: [Marxism] The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory | Literature, the Humanities,

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 4:27 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> What a bunch of jive.

It’s an intentional provocation, not a policy document.
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Re: [Marxism] The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory | Literature, the Humanities,

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 4:57 PM, MM  wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 21, 2020, at 4:27 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>> mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> What a bunch of jive.
> 
> It’s an intentional provocation, not a policy document.

By the way, I don’t think Scott would call himself a “leading MMT theorist.” 
He’s not even an economist, but a young media scholar.

Here’s a better place to start:

Modern Monetary Theory and Practice: An Introductory Text
Mitchell, Prof W F; Wray, Prof L R; Watts, Prof M J
https://www.abebooks.com/9781530338795/Modern-Monetary-Theory-Practice-Introductory-1530338794/plp

Again, if you need a straw man to debunk in order to feel better about your 
ignorance, you’ll definitely be able to find one.
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Re: [Marxism] MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 1:22 PM, John Reimann via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Question for the MMT advocates, or anybody who understands the theory: Am I
> right that MMT advocates that countries simply print up cash rather than
> float bonds and T-notes - in other words rather than go into debt? A simple
> "yes" or "no" will do.


A simple yes or no won’t do because the question reflects multiple 
misunderstandings.

MMT doesn’t advocate any specific policy for all countries, or for any specific 
country. It offers a description of how central government spending works, and 
a framework for understanding how much fiscal space a given country has for 
using that spending power. As I wrote earlier, it’s best understood as a lens 
through which to understand structural impediments to the effective use of 
public spending. To the extent that the MMT lens is more widely understood 
among the public, it then becomes increasingly possible to assert 
mass-democratic pressure on that spending, in ways that can advance the kinds 
of social goals that hopefully everyone on this list would embrace.

“Print up cash” isn’t an accurate description of how money is created. The 
authorizing government body (in the US, Congress) passes a spending bill, and 
that spending takes place through keystrokes that change bank balances. But far 
more importantly, it matters a great deal how that money is spent, because even 
for a country with “full monetary sovereignty,” the impacts of public spending 
are constrained by the availability of real resources — including labor, but 
also raw materials, energy, food, technology, etc.

When new spending happens, new money is created. In accounting terms, the 
record of that spending is a “deficit”; on the other side of the ledger it is 
simply “money in circulation.” Each dollar is worth exactly one other dollar, 
so the government technically “owes” exactly the amount of money that is in 
circulation — but it is also the sole issuer of the currency it offers in 
exchange for existing dollars.

In the US, there is a legal requirement to turn that deficit into debt through 
the issuance of bonds / T-bills, but that’s because of a law passed by 
Congress; it isn’t an inherent part of the money creation process. There are 
different views among MMT scholars on the wisdom of that. Either way, MMT 
doesn’t “advocate” “printing up cash,” or the reverse; it offers a description 
of how the process works; an explanation of why many countries can do more of 
that than many people realize; some suggestions on how that greater spending 
power could best be used (although the details will always be dependent on the 
concrete national context); and some ideas for how countries that are 
especially constrained in that regard can move towards greater independence and 
autonomy. 

BTW, I’m not particularly an advocate of MMT, but I am an advocate of reading 
in good faith and taking advantage of useful insights wherever they originate. 
The refusal of folks on the left to engage with this body of thought is beyond 
bizarre — borderline pathological. What I’m waiting for now is what typically 
comes next: As folks spend enough time with the material for the penny to drop, 
they’ll suddenly say, “Oh, of course, I’ve known that all along! MMT has 
nothing new to offer!” Wait for it.
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Re: [Marxism] How Useful Is Modern Money Theory for Developing Countries?

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 9:48 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://therealnews.com/stories/modern-monetary-theory-developing-countries 
> 

The mistake all of these critics make is to assume that MMT is an economic 
paradigm offering a set of policy prescriptions, rather than a lens through 
which to analyze national economies in order to identify the specific 
structural impediments to advancing public, democratic control over the economy 
(from which a tailored set of policy prescriptions could be developed). Once 
you understand it, the resistance to it from the right makes perfect sense; 
rightwing  economists and thinktanks understand perfectly well that MMT’s wider 
acceptance will make their efforts to maintain class-divided societies much 
harder. The resistance to it from the left is much sadder and more pathetic — 
as far as I can tell it mainly boils down to sectarian habits of argumentation, 
turf and reputations. And it’s bizarre to watch it in action.
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Re: [Marxism] How Useful Is Modern Money Theory for Developing Countries?

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 9:48 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://therealnews.com/stories/modern-monetary-theory-developing-countries


There are many more examples of pieces written from a basically hostile 
standpoint that also cherry pick quotes and construct a strawperson version of 
the thought in order to dismiss it, rather than bothering to grapple with the 
original materials, including from places like Cato and Hoover, both of which 
seem especially keen to make sure that nobody takes MMT seriously. I can 
provide links if you want.


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Re: [Marxism] MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 9:26 AM, MM  wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 21, 2020, at 8:50 AM, Louis Proyect > > wrote:
>> 
>> Actually, I think it is probably beyond the scope of MMT. I just read Doug 
>> Henwood's article that makes clear it is a policy for G7 nations, especially 
>> the USA, not poor countries like Nicaragua. Indeed, I came to the conclusion 
>> long ago that post-Keynesian economics has little to offer places like 
>> Nicaragua. I got to know Nathan Tankus fairly well when I was writing some 
>> stuff about the difficulties of getting Greece back on the drachma that were 
>> cross-posted on Naked Capitalism. As I began reading Yves Smith's blog and 
>> spending some time with her and Nathan, it occurred to me at some point that 
>> they had zero interest in the global South or what is sometimes called 
>> "development economics".
> 
> That’s why I recommended the interview with Fadhel — the application of MMT 
> to the global South is *exactly* what he is focused on. But it’s easy to 
> convince yourself you’ve won an argument when you refuse to listen to the 
> other side.

By the way, the only thing that Doug’s Jacobin piece “makes clear” is that he 
also refused to do any serious study of MMT, because he was convinced he 
already understood it. Pavlina Tcherneva’s response to it is also worth 
reading, although she doesn’t deal explicitly with the developmental econ side:

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/mmt-modern-monetary-theory-doug-henwood-overton-window

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Re: [Marxism] MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 8:50 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:
> 
> Actually, I think it is probably beyond the scope of MMT. I just read Doug 
> Henwood's article that makes clear it is a policy for G7 nations, especially 
> the USA, not poor countries like Nicaragua. Indeed, I came to the conclusion 
> long ago that post-Keynesian economics has little to offer places like 
> Nicaragua. I got to know Nathan Tankus fairly well when I was writing some 
> stuff about the difficulties of getting Greece back on the drachma that were 
> cross-posted on Naked Capitalism. As I began reading Yves Smith's blog and 
> spending some time with her and Nathan, it occurred to me at some point that 
> they had zero interest in the global South or what is sometimes called 
> "development economics".

That’s why I recommended the interview with Fadhel — the application of MMT to 
the global South is *exactly* what he is focused on. But it’s easy to convince 
yourself you’ve won an argument when you refuse to listen to the other side.
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Re: [Marxism] MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

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> On Apr 21, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:
> 
> Yes, he addresses the question of how developing countries can gain monetary 
> sovereignty in a podcast. I am not trying to avoid his ideas but I have a 
> real antipathy to podcasts. I just can't abide by the idea of sitting through 
> an hour of someone making impromptu observations. I get my information from 
> reading, not listening.

I can’t make you listen to it, but it isn’t “impromptu observations” — it’s a 
fairly systematic presentation of the key issues. And I suspect you’ll 
immediately know what sorts of questions need to be asked and answered about 
the Nicaraguan economy in order to understand what went wrong: questions mainly 
around food imports, energy, and technology. I just don’t know enough about the 
country to say much of use, and I can’t justify putting the time into it given 
other writing obligations.
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Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Re: WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 11:00 PM, MM  wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 20, 2020, at 10:23 PM, John Edmundson via Marxism 
>> mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> What I don't understand is how MMT can be simultaneously a progressive
>> approach compatible with socialism and also a good strategy for capitalist
>> survival. Mike Roberts seems to have similar misgivings. I think these may
>> have been posted here before but seem pertinent to this discussion.
> 
> The mistake you’re making is in thinking that MMT is inherently a 
> political-economic “ideology” that is trying to “compete” with “Marxism” — 
> and that therefore must be either pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist.
> 
> Do you believe the same of chemistry? Biology? Physics? Math? 
> 
> This is the mistake that Michael Roberts makes, and it’s what makes his 
> “critique” essentially worthless.
> 
> None of this will make any sense if you’re not willing to read the source 
> literature. 

“I have not yet been persuaded that the study of physics is inherently 
anti-capitalist, and therefore I refuse to make any serious effort to 
understand physics.”

Maybe the stakes get clearer when we put the argument that way.
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Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Re: WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 10:23 PM, John Edmundson via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> What I don't understand is how MMT can be simultaneously a progressive
> approach compatible with socialism and also a good strategy for capitalist
> survival. Mike Roberts seems to have similar misgivings. I think these may
> have been posted here before but seem pertinent to this discussion.

The mistake you’re making is in thinking that MMT is inherently a 
political-economic “ideology” that is trying to “compete” with “Marxism” — and 
that therefore must be either pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist.

Do you believe the same of chemistry? Biology? Physics? Math? 

This is the mistake that Michael Roberts makes, and it’s what makes his 
“critique” essentially worthless.

None of this will make any sense if you’re not willing to read the source 
literature. 
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Re: [Marxism] MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 9:49 PM, Anthony Boynton via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> MMT's prescriptions can be seen as extensions of Keynesian economics. Their
> limited value for saving capitalism applies only to imperialist countries
> without debts denominated in currencies other than their own currency and
> cannot and does not apply to the world economy.


This is a staggeringly ignorant and cringingly “priestly” couple of sentences. 
Let me just rip a few phrases to shreds for now:

“MMT's prescriptions” — as if there is a single set of prescriptions coming out 
of this school of thought — when even leading voices of MMT insist that the 
main thing that unifies “MMT” is a descriptive account of the money function, 
as for instance in this interview: 
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/20/deconstructed-podcast-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-coronavirus-economy/

"can be seen” — by whom? Sectarian idiots? Great; not really very concerned 
about them.

“Their limited value for saving capitalism” — as if MMT is focused on saving 
capitalism, as opposed to saving societies from capitalism, as would be 
apparent to anyone who spent even a few minutes trying sincerely to become 
familiar with the body of thought in question.

"cannot and does not apply to the world economy” — already dispensed with in 
earlier posts.

This is really getting embarrassing. Why are people so enthusiastically 
committed to pronouncing on stuff they don’t have the first clue about? I feel 
like I’m trapped in a Monty Python sketch.

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Re: [Marxism] MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 9:49 PM, Anthony Boynton via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> A good place to start understanding MMT, its history, and its differences
> with traditional Keynesian economics is Wikipedia
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory 
> 
> 
> ...
> MMT's prescriptions can be seen as extensions of Keynesian economics. 

And now we have someone purporting to be a serious Marxist thinker invoking 
Wikipedia as an authoritative source on MMT — a body of thought for which there 
is no single set of policy prescriptions.

And by the way, I’ve personally seen Michael Roberts admit that he couldn’t 
offer any source reference for his characterization of MMT because it was 
simply “his opinion.” 

This is getting ridiculous. It’s truly astonishing how committed some people 
are to defending their own ignorance.

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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 9:59 PM, John A Imani via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> JAI

What’s missing from JAI’s response — but is dealt with at length in the 
interview I posted, and runs throughout the MMT literature — is what the newly 
printed money is put to use to do.

Unless comrades are willing to start dealing with the details of specific 
national contexts and industrial strategies, this is all sound and fury, 
signifying nothing. Pick a country — any country — and start dealing with the 
numbers. But for Christ’s sake stop with the fucking Marxian scriptural 
references. 

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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 9:09 PM, Louis Proyect  wrote:
> 
> I'd be willing to read something written by an MMT proponent.

I’m almost sure you don’t realize how that comes across. Almost.

> I used to be in contact with Nathan Tankus but lost touch.

I posted the link to Nathan’s new substack website earlier; it’s here: 
https://nathantankus.substack.com/

> Much of what I've heard about MMT seems geared to G7 nations. 


The first thing you say here is a nearly universal misunderstanding based on a 
simple failure to use Google. The podcast I posted is the best single source I 
know of, and frankly I don’t have a lot of patience with anyone who isn’t 
willing to listen to it. Fadhel is incredibly busy — he gave more than 400 
presentations last year alone, in dozens of countries. 

> If it was so easy to lift a country up by its own bootstraps, it seems made 
> to order for the global South. Right? 

Who said it was easy? This is a stupid, ignorant comment. It’s beneath you.

> So, why hasn't it been adopted universally?

Believe it or not, we’re working on it. This is from South Africa, less than 24 
hours ago:

Former Treasury official Donaldson says Bank can buy up to R20bn of bonds a week

Current shocks to global and domestic demand mean inflation is not an immediate 
concern, says former Treasury official

BL PREMIUM 
20 April 2020 - 05:10 Lukanyo Mnyanda
The Reserve Bank should scale up its bond purchases to as much as R20bn a week 
to help reduce borrowing costs for the government as it seeks to fund emergency 
measures to deal with the Covid-19 crisis, according to one of the economists 
briefing advisers and officials in the presidency. 

That would be a major escalation in the use of the Bank’s firepower after 
deputy governor Fundi Tshazibana 

 told Business Day on April 7 that it had bought about R1bn of government-debt 
securities the month before, a relatively modest number in a market valued at 
about R2.5-trillion. The Bank announced its programme on March 25, after 
identifying market dislocations that pushed bond yields to record highs. 

Such an aggressive show of force, mirroring actions by central banks in 
developed economies that have exceeded interventions during the great recession 
a decade ago, would reduce market stress and shift market expectations towards 
lower long-term yields, according to a paper written for the government by the 
University of Cape Town’s Andrew Donaldson.

Current shocks to global and domestic demand mean inflation is not an immediate 
concern despite the sharp depreciation by the rand in 2020, he said. The rand, 
which started the year at about R14/$, has slid about 25% to nearly R19/$, 
though the potential effect on inflation has been countered by the collapse of 
oil prices and economic activity.

Donaldson spent 20 years at the Treasury before retiring in 2017. The group of 
economists supporting efforts to come up with measures to mitigate the economic 
impact of the coronavirus outbreak includes another former official, Michael 
Sachs, who has headed the Treasury’s budget office and is now an adjunct 
professor at Wits University. Sachs has argued for fiscal stimulus to deal with 
the health and economic crisis arising from Covid-19.

The Bank, which has slashed its repo rate by 200 basis points in two meetings 
since March, has resisted pressure to undertake wide-scale money printing to 
help reduce government borrowing costs at a time when already elevated 
borrowings costs were raising questions about its ability to fund itself.

The Bank entered the bond market after 10-year yields spiked to close to 13% 
late in March, though it insisted this was not quantitative easing as it was 
not meant to influence prices but rather to restore market liquidity and 
efficiency to ensure sellers could easily find buyers. Yields have since eased 
back to about 10%, a level that is still seen as severe and unsustainable given 
that inflation is well within the 3%-6% target range.

After the Bank cut rates on April 14 governor Lesetja Kganyago rejected 
suggestions that it follow its counterpart in the UK and fund the state 
directly through so-called monetary financing. That step was unnecessary 
because the government has no trouble funding itself in open markets, he said. 
It would also be illegal and in breach of the Bank’s legal mandate.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak government borrowing costs were heading 
higher due to a weak economy and failure to consolidate spending to arrest a 
deterioration that was set to push the deficit 

Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 8:13 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> I have not really bothered reading anything about MMT but I do have to wonder 
> whether it could have done anything to relieve the terrible economic crisis 
> that the FSLN had to deal with in the late 80s and that eventually led to the 
> election of Violetta Chamorro.
> 
> Nicaragua certainly printed money like it was going out of style but it led 
> to an inflationary spiral as bad as 1920s Germany. It had to pay soldiers who 
> were out in the field trying to end the contra war. The money that was put 
> into circulation had consequences:
> 
> Nicaraguan Devaluation
> Reuters, January 5, 1989
> 
> Nicaragua devalued its currency by 54 percent today, the seventh drastic 
> reduction in a year, and cut subsidies on transportation and military 
> spending to combat an economic slump and soaring inflation. The central bank 
> said in a statement that the cordoba was now fixed at 2,000 to the United 
> States dollar, down from 920 to the dollar. President Daniel Ortega said 
> Sunday that prices rose 21,742 percent in 1988, and he promised a severe new 
> round of austerity. Some independent economists have warned that inflation 
> could exceed 100,000 percent this year.
> 
> So, what is it that I am missing?

I’m not familiar with the Nicaraguan economy, but I think you’ll probably find 
the interview with Fadhel Kaboub that I just posted in response to John at 
least suggestive of how to go about answering the question.
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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 8:25 PM, MM  wrote:
> 
>> So, what is it that I am missing?
> 
> I’m not familiar with the Nicaraguan economy, but I think you’ll probably 
> find the interview with Fadhel Kaboub that I just posted in response to John 
> at least suggestive of how to go about answering the question.

Just to say a little more: The key is how the new money is spent, and 
specifically whether it is spent on developing the kind of productive 
infrastructure that any good socialist government would build: public 
transport, hospitals, schools, local farms, factories to produce basic consumer 
goods, etc. The money thus spent into existence continues to circulate, 
becoming the lifeblood of local economies: bodegas, book stores, hair salons, 
jazz clubs. But very few people on the left have been willing to even engage 
with this body of thought enough to be able to move beyond the fundamentally 
reactionary phrase “printing money,” and begin think about how any of this 
actually works in concrete terms — hardly a shining testament to the legacy of 
historical materialism.

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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 7:57 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I asked around about whether the advocates of this theory say it applies to 
> underdeveloped countries - in fact any country aside from the US, any country 
> whose currency isn't the world currency - and nobody can answer me. Now, 
> maybe all those other people are just as dumb and uneducated as I am. Or 
> maybe they don't know because the so-called theory simply doesn't deal with 
> these questions concretely.

Alternatively, maybe the “so-called theory” deals with them in considerable 
detail:

https://urpe.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/fadhel-kaboub-on-monetary-sovereignty-colonialism-and-independence/

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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 6:31 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In many other countries around the world, extremely high levels of government 
> debt led to devaluation and high inflation. The US is in an exceptional 
> situation because of the global role of the dollar. That role is based on the 
> military and economic power of the US internationally. However, just as that 
> power of US capitalism is being challenged so, contrary to what some comrades 
> seem to think, the international role of the dollar may not last forever.
> 
> So, we will see.
> 
> John Reimann

John, Where do you think a future socialist government’s money supply would 
come from? 

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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 20, 2020, at 6:31 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In many other countries around the world, extremely high levels of government 
> debt led to devaluation and high inflation. The US is in an exceptional 
> situation because of the global role of the dollar. That role is based on the 
> military and economic power of the US internationally. However, just as that 
> power of US capitalism is being challenged so, contrary to what some comrades 
> seem to think, the international role of the dollar may not last forever.

And those cases have been analyzed at length in the /extensive/ literature on 
modern money systems that’s been produced over the past couple of decades. All 
this proves is that Reimann still hasn’t read any of it. 
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Re: [Marxism] WA Post: "Record government and corporate debt risks tipping point"

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> On Apr 19, 2020, at 9:59 AM, John Reimann via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> From the Washington Post
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/04/18/record-government-corporate-debt-risk-tipping-point-after-pandemic-passes/
>  
> 
> 
> The United States is embarking on a rapid-fire experiment in borrowing
> without precedent, as the government and corporations take on trillions of
> dollars of debt to offset the economic damage from the coronavirus
>   
> >
> pandemic.

There’s a fundamental misconception in this piece. US government debt is 
nothing like debt for the private sector, or at the state or municipal level. 
Virtually all USG debt is denominated in dollars, and the US is the sole issuer 
of dollars. The US Government doesn’t have to “earn” US dollars in order to pay 
off its dollar-denominated debts, and its debt is for all practical purposes 
“owed” to itself: it “borrows” from itself when it expands the money supply. If 
people think the US government needs to “raise” dollars in order to meet its 
obligations, then surely they should be able to explain where those dollars it 
is ostensibly going to get from someone else — taxpayers, China, whoever — 
could have come from in the first place.

Nathan Tankus is almost certainly doing the best analysis of what’s happening 
with the bailouts — and the mainstream press is rapidly recognizing that fact:

https://nathantankus.substack.com/

It really would be helpful if the left would get up to speed on how central 
banking works, because the scales are very rapidly falling from the eyes of 
those members of the capitalist class who didn’t already understand this stuff, 
and they’re quite happy to use it against us while we continue to wallow in our 
ignorance.

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[Marxism] Bloomberg Editorial Board Member: This Pandemic Will Lead to Social Revolutions

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“Andreas Kluth is a member of Bloomberg's editorial board. He was previously 
editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.”


This Pandemic Will Lead to Social Revolutions
As the coronavirus sweeps the world, it hits the poor much harder than the 
better off. One consequence will be social unrest, even revolutions.

Andreas Kluth
April 11, 2020, 1:00 AM EDT

The most misleading cliche about the coronavirus is that it treats us all the 
same. It doesn’t, neither medically nor economically, socially or 
psychologically. In particular, Covid-19 exacerbates preexisting conditions of 
inequality wherever it arrives. Before long, this will cause social turmoil, up 
to and including uprisings and revolutions.

Social unrest had already been increasing around the world before SARS-CoV-2 
began its journey. According to one count, there have been about 100 large 
anti-government protests since 2017, from the gilets jaunes riots in a rich 
country like France to demonstrations against strongmen in poor countries such 
as Sudan and Bolivia. About 20 of these uprisings toppled leaders, while 
several were suppressed by brutal crackdowns and many others went back to 
simmering until the next outbreak.

The immediate effect of Covid-19 is to dampen most forms of unrest, as both 
democratic and authoritarian governments force their populations into 
lockdowns, which keep people from taking to the streets or gathering in groups. 
But behind the doors of quarantined households, in the lengthening lines of 
soup kitchens, in prisons and slums and refugee camps — wherever people were 
hungry, sick and worried even before the outbreak — tragedy and trauma are 
building up. One way or another, these pressures will erupt.

The coronavirus has thus put a magnifying glass on inequality both between and 
within countries. In the U.S., there’s been a move by some of the very wealthy 
to “self-isolate” on their Hamptons estates or swanky yachts — one Hollywood 
mogul swiftly deleted an Instagram picture of his $590 million boat after a 
public outcry. Even the merely well-heeled can feel pretty safe working from 
home via Zoom and Slack.

But countless other Americans don’t have that option. Indeed, the less money 
you make, the less likely you are to be able to work remotely (see the chart 
below). Lacking savings and health insurance, these workers in precarious 
employment have to keep their gigs or blue-collar jobs, if they’re lucky enough 
still to have any, just to make ends meet. As they do, they risk getting 
infected and bringing the virus home to their families, which, like poor people 
everywhere, are already more likely to be sick and less able to navigate 
complex health-care mazes. And so the coronavirus is coursing fastest through 
neighborhoods that are cramped, stressful and bleak. Above all, it 
disproportionately kills black people.
 
Even in countries without long histories of racial segregation, the virus 
prefers some zip codes over others. That’s because everything conspires to make 
each neighborhood its own sociological and epidemiological petri dish — from 
average incomes and education to apartment size and population density, from 
nutritional habits to patterns of domestic abuse. In the euro zone, for 
example, high-income households have on average almost double the living space 
as those in the bottom decile: 72 square meters (775 square feet) against only 
38.

The differences between nations are even bigger. To those living in a 
shantytown in India or South Africa, there’s no such thing as “social 
distancing,” because the whole family sleeps in one room. There’s no discussion 
about whether to wear masks because there aren’t any. More hand-washing is good 
advice, unless there’s no running water.

And so it goes, wherever SARS-CoV-2 shows up. The International Labor 
Organization has warned that it will destroy 195 million jobs worldwide, and 
drastically cut the income of another 1.25 billion people. Most of them were 
already poor. As their suffering worsens, so do other scourges, from alcoholism 
and drug addiction to domestic violence and child abuse, leaving whole 
populations traumatized, perhaps permanently.

In this context, it would be naive to think that, once this medical emergency 
is over, either individual countries or the world can carry on as before. Anger 
and bitterness will find new outlets. Early harbingers include millions of 
Brazilians banging pots and pans from their windows to protest against their 
government, or Lebanese prisoners rioting in their overcrowded jails.

In time, these passions could become new populist or radical 

Re: [Marxism] Minnesota: Doctors Receiving Instructions “to Report Covid19 as a Cause of Death, even if Patient was never Tested”

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> On Apr 11, 2020, at 9:36 AM, Mark Lause via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Although I didn't get the details, I did hear the tail end of an interview
> the other day reporting that deaths from heart failure are 400% higher than
> they ordinarily would be.  I didn't catch the context--where it was,
> etc.--but the takeaway on this is that people are already doing these sorts
> of studies, and we'll hear much of this in the future, even if it's not
> going to be grabbing the headlines.

There’s been a spike in cardiac arrest calls and deaths in New York, first 
reported at least a couple of weeks ago but still making headlines:

NYC first responders describe 'devastating' coronavirus cases as cardiac arrest 
calls surge
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nyc-first-responders-describe-devastating-coronavirus-cases-cardiac-arrest-calls-n1179376


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Re: [Marxism] South Africa: A Step towards Dictatorship?

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> On Apr 7, 2020, at 12:33 AM, RKOB via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> I can only hope that at least some critics would show a bit more sensivity 
> for the extraordinary conditions of repression particularly in many African 
> countries (but also others). The army is on the streets, killing people and 
> so on. African comrades in the slums are living in much more difficult 
> conditions than those in North America or Western Europe.
> 
> But even in Europe conditions are becoming more repressive: yesterday the 
> Austrian government announced a ban for all public meetings, demonstrations 
> etc. at least until the end of June. Similar developments are taking place in 
> other countries. (Who could have seen this coming?!)
> 
> It is also noticable that yesterday the EU defence ministers had a video 
> conference to coordinate the role of the military in the current crisis. 
> (https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/77151/video-conference-defence-ministers-remarks-high-representativevice-president-josep-borrell_en
>  
> 
>  )
> 
> I fear that some of the people who expressed their outrage about my post are 
> much less outraged about the banning of public assemblies and demonstrations. 
> They probably even support such banning! This is the real outrageous thing - 
> at least for people who call themselves progressive!

None of the responses to MP’s post expressed “outrage”; that’s a self-serving 
characterization, and one that suggests a need more for psychological than for 
poltical intervention. Surprise, incredulity, annoyance — but nothing even 
close to outrage.

But to invoke what’s happening in the townships — where some of us on the list, 
including myself, have longstanding political connections and very close 
personal friendships — in an effort to defend one’s reputation and avoid 
acknowledging a lapse in judgment, is genuinely disgusting.
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Re: [Marxism] South Africa: A Step towards Dictatorship?

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> On Apr 6, 2020, at 6:59 AM, A.R. G via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> RKOB, I have noticed you have written highly detailed and well-thought out
> polemics on imperialism and other topics.
> 
> So I have to say I am really flabbergasted to see you posting conspiracy
> non-sense from social media when it comes to the COVID-19 issue. What's
> going on?!

I have to add that I’m disappointed, although not really surprised, by RKOB’s 
radio silence on this, after Amith’s quite generous intervention. As I wrote on 
March 23rd, in response to an earlier misjudged message from RKOB:

“MP seems to be focused on looking for evidence to confirm a thesis that none 
of us disputes: that ruling forces will attempt to take advantage of the 
crisis. That singular focus, and perhaps a lack of understanding of 
epidemiology and public health, seem to have drawn him dangerously close to the 
brink of conspiracist confirmation bias.”

Unfortunately, I suspect the silence today is due to a frantic search for 
something that can be construed as evidence in support of the debunked hoax. It 
wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen that happen; the Syrian catastrophe led 
many folks down a path from which they couldn’t return, since doing so would 
have required a more radical and embarrassing reversal than some folks are up 
to. I suppose we should have anticipated that COVID-19 would also have some 
political casualties, over and above the medical ones.
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Re: [Marxism] South Africa: A Step towards Dictatorship?

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> On Apr 6, 2020, at 6:41 AM, RKOB via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> I would like to draw the attention of readers to the following. Comrades from 
> South Africa just informed me that the government forced social media groups 
> to post following message:


The message being circulated is a hoax:

https://www.thequint.com/news/webqoof/fake-message-on-disaster-management-act-says-posting-on-covid-19-illegal-fact-check


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Re: [Marxism] Join the Struggle at Amazon! - COSMONAUT

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> On Apr 3, 2020, at 5:59 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Imagine if DSA got involved with this rather than chasing its tail in the 
> Democratic Party.

https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1245697493708361736

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[Marxism] U.S. Plant Workplaces Emerge as Coronavirus Battlegrounds - WSJ

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Tensions are breaking out between employers and workers across the U.S. as some 
companies push to keep producing during the coronavirus pandemic and some 
employees push back over health concerns and other issues.

In recent days, plant workers have walked off the job at companies ranging from 
poultry producer Perdue Farms Inc. to soda maker Refresco B.V. At Tyson Foods 
Inc., workers petitioned for more paid sick leave. Some want more protective 
equipment. Others have complained to regulators about unsafe conditions.

Warnings about social distancing and exposure have also surfaced new concerns, 
especially when doing business in close quarters seems to conflict with 
guidance from health officials about physical distancing.

“The next phase of concern is safety in the workplace,” said William Schaffner, 
an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.

Protections like physical spacing of employees are particularly important, said 
Mr. Schaffner, because the virus spreads even from those who aren’t 
symptomatic. Identifying sick workers by checking employees’ fever, he said, 
“is helpful but not the complete story.”

Meatpacking, which is seeing increased demand as Americans batten down at home, 
is one industry where workers have become concerned about being in proximity 
while cutting carcasses and trimming meat. Some companies have spaced workers 
farther apart and staggered shift starts and break times. Tyson and others have 
begun offering employees masks and gloves, and taking their temperatures.

Earlier this week, the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Hispanic 
civil-rights group, asked the federal Occupational Safety and Health 
Administration for broader guidance on safety equipment, paid sick leave and 
regular health checks for plant employees. A significant share of 
meatpacking-plant employees are immigrants.

Last week, about two dozen workers at a Perdue Farms chicken plant walked off 
their jobs in Georgia, complaining that the company wasn’t doing enough to 
prevent coronavirus infection, and not paying them enough. Perdue said that 
after speaking with management, most of the employees returned to work. The 
Perdue plant isn’t represented by a union.

Perdue said it had already boosted plant sanitation and extended hours for its 
on-site wellness centers, which are free for employees and their families. It 
has also temporarily increased pay for hourly plant workers, and waived a 
waiting period to get short-term disability benefits, a spokeswoman said. The 
company is also offering free chicken to employees.

It is unusual for nonunion employees to walk off jobs, particularly immigrant 
workers in meatpacking and other industries. “I was floored,” said Deborah 
Berkowitz, a former U.S. OSHA official and poultry-worker safety advocate. “The 
workers have very few safety rights if they refuse to work.”

In Arkansas, a group called Venceremos, which was founded last year and works 
with poultry workers, has called on Tyson to expand pay for workers who have to 
stay home sick, saying the company’s existing policy doesn’t go far enough. In 
an interview, a worker complained about jam-packed factory-production lines, 
not enough hand sanitizer and crowded lines for worker bathrooms.

A Tyson spokesman said the company is committed to hearing out employees’ 
concerns, and maintains an anonymous ethics helpline. He said problems with 
hand sanitizer and bathroom lines haven’t been raised.

Tyson, which produces one in 5 pounds of all beef, pork and chicken produced 
daily in the U.S., said it has seen a small number of employees test positive 
for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. The company has 
directed employees who might have had contact with infected colleagues to 
self-quarantine, has notified other workers of positive cases and is checking 
workers’ temperatures before shifts, the spokesman said. In some plant break 
rooms, colored dots have been placed on chairs to help Tyson staff sit the 
recommended distance apart.

Experts said they don’t worry about transmitting the virus through food, but 
they say workplace conditions risk creating additional coronavirus hot spots 
and could potentially slow food and other production.

In Wharton, N.J., workers at a Refresco bottling plant walked out on March 21 
after a manager berated an employee who was worried about the coronavirus and 
reported himself as feeling ill, a worker at the plant said. On March 27, the 
workers tried to deliver a letter addressing their concerns to the human 
-resources department, but it wasn’t accepted and they had to email it to upper 
management. 

Re: [Marxism] SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data (New Scientific Study)

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> On Mar 31, 2020, at 5:04 AM, RKOB via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data
> 
> A new scientific study to appear in: International Journal of Antimicrobial 
> Agents
> 
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920300972 
> 

From the article link:

“This work was supported by the French Government under the ‘Investments for 
the Future’ programme managed by the National Agency for Research, 
Méditerranée-Infection 10-IAHU-03.” 

From the website for the “Investments for the Future’ programme”: 

“Created in 2010 and allocated €35 billion, the Investments for the Future 
programme (PIA) aims to stimulate employment, boost productivity and increase 
the competitiveness of French businesses by encouraging investment and 
innovation in priority sectors to drive growth. A second programme was launched 
in 2013 with €12 billion, followed by a third in 2017 with €10 billion.”

https://anr.fr/en/investments-for-the-future/investments-for-the-future/

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Re: [Marxism] [UCE] coronavirus bailout, inflation and Marx

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> On Mar 29, 2020, at 3:20 PM, John Reimann via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/03/29/coronavirus-bailout-inflation-and-karl-marx/
>  
> 

I would have thought that what determines whether rising wages will fuel 
inflation is whether production can keep up with demand for consumer goods, and 
I think that’s obviously in serious question at the moment. Roughly 15% of US 
food and about 35% of overall consumer goods are imported, so US supply of 
“everyday stuff” is still heavily dependent on domestic production. For US 
capitalism, I believe the question of the moment is how to meet that demand 
(even if at a lower level due to everyone scaling back their spending) at a 
time when public health imperatives prevent domestic production from returning 
to anything like pre-COVID levels any time soon.

Of course, another question of the moment is how to prevent a cascading debt 
crisis from taking down the financial system if government supports to the 
millions of people suddenly without an income aren’t sufficient to keep most 
people above water for the next year or two.
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Re: [Marxism] How to Beat Coronavirus Capitalism Tickets | Eventbrite

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> On Mar 26, 2020, at 10:11 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Need a bit more notice on these things.


Just passing along in case of interest. The recording of the call is available 
at the link provided:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lxwLHRKaB0

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Re: [Marxism] How could WHO and World Bank exactly predict COVID-19?

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> On Mar 26, 2020, at 2:48 PM, Jeffrey Masko via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> The medical industry at large is built on treatment, not prevention and
> they keep focus R and D with this in mind, as this is where they money
> is...not unlike in planned obsolescence in other sectors. It is indeed
> shady, but save me the Alex Jones version of events. Tons of research goes
> into earthquakes and should one hit say, San Francisco, it would be easy to
> point to the research done beforehand as "evidence" of the shadiness that
> would emerge from financial and political sectors benefiting from the
> crisis, but that doesn't mean someone will trigger and earthquake to get
> those benefits.

Indeed. It isn’t a “false-flag” conspiracy but straight-up “shock doctrine.” 
This is from Naomi Klein:

“‘Ideas that are lying around.’ Friedman, one of history’s most extreme free 
market economists, was wrong about a whole lot, but he was right about that. In 
times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible. But whose 
ideas? Sensible, fair ones, designed to keep as many people as possible safe, 
secure and healthy? Or predatory ideas, designed to further enrich the already 
unimaginably wealthy while leaving the most vulnerable further exposed? The 
world economy is seizing up in the face of cascading shocks.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/naomi_klein_coronavirus_capitalism

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[Marxism] How to Beat Coronavirus Capitalism Tickets | Eventbrite

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An online teach-in with Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

About this Event

Please join an online teach-in with Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and 
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, with a musical performance by Lia Rose

Thursday, March 26, 2020, 5 PM Eastern

Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Leap, Debt Collective, and Democratic 
Socialists of America

The event will begin at 5:00 PM EDT (2:00 PM PDT) and will be streamed live on 
Youtube through this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lxwLHRKaB0

The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities of 
our economic and social system.

We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this crisis. We 
will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal winner-takes-all 
system — or this will be a wake-up call.

Ideas that were dismissed as too radical just a week ago are starting to seem 
like the only reasonable path to get out of this crisis and prevent future ones.

We need to use every tool that we have that allows us to hear each other’s 
voices, to read each other’s words, to see each other’s faces, even if it’s 
just on screens, to stay organized and stay connected. We have to create spaces 
where we’re able to deliberate and strategize about what it means to protect 
our neighbors, our rights, and our planet.

We have to have the confidence to say this is the moment when we change 
everything.


https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-beat-coronavirus-capitalism-tickets-100840167656
 



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[Marxism] Unsanitized: Bailouts, A Tradition Unlike Any Other - The American Prospect

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"The enormity of this bailout is being under-reported. The number you’re 
hearing is $500 billion. Of that, $75 billion goes to the airline industry and 
the mysteriously named “businesses critical to national security.” The other 
$425 helps capitalize a $4.25 trillion, with a T, leveraged lending facility at 
the Federal Reserve. The taxpayer dollars would soak up any losses from that 
lending program. The loans won’t be secret anymore, but the oversight is 
largely after the fact, without subpoena power, and mainly reduced to writing 
reports. How exactly do you expect a small, underfunded panel to find fraud in 
a $4.25 lending facility! Especially when the current administration explicitly 
believes they are not required to turn over anything to Congress.

"So it’s not a $2 trillion bill, it’s closer to $6 trillion, and $4.3 trillion 
of it comes in the form of a bazooka aimed at CEOs and shareholders, with 
almost no conditions attached. At the moment nobody’s seen language, but 
there’s apparently only a buyback ban for the term of the loan. The money 
cannon can therefore go to executive compensation or mergers or wholesale 
purchases of distressed businesses or whatever other financial engineering the 
accounting department can muster. And once the company returns to health, it 
can leak out cash to investors (and during the loan too, in dividends). There’s 
no requirement to keep workers hired; in fact, the (necessary) provision to 
boost unemployment insurance for four months to 100 percent of median salary 
(including furloughed workers, gig workers and freelancers) means that these 
companies can fire with relative impunity. Members of Trump’s family can’t get 
bailout funds, so, yay.

"This is a robbery in progress. And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. 
It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these 
companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them. The 
short-termism and lack of capital reserves funneled record profits into a 
bathtub of cash for investors. That’s who’s being made whole, financiers and 
the small slice of the public that owns more than a trivial amount of stocks. 
In fact they’ve already been made whole; yesterday Wall Street got the word 
that they’d be saved and stocks and bonds went wild. BlackRock, the world’s 
largest asset manager, is running these bailout programs for the Fed, and could 
explicitly profit if the Fed buys its funds, which it probably will.

"This is a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship 
to the majority of America. The people get a $1,200 means-tested payment and a 
little wage insurance for four months. Corporations get a transformative amount 
of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition.

"Small businesses get their own program, and can’t participate in the $4.3 
trillion bonanza. They get $300 billion, so do the math on who’s supported 
more. They get forgivable loans if they keep staff on payroll; there’s no such 
requirements for the corporates. While the Federal Reserve, which can transfer 
money from the cash cannon with ease, runs the corporate bailout, the hapless 
Small Business Administration will deal with the small businesses; they have 
been endlessly criticized for delays on their couple billion in loan guarantee 
programs, let alone $300 billion. The monopolists get concierge service, the 
small businesses get to take a number. And the result will almost certainly be 
massive concentration of power.”


https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-bailouts-tradition-unlike-any-other/
 



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[Marxism] Metalworkers in Italy’s coronavirus-ravaged Lombardy region to strike, want more businesses closed

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"Metalworkers unions in Italy's northern Lombardy region said on Monday they 
would strike to protect the health of their members because a government decree 
temporarily shutting many businesses due to coronavirus contained too many 
loopholes and exceptions.

"The three main unions, FIOM, FIM and UILM, said in a statement that the list 
of companies that can continue working "has been excessively extended, covering 
areas of dubious importance" and allowing firms "excessive discretion" in 
applying for exemptions.

"Lombardy is the Italian region worst hit by the epidemic, which killed 5,476 
people nationwide up to Sunday.

"The statement noted the unions would hold a one-day strike on Wednesday and 
would announce details in the coming days. The government decree, signed on 
Sunday, says all but "essential" businesses must close until April 3, and sets 
out a long list of sectors deemed essential.

"Over the weekend, Communist-run Cuba dispatched a brigade of doctors and 
nurses to Italy to help in the fight against the novel coronavirus at the 
request of Lombardy authorities as the region struggles to cope with the 
crisis.”


https://www.france24.com/en/20200323-metalworkers-in-italy-s-coronavirus-ravaged-lombardy-region-to-strike-want-more-businesses-closed
 



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Re: [Marxism] COVID-19: A Cover for a Major Global Counterrevolutionary Offensive

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> On Mar 22, 2020, at 9:31 PM, RKOB via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/covid-19-a-cover-for-a-major-global-counterrevolutionary-offensive/
>  
> 

The main problem with this piece is in the following paragraph:

"The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly a significant health crisis. However, 
things have to be seen in context. The influenza epidemics in the past decades 
have caused 290,000-650,000 death each year, without provoking any major 
political initiative by the ruling class. [2] The overall all-cause 
influenza-attributable mortality in the 2017/18 season was estimated to be 
about 152,000 deaths in Europe alone! [3] The Swine Flu Pandemic in 2009 has 
killed up to 203,000 people. Since the COVID-19 crisis has caused, until now, 
several thousand victims, it is evident that the global shut down which we are 
currently experiencing must have different causes.”

What this ignores is that the specific characteristics of this virus seemingly 
make it much more likely than many other viral outbreaks to overwhelm 
healthcare systems — in particular, the relatively long and often asymptomatic 
incubation period (making it significantly more likely that infected people may 
pass it along); its apparent rates of persistence outside any biological host 
(still being assessed, but apparently at least hours and in some cases possibly 
days on some hard surfaces); the lack of existing immunity among populations; 
and, perhaps most importantly, the much higher rates of hospitalization 
required. That combination of factors can overload even very good healthcare 
systems, as we’ve seen in Italy. MP may not understand any of that, or may not 
take it seriously, but I know multiple healthcare professionals who are also 
committed socialists who do, and who are taking the lockdown deadly seriously 
even as they know with absolute certainty that it will be used against us.

MP seems to be focused on looking for evidence to confirm a thesis that none of 
us disputes: that ruling forces will attempt to take advantage of the crisis. 
That singular focus, and perhaps a lack of understanding of epidemiology and 
public health, seem to have drawn him dangerously close to the brink of 
conspiracist confirmation bias. 
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[Marxism] DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic - POLITICO

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"The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief 
judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of 
a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United 
States.

"Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department’s requests to lawmakers 
on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way 
court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on 
documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and 
prosecutions."

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-emergency-powers-140023
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[Marxism] Federal Reserve to lend additional $1 trillion a day to large banks | PBS NewsHour

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"None of the funding is from taxpayer dollars.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/federal-reserve-to-lend-additional-1-trillion-a-day-to-large-banks
 



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Re: [Marxism] religious responsibility "personal distancing plus social solidarity"

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> On Mar 19, 2020, at 6:04 PM, John Obrien via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> I encourage all right wing religious fanatics to gather together inside their 
> churches and temples
> to spread their love to each other and hope the virus brings them to their 
> god much sooner!
> 
> They want to be in their paradise - and I share that view that they should.
> 
> Very revealing that the religious hypcrites are in fear of this virus - they 
> do not trust their god
> and do not want to be with their god sooner.
> 
> They want their consumer goods instead of their god - just shameeful lack of 
> faith!

I appreciate the sentiment here, but this only really works if they stay there. 
Once they disperse, they become another set of vectors. 

And yes, I know you know that.
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Re: [Marxism] Italian Philosopher writes in Il Manifesto against the lock down and state of emergency policy

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> On Mar 19, 2020, at 12:58 PM, Jeffrey Masko via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> From the comments below the article:
> 
> "I have deep respect for philosophers, and the ideas expressed here have
> been known for a long time: how people in power use the fear to dominate
> masses. However, as facts have demonstrated since this was published in feb
> 26, Mr Agamben couldn’t be more wrong in this case. Intellectuals sometimes
> are taken away by their intelligence, to the point that they fail to see
> reality in front of their noses. hope this gentleman will publish another
> article soon acknowledging that what he calls a simple flu is killing (and
> will kill many more) thousands of human beings around the world."
> 
> Well put.

Couldn’t agree more. MP’s apparently firm resolve to find a way to disregard or 
minimize the significance of epidemiological realities is disconcerting to say 
the least, and at this point is doing more damage to his credibility than 
anything else, in my view.

The fact that ruling class forces will attempt to use an epidemiological crisis 
to consolidate and extend their power in no way reduces the danger that an 
aggressive and potentially fatal virus poses on its own to working people. 
Infectious diseases don’t give a fuck about the balance of class forces, and we 
have to work out strategy and tactics on that basis of that reality.
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[Marxism] Chile changing: transgender student leader lends voice to renewed protests - Reuters

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[Emilia is the great granddaughter of General Rene Schneider.]


SANTIAGO (Reuters) - As the long southern hemisphere summer holiday draws to an 
end this month, students in Chile are returning to college - but not always to 
classes. Many are getting ready to head out into the streets and breathe new 
life into the protests that rocked the country last year.

Organizers of marches to mark International Women’s Day on Sunday are hoping to 
attract large crowds. Last year, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 attended the 
one in Santiago.

One of the loudest and most influential voices pressing for change is Emilia 
Schneider, a transgender, feminist and militant leftist who is the leader of 
the Student Federation of the University of Chile (Fech), the country’s oldest 
student union.

The Fech is known for its role in demonstrations for free education between 
2011 and 2013 that brought Chile and its student leaders global attention. But 
it was caught on the backfoot in October last year when civil disobedience over 
public transport fare hikes spiraled into weeks of widespread violence and 
demonstrations over inequality and elitism.

The protests were Chile’s most profound unrest since the end of Augusto 
Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990. They cost the economy millions of dollars, at 
least 31 people died, more than 3,000 were injured, and 30,000 were arrested.

Now, the Fech is joining in, and has endorsed the protesters’ demands for deep 
societal changes.

“We are the sons and daughters of neo-liberal Chile and the shortcomings that 
came with it,” Schneider, a 23-year-old law student, told Reuters this week in 
an interview at the headquarters of the Fech.

“We had seen years of protests in this country but the demands had not been 
heeded,” she said, citing the highly privatized provision of services such as 
health, education and pensions that had sparked a “sense of discomfort that 
built up over years.”

Schneider said she has benefited from a Gender Identity Law that allows people 
to legally change their name and sex and took effect in December last year. The 
passing of the law caused shockwaves in the historically conservative and 
predominantly Catholic country, where divorce was legalized just 16 years ago 
and abortion is allowed only in extreme situations.

She argues that her gender change was only made possible by her privileged 
position as a student leader and the support of her liberal family. Many like 
her still face job insecurity, discrimination, and patchy access to health 
services, she said.

Schneider has a potent link to the country’s dark past: her great-grandfather 
was General Rene Schneider, a well-known figure in Chile who opposed plans for 
a military coup in 1970 and was killed by a far-right group.

Older Chileans lived through the chilling effect of the 1973-1990 dictatorship 
but younger people protesting had less “fear of participating in politics,” she 
said.

President Sebastian Pinera has sought to address protesters’ grievances by 
sacking his most unpopular ministers and introducing new laws to improve 
salaries, pensions and healthcare. He also backed a growing clamor for a new 
constitution to replace the incumbent drafted during the Pinochet regime.

But many remain dubious about his ability to push the laws through a divided 
Congress and, if he does, how much change they will really bring.

Schneider has turned her organization’s focus to lobbying for influence over 
the new constitution and specifically the participation of more women in the 
drafting of the new text if it is approved in a referendum on April 26.

“We want a feminist constitution,” she said, “one that guarantees sexual and 
reproductive rights, gender equality and greater participation by women and 
those who do not conform to traditional genders.”

Chile may be changing, she said - but not fast enough. “We have to keep seeking 
new policies to generate fresh changes,” she said. “Protests alone will not get 
us there.”


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-protests-transgender-idUSKBN20S2JL
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Re: [Marxism] Could Sanders win? | Red Flag

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> On Mar 3, 2020, at 11:18 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> On 3/3/20 10:30 PM, MM via Marxism wrote:
>> The point of a Sanders Presidency isn’t that he’s going to usher in 
>> socialism or even make real inroads towards “structural reforms” (not sure 
>> what that means, actually), but that he either:
>> 1. Makes progress towards reforms that make a real difference in people’s 
>> lives — healthcare, student debt, union rights — and / or towards reining in 
>> the fossil fuel industry and its enablers, which would be “not enough but 
>> better than nothing” in dealing with the ecological emergency(ies);
>> or:
>> 2. Is visibly and indisputably thwarted by “the establishment” at every turn 
>> in his efforts to do the kinds of things mentioned in #1 — which will almost 
>> certainly crystallize a wave of resistance among the millions of young 
>> people who are putting their hopes in the vision he has articulated as part 
>> of his campaign, and unleash a wave of civil disobedience the US hasn’t seen 
>> in decades.
>> Either 1. or 2. would be a major step in the right direction.
> 
> That's certainly the expectation of Jacobin/DSA but for those of us still 
> Quixotic to believe in the need for a socialist revolution, there's an 
> entirely different agenda that has to do with drawing clear class lines and 
> gathering together like-minded people for the long haul.
> 
> Voting certainly makes a difference in peoples' lives. For example, I have 
> indigent relatives who are on Obamacare. It makes a real difference in their 
> lives.
> 
> But facing monumental threats to the continuing existence of the human race 
> and life on earth and general, a different kind of tool is needed than the 
> one wielded by the Sandernistas. It might seem total like self-delusion but 
> the crisis of revolutionary leadership has to be resolved or else we will end 
> up like the brontosaurus.

The sad history of the left is littered with this kind of misrepresentation and 
false dichotomy. I didn’t for a moment espouse the DSA / Jacobin line; not in 
the least. But maybe Lou needs a cheap foil to vent against.

Anyone who thinks a second Trump term affords a better opportunity to “draw 
clear class lines” than would a Sanders presidency is a delusional and 
dangerous accellerationist. The serious tactical question is how to take 
advantage of the space a Sanders presidency would afford, under either of the 
scenarios I mentioned, to draw those “clear class lines” and build the forces 
necessary for more radical change. That requires political education, among 
other things, and political education that doesn’t connect with people’s 
concrete struggles is sectarian cultism. 

You want people to fight against the system? Give them healthcare and get the 
debt burden that’s giving them anxiety attacks off their fucking backs. Then 
tell them there’s more where that came from, including a future for their 
children, but only if they’re willing to fight like hell for it. And tell them 
to hold onto each other for dear life because it’s going to be harder than 
anything they’ve ever done — harder than anything they’ve ever imagined. And 
there’s homework — lots of homework. But hell, we got Bernie elected despite 
everything they threw at us, so maybe we can win the rest of it after all. 
Let’s give it our best shot, and if nothing else let’s go out swinging.

That’s what you tell them, or something like that, if you’re interested in 
“resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.” Leadership doesn’t just 
have an opinion or an analysis; it has a voice. Find that voice. Be that voice.
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Re: [Marxism] Syria: Slaughter in Idlib (re: How Much Does the Pentagon Pay for the YPG?)

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> On Feb 28, 2020, at 5:01 AM, Chris Slee via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Michael, can you send a link to this article on Saraqeb.
> 
> Chris Slee


I’m sure Michael is referring to this one: 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/10/fall-of-syrian-town-delivers-strategic-and-symbolic-prize-to-assad

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Re: [Marxism] Is Marxism ‘ethical’? | The Marx Memorial Library | The Morning Star

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> On Feb 17, 2020, at 3:37 PM, Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/marxism-ethical 
> 

This is excellent.
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[Marxism] The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President - The Atlantic

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"One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a 
forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked 
“Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. 
Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a 
variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also 
gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private 
Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that 
seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

"The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a 
multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the 
recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had 
flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on 
foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore 
little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing 
websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy 
theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the 
biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

"The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, 
at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an 
impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s 
conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served 
up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same 
testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is 
that what happened today?

"As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: 
“That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” 
Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these 
radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only 
one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

"I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and 
media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found 
myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump 
and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of 
heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything 
else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of 
observable reality drifted further out of reach.

"What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political 
leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these 
leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for 
their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need 
to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to 
drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

"After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American 
democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and 
Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these 
shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his 
domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare 
that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

"Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this 
year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political 
strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election 
comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news 
sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties 
will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who 
lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily 
manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak 
havoc is enormous.

"The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be 
aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and 
enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage 
what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. 
Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves 
behind could be irreparable.

…

"It doesn’t require an overactive imagination to envision 

Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Trump, Barr and Julius Caesar

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> On Feb 14, 2020, at 10:18 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As far as organize to do what: I've spelled that out many times in many of 
> the articles of Oaklandsocialist. I don't think it's necessary to do so every 
> single time. 

There’s a lot of stuff on the Oaklandsocialist website that doesn’t seem to 
address this question, so maybe you could suggest some specific links — ideally 
where you explain how you propose to pay for the things that you're calling on 
people to do, or at least that you think they will call upon themselves to do 
under the conditions you envisage. Will those payments be made in US dollars? 
If you think these are not very good questions, please propose better ones.
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Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Trump, Barr and Julius Caesar

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> On Feb 14, 2020, at 8:21 PM, John Reimann via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> When I first heard about it, I had thought that the whole dance between
> Trump and Barr was carefully choreographed. But then, reading further and
> realizing that such a scheme would be too subtle for Trump's lizard brain,
> I changed my view.

There’s no doubt that what’s happening is complex, but this line from John’s 
linked piece is hard to take seriously:

"Trump’s lizard brain must have started to get the feeling that he was moving 
towards a situation similar to that of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play of 
that name.” 

So Trump’s “lizard brain” can’t handle the kind of political machination that 
would be involved in a corrupt conspiracy with Barr, but he’s somehow motivated 
by an instinctive familiarity with the dilemma faced by Shakespeare’s Julius 
Caesar? I’m not sure John has really thought this line of reasoning through 
very carefully. I think there’s a fundamental misjudgment here about what Trump 
is and is not good at; I think it should be considered beyond question that 
he’s pretty good at orchestrating criminal conspiracy. Still, I confess I’d 
love to see an interviewer ask him for his take on the play.

But there’s also this:

“Meanwhile, socialists and real working class fighters should be explaining and 
agitating for working class independence and for organizing out in the streets 
to fight this onslaught of capitalism driven mad in the person of Trump… and 
whoever follows him.” 

Organizing them to do what? And how do you plan to pay for it? 
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Re: [Marxism] Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory - CounterPunch.org

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> On Feb 14, 2020, at 10:51 AM, Daniel Lindvall  
> wrote:
> 
> I hope to be proven wrong and I support any serious attempt at pushing 
> through real reforms, but I can’t see it happen without a mass movement 
> threatening the hell out of the ruling class.


Who said it will happen without a mass movement? You didn’t watch the video of 
Raul Carrillo, did you? The entire MMT activist base — and there are many 
thousands of people involved, in countries around the world, as well as several 
recurring podcasts, blogs, conferences, and a very active publication scene — 
are completely focused on building a mass movement — radical mass movement. 
Much of the entrenched left is making itself deeply irrelevant by refusing to 
engage with this body of ideas and this emerging movement. You see all those 
people at the Sanders rallies? What about the Sunrise Movement occupation of 
Pelosi’s office? Those are significantly due to the work that’s been done 
around MMT over the past 20 years. It isn’t an odd coincidence that Stephanie 
Kelton is a close advisor to Sanders. It also isn’t an accident that he is 
still committed to showing how things can be paid for — because he knows that 
even many people on the left aren’t prepared for the radical truth that “budget 
discipline” for a monetarily sovereign government is a ruling class fiction.

I don’t think there’s anything more tedious than engaging with people who “hope 
to be proven wrong”; what a dreadful spiritual condition that must be. Roll up 
your sleeves and start helping — filling the gaps in your knowledge and 
alleviating your doubts, or sharpening your critique if you still have one — or 
get out of the way. Nobody owes you “proof” of anything.
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Re: [Marxism] William Barr says Trump's tweets about DOJ cases make it 'impossible to do my job - CNNPolitics

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> On Feb 14, 2020, at 11:39 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> On 2/14/20 11:25 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:
>> Barr took an enormous hit with that whole event of the recommended sentence
>> to Stone being withdrawn immediately after Trump's tweet. It was crystal
>> clear that Trump is now running the (in)Justice Department. And, in fact,
>> so did Trump. Trump's response was completely out of character for him.
>> Completely and totally. To just respond that Barr has a right to express
>> his opinion? No. In my opinion, this was all a set up job, agreed upon
>> between Trump and Barr in advance, made to try to heal Barr's image.
>> John
> 
> NY Times, Feb. 14, 2020
> Trump Claims ‘Legal Right’ to Interfere in Justice Dept. Cases
> By Michael D. Shear

The NYT piece is perfectly consistent with John’s reading, and I think he’s 
correct, but I think the truth is even scarier. What better cover for a radical 
politicization of the DOJ than to set up an orchestrated and perfectly 
manageable tension between Trump and Barr for public consumption? It “proves” 
that Barr is a man of principle, fighting to preserve the integrity of the DOJ 
and maintain his independence, and simultaneously allows Trump to keep huffing 
and puffing to keep his base happy, but leave Barr in place as “proof” that 
Trump isn’t a tyrannical despot. It’s genius.
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Re: [Marxism] Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory - CounterPunch.org

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> On Feb 14, 2020, at 9:26 AM, Daniel Lindvall  
> wrote:
> 
> It sometimes feels as if people here are determined to make the worst 
> possible interpretations of comments. It was a straight question, asked 
> precisely out of curiosity, not the lack of it. I’m not dismissing the 
> general importance of understanding money, but the text left me wondering 
> what difference it makes to someone in an electoral campaign if s/he has to 
> argue that we need to raise taxes to avoid inflation rather than to pay for 
> progressive policies as such? 

Yeah, I don’t think that would be a very effective campaign strategy. If you’re 
a campaign advisor to anyone, I’d suggest not using that approach.

One of the things you learn when teaching university students is how to spot 
the guys — and they are always guys — who are committed to not learning things, 
or who expect to be spoon-fed insights, or who think they can trick you into 
doing their thinking for them. At least, I did. They lack even a modicum of 
healthy shame. And they get defensive when you point that out.

But I’ll indulge you one last time.

You’re asking what the difference is between a government whose spending is 
constrained in advance by its ability to raise funds from taxes, and a 
government that isn’t so constrained in advance, but may have to tax what it 
spends into the economy back out at some point.

Can you see now where this is headed?

When a government uses its spending power to build useful infrastructure, 
productive economic capacity and good social programs — which, gosh, sounds 
like something even a socialist government would want to do — then what you 
have at the end of that process is… wait for it… useful infrastructure, 
productive economic capacity and good social programs. You also have a bunch of 
liquidity circulating through the economy, which the government injected into 
it by hiring all of the people it hired to build and do all of those things.

Now, it might become necessary to tax some of that liquidity back out of the 
economy in order to prevent overheating. My guess is people are less likely to 
mind paying some taxes now that they’ve got useful infrastructure, productive 
capacity and good social programs. But there are other options. For instance, 
you could do what the US government did during WWII and issue savings bonds at 
a modest interest rate in order to tie up some of that liquidity for a few 
years until the productive capacity can catch up to the point where it can 
satisfy the extra demand. (And if anyone is under the impression that the 
purpose of those bonds was to raise funds to “pay for the war,” I would *urge* 
you, in the strongest possible terms, to read Sam Levey’s piece before 
responding and making an absolute ass of yourself.)

Obviously, this whole time you’re going to be working towards an industrial 
strategy to decarbonize the economy and prioritize for sustainable forms of 
economic activity, at least if you have any sense. But I digress.

Can you see how much difference it makes now? On one approach, you don’t end up 
with useful infrastructure, productive industrial capacity and good social 
programs. On the other approach, you do. I feel silly having to point out to 
someone on the left that we should be fighting to have them.

Honestly, there’s a lot of excellent material out there for anyone who’s even 
mildly curious. There’s also a lot of willful misrepresentation from mainstream 
economists (many of whom do understand it, and thus understand what a danger it 
poses to the continuation of the ruling hegemony) and witless misrepresentation 
from quite a few Marxists (who don’t understand it, and are committed to making 
sure they don’t start to — because that would require them to admit they’ve 
gotten some things badly wrong).
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Re: [Marxism] Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory - CounterPunch.org

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> On Feb 14, 2020, at 4:01 AM, Daniel Lindvall  
> wrote:
> 
> But, if you have to rise taxes, not to fund the spending as such, but to 
> offset inflation, how much difference does it really make?
> 
> Kavanagh: ”…surtaxing the rich does not transfer funds directly to pay for 
> another activity like healthcare, but it does help configure the money supply 
> on a macro level to enable more social spending. It averts the inflation that 
> would occur if both a lot of spending on healthcare andthe infinite 
> appropriation of money by individuals were tolerated. Taxes don’t raise 
> funds; they do help control the money supply.”

If you can read that piece and be left with that question, and without any 
curiosity to pursue any of the ideas mentioned in it, there’s nothing 
whatsoever I can do to help you. 
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[Marxism] Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory - CounterPunch.org

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This is quite a useful piece by Jim Kavanagh on the Counterpunch website from a 
couple of years ago. It’s lengthy; I’ll post a few key passages but it’s worth 
reading in full:


The argument of the common-wisdom economic paradigm is that the government must 
collect taxes (or borrow money—we’ll get to that) to spend on whatever programs 
it wants to fund. In this paradigm, the government extracts money from an 
external, economically prior source, and uses it to pay for government 
programs. For both the left and the right in this paradigm, taxes are for 
funding government spending: money first flows into the government through 
taxes collected, and is then spent into economy in various programs and 
purchases. The arguments that ensue are over how much money to collect in 
taxes, from which sources, and which government programs to fund with the money 
collected.

Most leftists take their stance within this paradigm. Bernie Sanders, for 
instance, says his Medicare-for-all plan would “raise revenue” from various 
taxes such as income and capital gains, and from limiting “deductions for the 
rich.” Dean Baker suggests a 4% increase in payroll taxes to “fully fund” 
Social Security and Medicare.

These kinds of analyses, typical of the left, make points that are helpful in 
immediate political fights, and they’re also grounded in the conventional 
paradigm about, money, taxes, and government spending. That paradigm not only 
informs most thinking—whether conservative, liberal, or left-radical—about 
money in our society, it also informs the legal and institutional policy 
framework. It’s the paradigm of the household.

We’re comfortable with the household paradigm because it reflects everyday 
reality. The household has to get money from somewhere to spend it. It’s 
obvious. But, also obvious, the household (or business or state) does not 
create money. That teensy little huge fact makes the household-government 
finance analogy wrong and wildly misleading. Unless we take that fact as of no 
significance—And how could we?—we need another paradigm. Analyses and 
critiques—no matter how radical—of government financing as if it worked like 
household financing are based on false premises, and false premises lead down 
meandering dead-end paths to wrong conclusions.

We have to reject the household analogy whenever it comes up from any source, 
including our own minds, where it will sneak in. Most leftists, I’m afraid, do 
end up assuming it, and ignoring the huge little fact that it cannot be right. 
We need another paradigm, one that’s more truthful and therefore opens more 
effectively radical paths.

…

This brings up another core insight of MMT, a corollary of the fact that the 
government creates money to spend into the economy: The government’s loss is 
the economy’s gain. The government’s deficit is equal, to the penny, to our 
surplus—the amount of dollars the government has spent into and left in the 
economy. With due consideration for how the “government” and “we” are 
constituted—A political question that MMT makes increasingly visible as the 
important question underlying the economics!—the government’s deficit is “our” 
net savings after taxes, dollars that haven’t been zeroed out, points we can 
use to buy our seats. As Robert Bostick puts it, in a scathing critique of Paul 
Ryan’s deficit hawkery:

It’s essentially interest-free money for us to spend as we choose. That’s why 
the financial sector/commercial bankers hate deficit spending. Americans 
benefit from deficit spending and therefore, don’t need to go into debt to 
maintain living standards.

Our surplus from deficit spending is what keeps the economy growing… When Ryan 
and company tell us they’re going to cut the deficit, it automatically means 
they are going to reduce the amount of interest-free money available to us. 
That eventually will, in short order, force us to use our savings, retained 
earnings or borrow from banks at interest just to maintain current spending.

Note that it’s not the government deficit that’s pernicious here, but citizens’ 
indebtedness to the banks, which grows in inverse relation to the government 
deficit. Too little government deficit makes for too much citizens’ debt.

This is why “austerity” policies are ridiculous, self-defeating, and immensely 
harmful. This is why the last thing we want is for the government to have a 
“balanced budget” policy, let alone for the government to run a surplus, which 
would be our deficit. For a healthy, growing economy, the government should 
avoid retrieving as much in taxes as it has spent into the economy. And there 
is no economic need to do 

Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 12, 2020, at 12:41 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Basically, what the advocates of MMT argue is that their policy can overcome 
> the fundamental contradictions of capitalism itself. In other words, 
> reformism.

There’s certainly no reason to read anything when you already “know” what it 
says. 
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 12, 2020, at 11:07 AM, John Reimann via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Yes, debt does have to be repaid. Or, put another way, the US government
> does have to pay back those loans/bonds and T notes, or at least there has
> to be confidence that it will do so. At some point, as the world becomes
> flooded with dollars, the only way that the US government can maintain that
> confidence will be to increase the interest rate paid on those instruments.
> Does anybody think that won't have an affect?


The US only has to issue bonds and T-bills because it’s a discretionary legal 
requirement imposed by Congress; there is no other basis for that requirement. 
I realize you aren’t going to read any of the materials that deal with all of 
this, but I’m not going to waste any more time dealing with fundamental 
misunderstandings like this. They’ve been dealt with at length in the MMT 
literature.
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 12, 2020, at 8:37 AM, MM  wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 12, 2020, at 8:27 AM, Daniel Lindvall > > wrote:
>> 
>> The question remains, how can Sanders stand up to the pressure of finance 
>> capital and what forces does he have behind him to make this stand possible?
> 
> Absolutely. It won’t happen without a fight, and the odds are vastly against 
> us.

I should add: The myth of the scarcity of liquidity — the central myth MMT is 
working to debunk, I would say — is a myth perpetuated by the ruling class 
(and, sadly, some Marxists, if unwittingly). The ruling class has understood it 
was false since at least the 1940s, when US war spending eliminated any 
remaining doubts; see Sam Levey’s piece, "Modern Money and the War Treasury” 
for details, including some amazing passages from Walter Lippmann. (Actually, 
ruling elites have understood much of what MMT has tried to clarify and 
systematize for millennia; see Michael Hudson’s book “… and forgive them their 
debts…” for a sweeping historical survey.) Countering and debunking the myth, 
and exposing the damage that has been done under its cover, is part of the 
process of building the movement that can force another path. It doesn’t 
eliminate the need for class struggle; it simply opens up possibilities for 
class struggle that the working class hasn’t generally grasped.
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 12, 2020, at 8:27 AM, Daniel Lindvall  
> wrote:
> 
> The question remains, how can Sanders stand up to the pressure of finance 
> capital and what forces does he have behind him to make this stand possible?

Absolutely. It won’t happen without a fight, and the odds are vastly against us.
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 12, 2020, at 3:00 AM, Daniel Lindvall  
> wrote:
> 
> Agreed. But surely the real problem with spending is about ideology and class 
> struggle. The financial markets (i.e. the ruling class) react one way when 
> spending goes to bailing out businesses (or buying more guns), and in an 
> entirely opposed way when it goes to improving the lives of the working class 
> and the general population. 

Which is why you use that spending power to expand the public sector. You could 
even use it to — gasp — take over failing industries, and wind them down if 
they aren’t usefully productive, transitioning the workforce into things we 
want done. But it’s easier to think of ways it can’t work than to do it.
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 11, 2020, at 6:40 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If MMT is the basis for Sanders' claim that his health care program (plus 
> paying for student debt and a host of other programs) can all be paid for, 
> then I don't find his claim credible. Since there evidently are no other more 
> concrete plans to pay for these programs, then I think a large dose of 
> skepticism is justified.

Holy shit — even American Prospect has figured out that the demand for balanced 
budgets and “how-do-you-pay-for-its” is a red herring:

“Buttigieg settles on deficit hawkery as a closing argument in New Hampshire. 
It’s hard to think of a school of political thought with less credibility and 
less popularity.

…

"PPI has lambasted Bernie Sanders for his Medicare for All proposal, claiming 
it leaves a $25 trillion shortfall, and praised Buttigieg for being the only 
candidate with more deficit-reducing offsets than new spending proposals. (For 
what it’s worth, Buttigieg’s health care vision would be more costly than 
Sanders’s in terms of overall national health expenditures, proving further 
that this is an ideological mission above all.) CRFB, meanwhile, has pivoted 
between praising Trump’s proposed cuts to Social Security and lamenting that 
they aren’t bigger.

"Both groups have advanced a deficit scaremongering approach that has 
consistently failed the burden of proof. We’re running a real-time experiment 
about the dangers of runaway deficits, but despite the best 
apocalypse-predicting efforts, interest rates haven’t soared and inflation 
hasn’t spiraled. CRFB and PPI are part of the crowd who have predicted dire 
outcomes from deficits for a decade, and they have spent a decade being 
incorrect. There was no natural rate of unemployment, no government “crowding 
out” private spending, and no inflationary spiral. They were completely, 
utterly mistaken. Somehow these are Buttigieg’s go-to fiscal policy shops.

“Perhaps the reason that deficit hawkery is unpopular is not because of a lack 
of political derring-do, as Buttigieg says, but because it’s flat-out wrong. 
And if it’s bad economics, it’s even worse political messaging, especially in 
the run-up to the general election against a Trump administration that has 
already spent twice as much public money on farm bailouts as Obama spent to 
save the auto industry. Obama’s too-soon pivot to deficit reduction stunted the 
recovery and may have contributed to Trump’s rise; that any Democrat would want 
to rerun that playbook beggars belief.”

https://prospect.org/politics/austerity-pete-buttigieg-deficit-economic-policy/
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 11, 2020, at 6:40 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Michael Roberts, author of the website thenextrecession.wordpress.com 
>  is probably one of the most serious 
> Marxist economists around. Here is his critique of Modern Monetary Theory 
> (MMT). 
> https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/modern-monetary-theory-part-1-chartalism-and-marx/
>  
> 
> If MMT is the basis for Sanders' claim that his health care program (plus 
> paying for student debt and a host of other programs) can all be paid for, 
> then I don't find his claim credible. Since there evidently are no other more 
> concrete plans to pay for these programs, then I think a large dose of 
> skepticism is justified.

Michael has done lots of great work; that hardly means he’s always right, and 
his engagement with MMT has been appalling — shallow and in bad faith. I’ve 
personally seen him admit that his characterization of MMT was not based on 
anything anyone writing in its name has said or written, but is just “his 
opinion” of what they really mean. His critique makes clear that he hasn’t 
really read any of the materials seriously — merely with an eye towards 
distilling out a strawman that he can debunk. I've lost a fair amount of 
respect for him over the past year or so from watching his sophistical, evasive 
treatment of this emerging body of ideas.

But I know there can be great comfort in believing there’s no need to grapple 
with new ideas and new insights.

For those who might be interested in seeing how a young Latino radical sees 
these ideas being put to work, check out Raul Carrillo’s excellent contribution 
to this 2018 Left Forum panel, starting just after the 1-hour mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwNTrN-Lhss

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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 11, 2020, at 2:18 PM, John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I watched the first half of this and then didn't want to waste any more time. 
> What this is is a defense of Keynesianism. That's fine for those who didn't 
> experience or have forgotten the late 1970s, when runaway inflation 
> threatened. What I want is a clear, concise, concrete plan for how much 
> Sanders' call would cost and how it would be paid for... other than by simply 
> swelling the federal deficit.


No, it isn’t a defense of Keynesianism. Here’s a response on concerns over 
inflation (and there is an extensive body of writing on this):

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/03/01/1551434402000/An-MMT-response-on-what-causes-inflation/
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Re: [Marxism] 2020 - Sanders Takes Top Spot In Dem Quinnipiac University Connecticut

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> On Feb 11, 2020, at 12:59 PM, John Reimann via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Also, has Sanders ever come up with a concrete plan for how to pay for
> Medicare for All, other than just to say that if other countries can afford
> something similar, so can the US?

Here’s Sanders’ main economics advisor explaining it: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9nP-BKa3M

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Re: [Marxism] Who Will Win The 2020 Democratic Primary? | FiveThirtyEight

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> On Feb 3, 2020, at 6:55 PM, MM  wrote:
> 
> Without having any illusions about the likelihood of a Sanders candidacy — 
> let alone an electoral victory, and leaving aside entirely any question of 
> carrying out an ambitiously social-democratic agenda if elected — one thing 
> that’s quite striking in the polling data is that Biden has dropped 
> significantly over the past couple of weeks in virtually all of the states 
> where he has been ahead, with Sanders rising by a roughly equivalent amount 
> in those same states:
> 
> https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primary-forecast/

Sorry, not the past couple of weeks but just the past few days. Misread the 
time scale.

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[Marxism] Who Will Win The 2020 Democratic Primary? | FiveThirtyEight

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Without having any illusions about the likelihood of a Sanders candidacy — let 
alone an electoral victory, and leaving aside entirely any question of carrying 
out an ambitiously social-democratic agenda if elected — one thing that’s quite 
striking in the polling data is that Biden has dropped significantly over the 
past couple of weeks in virtually all of the states where he has been ahead, 
with Sanders rising by a roughly equivalent amount in those same states:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primary-forecast/



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Re: [Marxism] Watch: US Harvard law students walk out en mass as Israeli ambassador begins to justify Jewish settlements – Redress Information

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> On Feb 1, 2020, at 4:47 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://www.redressonline.com/2020/02/watch-us-harvard-law-students-walk-out-en-mass-as-israeli-ambassador-begins-to-justify-jewish-settlements/
>  
> 

This is beautiful, but just to be clear it happened in November:

Story: 
https://imemc.org/article/harvard-students-walk-out-en-masse-of-israeli-consul-general/

Video: https://twitter.com/raza_hamzah/status/1194692536725639168

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[Marxism] The 18th-Century Quaker Dwarf Who Challenged Slavery, Meat-Eating, and Racism

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“By the time he himself died, in 1759, Lay had eked out a strange and deeply 
principled life for himself in the Philadelphia area. He lived in a cave, made 
his own clothes, and walked everywhere. He had become a vegetarian and felt 
that animals, including horses, should not be exploited for their labor or 
their meat. In 1737 he published the revolutionary tract All Slaveholders That 
Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, a mixture of polemic, musings, and 
autobiography, put together in a curiously nonlinear, almost postmodern, 
format. (The publisher—Benjamin Franklin, a longtime, if a little wary, 
friend—chose to keep his own name off the text.) Despite his requests to be 
cremated, which would have been tantamount to paganism, Lay was buried in an 
unmarked grave close to his wife’s, in the Quaker burial ground.

“During his life and after his death, many people, Rediker says, thought of Lay 
as deranged. “[Historians] thought he was not sane, and this was a very 
effective way of putting him at the margins.” Ableism, too, seems to have 
factored in this general unwillingness to take him seriously. But some of those 
in the abolitionist movement did feel the need to celebrate this “Quaker 
comet,” as he came to be known. Benjamin Rush, one of his earliest biographers, 
said Lay was known to virtually everyone in Pennsylvania; his curious portrait 
was said to hang in many Philadelphia homes. This early abolitionist burned 
bright, and, despite his exclusion from many abolitionist narratives, refuses 
to be extinguished from history.” 


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-18th-century-quaker-dwarf-who-challenged-slavery-meat-eating-and-racism


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Re: [Marxism] The Story of China’s Economic Rise Unfolds in Switzerland

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> On Jan 21, 2020, at 4:13 PM, Michael Meeropol via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> But is China an IMPERIALIST capitalist country or a NATIONALIST capitalist
> country ---



The closest look yet at Chinese economic engagement in Africa
By Kartik Jayaram, Omid Kassiri, and Irene Yuan Sun
McKinsey & Company
June 2017
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/middle-east-and-africa/the-closest-look-yet-at-chinese-economic-engagement-in-africa

…

In the eight African countries on which we focused, the number of Chinese-owned 
firms we identified was between two and nine times the number registered by 
China’s Ministry of Commerce, until now the largest database of Chinese firms 
in Africa. Extrapolated across the continent, our findings suggest there are 
more than 10,000 Chinese-owned firms operating in Africa today (Exhibit 2).

Around 90 percent of these firms are privately owned—calling into question the 
notion of a monolithic, state-coordinated investment drive by “China, Inc.” 
Although state-owned enterprises tend to be bigger, particularly in specific 
sectors such as energy and infrastructure, the sheer number of private Chinese 
firms working toward their own profit motives suggests that Chinese investment 
in Africa is a more market-driven phenomenon than is commonly understood.

Chinese firms operate across many sectors of the African economy. Nearly a 
third are involved in manufacturing, a quarter in services, and around a fifth 
each in trade and in construction and real estate. In manufacturing, we 
estimate that 12 percent of Africa’s industrial production—valued at some $500 
billion a year in total—is already handled by Chinese firms. In infrastructure, 
Chinese firms’ dominance is even more pronounced, and they claim nearly 50 
percent of Africa’s internationally contracted construction market.

The Chinese firms we talked to are mostly profitable. Nearly one-third reported 
2015 profit margins of more than 20 percent. They are also agile and quick to 
adapt to new opportunities. Except in a few countries such as Ethiopia, they 
are primarily focused on serving the needs of Africa’s fast-growing markets 
rather than on exports. An overwhelming 74 percent said they feel optimistic 
about the future. Reflecting this, most Chinese firms have made investments 
that represent a long-term commitment to Africa rather than trading or 
contracting activities.

At the Chinese companies we talked to, 89 percent of employees were African, 
adding up to nearly 300,000 jobs for African workers. Scaled up across all 
10,000 Chinese firms in Africa, this suggests that Chinese-owned business 
employ several million Africans. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of Chinese 
employers provided some kind of skills training. In companies engaged in 
construction and manufacturing, where skilled labor is a necessity, half offer 
apprenticeship training.

Half of Chinese firms had introduced a new product or service to the local 
market, and one-third had introduced a new technology. In some cases, Chinese 
firms had lowered prices for existing products and services by as much as 40 
percent through improved technology and efficiencies of scale. African 
government officials overseeing infrastructure development for their countries 
cited Chinese firms’ efficient cost structures and speedy delivery as major 
value adds.


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Re: [Marxism] Britain exits the European Union and takes a sharp right turn (John Smith, author of Imperialism in the 21st Century)

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> On Jan 19, 2020, at 6:14 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
>> 
>> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/britain-exits-the-european-union-and-takes-a-sharp-right-turn/
> 
> This is the best analysis I've read.

Much of this is useful; a few things one could take issue with. But the 
following is complete hogwash (which doesn’t mean that Corbyn’s people didn’t 
also believe it; tragically it seems likely they did):

“[T]o the Labour left, ultra-low interest rates are not a flashing red light, 
but a green light inviting them to borrow vast amounts of money from those who 
have it, i.e. the super-rich. Yet history, e.g. Greece under Syriza, teaches 
that, when asked to lend money to a government they do not trust, capitalists 
are certain to demand a hefty risk premium, wrecking public finances and 
destroying reformist dreams.”

Governments that control the issuance of their own currency and that don’t 
carry significant foreign-currency-denominated debt don’t need capitalists’ 
money to spend. (Hint: that’s a conspicuous difference between the UK and 
Greece. The weather is another. And don’t get me started about the food. But I 
digress….). Even the WSJ belatedly and begrudgingly acknowledged this about the 
UK a few years ago:

“Among facts that take a stubbornly long time to sink in, here’s one: Countries 
that borrow in their own currencies never have to default on their debt.

“The last few months have tested this notion again. When the U.K. was about to 
vote on its membership of the European Union, some investors and analysts 
warned that scared foreigners could dump British sovereign bonds, driving the 
government's borrowing costs to skyrocket.

“They were wrong. The day after Brexit, gilt prices rose 3.5%.”

For a (much) more detailed explanation, see this blog post by Bill Mitchell:

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=34714


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[Marxism] The 22 Convention: Make Women Great Again™

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Not The Onion:

"Women today are being taught to act more like men. Where has that led us? 
Skyrocketing rates of divorce, depression, dysfunction, and America at the #1 
spot in the world for single motherhood. No longer will you have to give in to 
toxic bullying feminist dogma and go against your ancient, biological nature as 
a woman.

…

"Hiding under a mask of fake progress, feminism today has become a radical 
assault on all forms of positive femininity - you know, the one hard coded into 
your DNA. Through an onslaught of anti-feminine propaganda spanning 
generations, women today have been pushed to act like men and DENY their own 
feminine nature. This has left millions of women feeling unhappy, confused, 
frustrated, and hopeless.  At The 22 Convention, you will learn the truth that 
unhealthy militant feminists have been hiding from you your entire life."

https://22convention.com/



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Re: [Marxism] When Rights Collide

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> On Dec 21, 2019, at 8:09 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> It is timely
> as a British employment court has ruled against Maya Forstater who took a
> case against an employer who sacked her for expressing gender-critical
> views outside of work hours.


Should the left rally behind people who dispute the reality of structural 
racism outside of work hours, when employers sack them for those views? Always? 
If not always, under what circumstances?

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Re: [Marxism] When Rights Collide

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> On Dec 21, 2019, at 8:09 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 


From the piece:

“The distinction between biological sex and gender is paramount. Biological sex 
is an objective attribute. Gender, on the other hand, is a collection of 
subjective preferences, behaviors and stereotypes. Positions and arguments that 
fail to appreciate this distinction are built on sand, with no firm foundation 
and no logical consistency.” 

Let’s talk about logical consistency. The following two assertions are made 
back-to-back in the linked piece:

1. “[I]t’s important to recognize that, like most species, humans are sexually 
dimorphic, with 99.98% of all humans clearly identifiable at birth as either 
male or female.

2. While gender  expression can change over time for both individuals and 
society as a whole, biological sex is immutable.

Without getting into the numbers, the second assertion directly contradicts the 
first — unless perhaps the word “immutable” is to be construed in some 
miraculously dialectical way.

When people ostensibly on the left start insisting that others simply accede to 
their terminology in order to be taken seriously, it’s time to accept that 
they’re not interested in good-faith dialogue. They’re shouting. Actually, it 
starts to sound a lot like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro (which may not be 
coincidental).

I understand why Louis is reluctant to take steps to keep this shit off the 
list, but I’d appreciate at least getting a temperature check to know whether 
any of the odious nonsense that Philip keeps posting is considered to deserve 
substantive engagement. I’m happy to just ignore it if I know that everyone 
else is ignoring it too, although it seems like there is at least some degree 
of hesitation among at least some list members to do so. Maybe Louis could take 
some kind of off-the-record poll, since it seems like relatively few people are 
willing to take a position for the record. But this is getting tedious.

PS: Is there a functionally Marxist definition of “paramount”? Asking for a 
friend.



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[Marxism] Homicide Rates of Transgender Individuals in the United States: 2010–2014

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Further to this issue:

Homicide Rates of Transgender Individuals in the United States: 2010–2014
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551594/

Abstract

Objectives. To estimate homicide rates of transgender US residents and relative 
risks (RRs) of homicide with respect to cisgender comparators intersected with 
age, gender, and race/ethnicity.

Methods. I estimated homicide rates for transgender residents and 
transfeminine, Black, Latin@, and young (aged 15–34 years) subpopulations 
during the period 2010 to 2014 using Transgender Day of Remembrance and 
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs transgender homicide data. I used 
estimated transgender prevalences to estimate RRs using cisgender comparators. 
I performed a sensitivity analysis to situate all results within assumptions 
about underreporting of transgender homicides and assumptions about the 
prevalence of transgender residents.

Results. The overall homicide rate of transgender individuals was likely to be 
less than that of cisgender individuals, with 8 of 12 RR estimates below 1.0. 
However, the homicide rates of young transfeminine Black and Latina residents 
were almost certainly higher than were those of cisfeminine comparators, with 
all RR estimates above 1.0 for Blacks and all above 1.0 for Latinas.

Conclusions. Antiviolence public health programs should identify young and 
Black or Latina transfeminine women as an especially vulnerable population.


Those on the list who aren’t necessarily particularly anxious to malign members 
and / or advocates of especially vulnerable groups as hysterical may also be 
interested in this companion piece:

Data Sources Hinder Our Understanding of Transgender Murders
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551619/



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Re: [Marxism] HRC Releases Report on Epidemic of Anti-Transgender Violence | Human Rights Campaign

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> On Dec 20, 2019, at 10:25 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> A response to this from a subscriber who prefers not to have his name made 
> public:

I think this is at least in part a fair critique, and in fact I had developed 
misgivings about the report after sending it, but hadn’t had time to follow up.

Having said that, I think it’s also fair to consider that hostility from people 
who seem like they should be allies could lead people who are part of, or 
connected to, such a very marginalized and maligned group could contribute to 
an incautious use of statistics in trying to wage self-defense.
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[Marxism] HRC Releases Report on Epidemic of Anti-Transgender Violence | Human Rights Campaign

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HRC Releases Annual Report on Epidemic of Anti-Transgender Violence

• By Sarah McBride
• November 18, 2019

HRC Foundation released A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in 
the United States in 2019, a distressing report honoring the at least 22 
transgender people and gender non-conforming people killed in 2019 and 
detailing the contributing factors that lead to this tragic violence. The 
report comes two days ahead of Transgender Day of Remembrance, which, this 
year, marks the 20th annual commemoration of transgender people killed during 
the preceding year.

“Transgender women of color are living in crisis, especially Black transgender 
women,” said HRC President Alphonso David. “While the details of the cases 
documented in this report differ, the toxic intersection of racism, sexism, 
transphobia and easy access to guns conspire to deny so many members of the 
transgender and gender non-conforming community access to housing, employment 
and other necessities to survive and thrive. Every one of these lives cut 
tragically short reinforces the urgent need for action on all fronts to end 
this epidemic — from lawmakers and law enforcement, to the media and our 
communities.”

A National Epidemic:Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in the United States in 
2019 explores many of the factors that can contribute to or facilitate fatal 
violence. In many instances, systemic discrimination at the intersection of 
gender identity and race lead to significant barriers to employment and 
housing. This pushes many transgender and gender non-conforming people into 
underground economies, including sex work, to survive and into circumstances 
where they may be more likely to encounter violence.

The report also calls for the expansion of community-based resources and 
programs to address the epidemic. Earlier this year, HRC announced it is 
significantly expanding its work dedicated to justice for the transgender 
community. The organization will advance new initiatives working alongside 
community advocates to focus on economic empowerment; capacity-building 
programs; targeted task forces in communities hardest hit by the epidemic of 
anti-trans violence; and expanded public education campaigns.

There are a number of actions outlined in the report that lawmakers can take to 
address the violence, including passing non-discrimination protections; 
enhancing law enforcement response and training; improving data collection and 
reporting; reforming laws that have the impact of criminalizing marginalized 
communities and undermining public health; and adopting common-sense gun 
violence protections.

This year’s annual report found that since the start of the year, at least 22 
transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed in the U.S., all 
but one were Black. Since January 2013, HRC has documented more than 150 
transgender and gender non-conforming people who were victims of fatal 
violence; at least 127 were transgender and gender non-conforming people of 
color. Nearly nine in every 10 victims were transgender women and 58 percent of 
all domestic deaths occurred in the U.S. South. These disturbing numbers likely 
underreport deadly violence targeting transgender and gender non-confirming 
people, who may not be properly identified as transgender or gender 
non-conforming.

In addition to the 22 transgender and gender non-conforming people killed by 
fatal violence, the report also profiles two other cases of transgender women, 
Johana ‘Joa’ Medina and Layleen Polanco, whose deaths remain under 
investigation. Both were likely impacted by circumstances fostered by hate, 
indifference and dehumanization. Medina, 25, died at a hospital in El Paso, 
Texas, just hours after being released from ICE custody. She suffered severe 
health complications that went untreated while she was in detention, according 
to Diversidad Sin Fronteras. Her family filed a wrongful death and personal 
injury claim against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Polanco, 27, 
was found dead in solitary confinement at Rikers Island on June 7. Her family 
says authorities knew she had epilepsy and failed to provide her proper 
treatment despite her condition.

The report comes just days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation released 
2018’s hate crimes data, which found an alarming 34 percent increase in violent 
hate-based attacks on transgender people between 2017 and 2018. 

Last week, HRC commemorated the annual Transgender Awareness Week, which is 
dedicated to illuminating both the progress and unfinished work in the fight 
for transgender equality. Throughout 

[Marxism] ‘No evidence’ that men are using trans identity for sexual violence | Scotland | The Times

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If anyone has a sub to the Times, I’d be interested to read the full article:

"There is no evidence men identify as transgender to access female-only spaces 
to commit sexual violence, the Scottish government has said.

"Draft legislation to reform and streamline the process for obtaining a Gender 
Recognition Certificate was published yesterday.

"It would remove the requirement for applicants to provide medical evidence of 
their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while retaining a condition that 
applicants must make a solemn statutory declaration that they have been living 
in their acquired gender and intend to do so permanently."

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/no-evidence-that-men-are-using-trans-identity-for-sexual-violence-zkplwlfzs



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[Marxism] Posie Parker, TERFs Find Audience With White Supremacists

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"Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (better known as her pseudonym Posie Parker), who is 
known in the United Kingdom for her strident anti-trans activism as well as in 
the United States for harassing the trans rights advocate Sarah McBride, 
recently appeared on the YouTube channel of French-Canadian far-right 
nationalist Jean-François Gariépy. Gariépy, for his part, believes in the need 
for a “white ethno-state” and regularly features the noxious Richard Spencer on 
his show. And while the two, during the 80-minute interview, debated and 
disagreed about women’s role in the family and gender disparities in the 
criminal justice system, their anti-trans bigotry united them."

https://jezebel.com/of-course-terfs-have-found-common-cause-with-white-nati-1839129243
 

Be sure to check out Parker’s response to the article, included in an update at 
the bottom of the article.
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Re: [Marxism] Labour’s Economic Plans: What Went Wrong? | Novara Media

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> On Dec 17, 2019, at 8:47 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/17/labours-economic-plans-what-went-wrong/


Meadway makes an odd slip at a crucial point. Here’s the salient passage:

"The economy is a zero-sum game.

"This is the starting point. Understanding this was critical to the success of 
the 2017 manifesto. Failing to understand it was critical to the failure of 
2019. The economy has grown, weakly, since 2008. Real  wages have not and 
public services have disintegrated. An economy that behaves like this, in which 
some people get richer but most very visibly do not, is one in which the broad 
promise of growth has broken down. Many people perceive the economy to be, 
broadly speaking, a racket in which a minority at the top are doing well at the 
expense of others, and they are, broadly speaking, quite correct.

"To see the economy like this is to see it as a zero-sum game whose brutal 
logic is this: I can only do better if somebody else does worse. If I want to 
be better off, someone else must be worse off. There are, of course, plenty of 
‘Keynesians’ out there who might see that improving the functioning of the 
economy – through investment and so on – can produce gains for everybody, and 
that the question is the distribution of the gains from this growth. But for 
significant numbers of people, and particularly for those people who have found 
themselves on the wrong side of a zero-sum game for a long period of time, such 
arguments don’t work. Note that austerity reinforces these arguments: the worse 
things get, the harder it can seem to imagine things getting better. (I made a 
barebones version of this argument in a piece I wrote back before Jeremy was 
first elected.)”

There’s an ambiguity in this argument which Meadway leaves unresolved: Is he 
arguing that every economy (or at least the UK’s economy) is, as a matter of 
political-economic law, a “zero-sum game,” or is he arguing that *people 
perceive the economy* to be a “zero-sum game,” and therefore that’s the social 
/ psychological reality in relation to which electoral political strategy has 
to be formulated? The reference to “Keynesians” suggests that the former isn’t 
really the case (although the reference itself is unhelpfully flippant), but 
then the rest of his argument seems to assume the contrary: It’s always 
necessary, not just as a matter of politics but as a matter of economics, to 
show “how things will be paid for,” and this is understood in terms of *who 
will be taxed to pay for them*.

So this seems like another example of an ostensibly left thinker perpetuating 
the (false) premise that social programs are paid for out of taxes — rather 
than, as the author seems to want to be credited for doing, *strategizing in 
light of the fact that many people (falsely) believe that social programs are 
paid for out of taxes* (which leaves open the possibility of pointing towards 
another horizon).

To the extent that left forces engage in electoral politics, our message should 
be, “Don’t worry; we’ll tax the shit out of the rich in due course — but that 
will be easier once you’ve got what you need, so making sure of that is our 
first priority, and we don’t need their money to do that.” Or words to that 
effect.

We need to stop perpetuating the enabling myths of ruling class rule. We need 
to stop making their war against us so easy for them.


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[Marxism] UK to investigate ‘far-left websites’ for ‘antisemitism’ – Mondoweiss

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"On Friday the thirteenth of December, the day after Boris Johnson’s Tory party 
devastated Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in Britain’s bitterly-fought 2019 election, 
Lord John Mann, the government’s independent antisemitism adviser, tweeted the 
following:

"'I can this morning announce that as government advisor on antisemitism that I 
will be instigating an investigation this January into the role of the Canary 
and other websites in the growth of antisemitism in the United Kingdom.'

"The tweet was first reported by The Jewish Chronicle, which said that Mann 
would be targeting other “far left websites.” The news suggests that the 
weaponization of antisemitism that contributed to Corbyn’s defeat was now being 
redirected — Mann indeed tweeted that the election did not herald the end of 
his efforts.[1]"

https://mondoweiss.net/2019/12/uk-to-investigate-far-left-websites-for-antisemitism/
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Re: [Marxism] Tweets from Luigi Pagarini on Corbyn

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> On Dec 15, 2019, at 11:42 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> The idea of working class people voting for a party to tax the rich to pay 
> for redistribution and public services was completely novel, and generally 
> immediately attractive. It was amazing to see how quickly and instinctively 
> they grasped a left-wing agenda while saying they had never thought about it 
> before. There seems like a huge opportunity there for the left to make 
> inroads with younger non-graduates in towns but how do we reach them? 
> Organising and social media I guess?


Plenty of useful reflections in this thread but the left needs to stop 
repeating the lie that we need rich people’s money to pay for things. If it 
isn’t necessary to tax the rich in order to pay for bank bailouts or a bloated 
military, it isn’t necessary to tax them to pay for social programs, 
infrastructure, or anything else we need. We should tax them anyway—tax them 
out of existence, if we can—but in order to eliminate their financial and 
political power, not because we need their money. There are constraints on the 
treasury’s ability to advance the common good, but those constraints are 
political (balance of forces) and material (sufficient supply of inputs, 
including labour), not financial (availability of liquidity). The capitalist 
class understands this perfectly well, which is why they don’t hesitate to use 
the treasury for their own ends, and why they’re so committed to keeping the 
rest of us attached to this enabling myth of austerity. We should stop making 
their war against us so easy for them.
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Re: [Marxism] Lysenko

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> On Dec 14, 2019, at 10:23 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Tonight I had occasion to pick up a copy of The Spark, Marxist Theory and 
> Discussion, a publication of the Communist Party of Canada.
> It carries a review of Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia.  The reviewer 
> claims that advances in science have vindicated Lysenko.
> 
> “…the author accidentally but fatally exposes West capitalist bioscience to 
> be severely flawed.  With its dogmatic rejection of the possibility of other 
> methods of inheritance it was Western bioscience that was shown to  be less 
> open, narrow, non-dialectical, philosophically frozen and inferior in 
> comparison to an imperfect but superior Soviet dialectical science.”
> 
> Can someone who knows more about this than I do please comment.



LOREN GRAHAM, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2016. Pp. 200. ISBN 978-0-674-08905-1. £18.95 (hardback). 
doi:10.1017/S0007087416000959


There is a remarkable moment, halfway through this book, when Graham happens to 
bump into Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) – after numerous failed attempts to 
arrange a meeting – in a dining room at the House of Scientists. Lysenko is 
sitting and eating alone, having lost his position of dominance at the 
Institute of Genetics (where he dismissed Mendelian genetics and promoted a 
version of the inheritance of acquired characteristics that promised to make 
Russia a verdant land). Amazingly, we witness Lysenko brazenly laying down the 
victim card, but Graham has the better hand, citing Lysenko’s public criticism 
of his rivals, who often ended up in prison or dead. When Lysenko died five 
years after this encounter, few people would have predicted that he and his 
theories would be granted a curtain call. But, as Graham shows in this 
delightful little book – part history, part memoir – research in epigenetics 
has done so. In recent years, geneti- cists have shown that environmental 
changes can affect the expression of genes (without altering the genetic code) 
and that, crucially, in some cases and through an as-yet-unknown mechanism, the 
resulting phenotype can be inherited. Graham asks whether this research 
vindicates Lysenko, but he also offers his book as a history of the concept of 
‘soft inheritance’.

Graham takes us from Hippocrates to Paul Kammerer via Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and 
Ivan Pavlov in thirty-two pages. It is useful to have this synthesis, as it 
shows how common belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics has 
been; indeed, it underlines Graham’s assertion that ‘the twentieth-century 
denial of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is likely to be con- 
sidered an odd detour in biological thought’ (p. 16). This is chiefly a history 
of ‘official’ science, and as such Graham perhaps overstates the extent to 
which the inheritance of acquired characteristics had been discredited in the 
West by the 1920s. As Piers Hale’s work suggests (to take one example), 
research scientists like J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley were at least 
concerned that the non-specialist public (and perhaps other research 
scientists) would accept George Bernard Shaw’s Lamarckian-inspired biology. 
More research on this needs to be done, touching as it does on important issues 
of the relation between science and the public, and the construction of 
scientific understandings in the ‘popular’ realm. Graham maintains a similar 
division between ‘of- ficial’ science and the popular when citing Kammerer’s 
status as a ‘popularizer’ and a ‘speculator in a way that is alien to 
scientists seeking reliable evidence and rigorous analysis’ as a reason why 
scientists rejected his ideas (p. 39). This sort of speculation was fairly 
common amongst scientists in the early twentieth century, for example in the 
To-day and To-morrow series – small books, some of which were written by 
practising scientists (including Haldane, the biologist H.S. Jennings and the 
physicist James Jeans), which often contained speculative scientific daydreams. 
Indeed, Graham is particularly good at pointing out how politics shaped ideas 
about heredity (and vice versa).

The material on what is happening in Russia today is perhaps most fascinating, 
not least because many of the historical chapters on the USSR will be familiar 
to readers of Graham’s previous work. Supporters of 

Re: [Marxism] Why I Don't Have a Mobile Phone - CounterPunch.org

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> On Dec 6, 2019, at 11:52 AM, DW via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> There simply is no evidence whatsosever that
> any radio frequencies do damage to anyone for any reason at the low levels
> of a cell phone. MM is going light on this :)

Yes; trying to play nice with others :-). And just to clarify, when I said 
there’s plenty to be concerned about with mobile phones, I meant *other than 
radiation*: ecological impacts of their material inputs; appalling labour and 
production practices; designed obsolescence and waste from disposability; 
impacts of screen time on developing brains; social isolation; etc. 
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Re: [Marxism] Why I Don't Have a Mobile Phone - CounterPunch.org

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> On Dec 6, 2019, at 11:12 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:
> 
> On 12/6/19 9:08 AM, MM wrote:
>> There’s plenty to be concerned about with mobile phones but this piece is 
>> completely off target. From the NYT a few months ago:
> 
> I posted this less about the impact on human beings but on the environment.
> 
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292983562_Environmental_Pollution_of_Cell-Phone_Towers_Detection_and_Analysis_Using_Geographic_Information_System

A perfectly legimitate thing to worry about, and the “precautionary principle” 
should certainly be followed in all such cases, but even that piece relies as 
much on a certain paranoia about the health / environmental impacts of 
radiation than the current state of scientific confidence really supports. 
Here’s a useful overview from ACS (again focused mainly on humans, but humans 
are also animals, so a lot of this applies to other life):

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/radiation-exposure/extremely-low-frequency-radiation.html

I’m not saying there’s nothing at all to be concerned about here, but if we 
don’t get GHG emissions under control, soon, cell phone towers are going to be 
the least of anyone’s worries. And if people think we’re going to succeed in 
organizing the way we need to in order to get emissions under control without 
using our cell phones, they’re living on another planet.
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Re: [Marxism] Why I Don't Have a Mobile Phone - CounterPunch.org

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> On Dec 6, 2019, at 10:22 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/06/why-i-dont-have-a-mobile-phone/ 
> 


There’s plenty to be concerned about with mobile phones but this piece is 
completely off target. From the NYT a few months ago:

The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t
How one scientist and his inaccurate chart led to unwarranted fears of wireless 
technology.

Over the years, Dr. Curry’s warning spread far, resonating with educators, 
consumers and entire cities as the frequencies of cellphones, cell towers and 
wireless local networks rose. To no small degree, the blossoming anxiety over 
the professed health risks of 5G technology can be traced to a single scientist 
and a single chart.

Except that Dr. Curry and his graph got it wrong.

According to experts on the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation, 
radio waves become safer at higher frequencies, not more dangerous. (Extremely 
high-frequency energies, such as X-rays, behave differently and do pose a 
health risk.)

In his research, Dr. Curry looked at studies on how radio waves affect tissues 
isolated in the lab, and misinterpreted the results as applying to cells deep 
inside the human body. His analysis failed to recognize the protective effect 
of human skin. At higher radio frequencies, the skin acts as a barrier, 
shielding the internal organs, including the brain, from exposure. Human skin 
blocks the even higher frequencies of sunlight.

“It doesn’t penetrate,” said Christopher M. Collins, a professor of radiology 
at New York University who studies the effect of high-frequency electromagnetic 
waves on humans. Dr. Curry’s graph, he added, failed to take into account “the 
shielding effect.”

More: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/5g-cellphones-wireless-cancer.html


Those still concerned about the dangers associated with holding a mobile phone 
against the side of their heads will be pleased to learn of a newfangled 
invention called earphones.


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Re: [Marxism] Russia Recognises Anez as Interim Bolivian President After Coup That Led to Morales' Resignation - Sputnik International

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> On Nov 15, 2019, at 12:22 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Can't wait for Max BLumenthal to justify this.
> 
> https://sputniknews.com/latam/201911141077305882-russia-recognises-anez-as-interim-bolivian-president-after-morales-resignation/
>  
> 

I’m also looking forward. A search of Grayzone for “Bolivia” and “Putin” still 
comes up blank for now. Their last story on Bolivia was Nov. 11.

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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Behrouz Boochani, voice of Manus Island refugees, is free in New Zealand | Australia news | The Guardian

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https://secure-web.cisco.com/1jU1UlyYcxpBrh9xZO_pcImndbxOAm4VLbh5Ce2rrux565GH-DMmsHMCIwXFvDmdEM70dKXTvPIjEwKO53C4IIzdCXGFFy_aNn4eFvbZ-qHX5aHj5ytWP3kELuGbFHNa7WbCkc8QKxcFxripUr-YIw_CQhaUUakRWtzAWnqAIU_m5GZ0RPbybO93SpgYzxZWMJYOgmAzuzRrrlWPWOq_Iqus_5S5bJMKYHsnNsLiKO2CBjjLe6ZB1ENfd6_mxvEMjLWk7oO7d36WnIknv8I-MjFxjEm2HULaTA6i25RayQr43886gTDmvwiw-NQPUapFfu2ZMRr7Mm9VBIAzNs1OA7tvRk_1qlTWiY-CvENzhhCOc5ZfIoT9bP3e0SVBwOm24vglLsNQ6xmxL2w1X00HHiQ/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Faustralia-news%2F2019%2Fnov%2F14%2Fbehrouz-boochani-free-voice-manus-island-refugees-new-zealand-australia

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[Marxism] LEAKED AUDIO: Richard Spencer Fumes At 'Kikes' And 'Octoroons' after Charlottesville Death

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An interesting tidbit about Spencer that I hadn’t seen before:

"Spencer, who advocates for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of the United States, 
is widely rumored among journalists to be a Central Intelligence Agency asset. 
He has received lavish profiles and glamorizing coverage in major mainstream 
publications including The Atlantic, Mother Jones, New York magazine, Slate, 
POLITICO, The Washington Post, GQ, Business Insider, the New Yorker, Pacific 
Standard, the Guardian and CNN."

https://freespeech.tv/blog/exclusive-leaked-audio-richard-spencer-charlottesville
 



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[Marxism] "Very fine people"

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"Spencer’s old friend, Milo Yiannopoulos, published an audio clip to YouTube 
late Sunday where Spencer can be heard using antisemitic slurs like “kike” and 
boasting that his ancestors “fucking enslaved those pieces of shit.” Spencer 
also says “I rule the fucking world” and suggests that anyone who isn’t white 
needs to be controlled through force.

…

"“That’s how the world fucking works,” Spencer says on the tape. “Little 
fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons.”

"The word “octaroon” is an offensive term for someone who is one-eighth black 
and is rarely heard outside of white supremacist circles.

"The next portion of the tape makes it clear what Spencer would like to see 
happen to the world and anyone who he doesn’t identify as white.

"“I rule the fucking world. Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me. 
They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the 
fucking world works. We are going to destroy this fucking town.”"


https://gizmodo.com/internet-savvy-nazi-says-a-bunch-of-old-fashioned-nazi-1839598635



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Re: [Marxism] Paying for Medicare for All

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> On Nov 2, 2019, at 10:02 PM, Dayne Goodwin via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Paying for Medicare for All
> by Elizabeth Warren, Medium, November 1
> https://medium.com/@teamwarren/ending-the-stranglehold-of-health-care-costs-on-american-families-bf8286b13086
>  
> 


Warren has fallen into the fatal trap that “scarcity-of-money” propagandists 
have been constantly setting and baiting for decades. State-funded public 
services don’t “cost” a country anything; they are injections of liquidity that 
improve the lives of those who are served, and unleash the spending power of 
the people who are employed to provide them; they also lend themselves to 
growth in union membership and power. This is why public services have been 
gutted under neoliberalism, and why blank-check deficit spending has been 
anathemized for anything but the military.

As Sanders advisory Stephanie Kelton succinctly puts it, money doesn’t grow on 
rich people. Government spending isn’t dependant on taxes (although taxation 
plays a role in keeping inflation in check, and in shaping the broad outcomes 
of an economy, even in class terms — i.e., which class has how much spending 
power). This is the main lie of neoliberalism (and its post-WWII precursors) 
that folks writing under the flag of “modern monetary theory” have been at 
pains to expose and debunk. Here’s a good piece on it:

"Modern monetary theorists believe that confusion around money has distracted 
economists from the real things that affect the economic health of society ― 
natural resources, technology, available labor. Money is a tool governments use 
to manage these variables and solve social problems. It is not a scarce 
resource that governments have to track down in order to pay for projects.

…

“‘The basic idea is that the government can’t run out of money,' Kelton said. 
'It creates money just by spending.’ 

“When people talk about government profligacy bankrupting their grandchildren 
or triggering a cataclysmic debt crisis, Kelton argues, they’re conflating the 
experience of a typical family, which has to get money from somewhere outside 
the household to meet expenses, with that of a sovereign government, which 
creates money as part of its basic operation.”

Link: 
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/stephanie-kelton-economy-washington_us_5afee5eae4b0463cdba15121

Warren’s perpetuation-by-silence of the lie that we “can’t have nice things” 
unless we squeeze money out of the rich is just further proof of her radical 
establishmentarianism. 

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[Marxism] Open Letter In Support Of Trans Labour Members

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Text:

We are members of the Labour Party expressing solidarity with trans people in 
the face of hate from the media and by anti-trans groups in the UK. We 
recognise that the UK has recently experienced a week  of coordinated 
pernicious attacks on trans people, including the launching of the execrable 
LGB Alliance and a motion passed at Hornsey & Wood Green General Meeting in 
support of Womans Place UK. The failure of the Labour Party on this issue is a 
deep wound to the principles of equality the Party is supposed to stand for.

Let us be under no illusions. The motion passed at Hornsey & Wood Green 
supports a transphobic organisation:

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/04/25/university-of-oxford-protest-transgender-feminism-womans-place/

https://clareflourish.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/womans-place-uk-transphobic/

https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2019/10/23/trans-exclusionary-group-womans-place-uk-set-to-hold-a-panel-in-oxford/

Failure of the General Secretary's office to rule the motion out of order in 
the first place is hard to comprehend but to still have failed to intervene to 
rule it out now that it has received some publicity and is going to Tottenham 
CLP is unconscionable. Our confidence in the Labour Party's commitment to 
protect trans members is shaken. Action must be taken.


Link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfb0_wA_hDX-iq5scn-L2OqrnwkfpklSptSQFJFovRJMizcQw/viewform
 

More than 500 signatures so far.
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[Marxism] My Search For Revolution & How we brought down an abusive leader - Troubador Book Publishing

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"In October 1985, Gerry Healy was expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party 
(WRP) on charges of sexual abuse and violence. His defenders included leading 
Party members Vanessa and Corin Redgrave and sympathiser Ken Livingstone. Clare 
Cowen was one of five Party members who secretly laid plans to challenge Healy. 
Now, in a tell-all book, she sets the record straight.

"Cowen joined the Trotskyist Young Socialists and Socialist Labour League, 
later to become the WRP, as a student in Bristol in the heady days of the late 
1960s. It was exhilarating; she felt in tune with major class struggles and 
believed her actions were making a difference. But by the early 1980s she began 
to question Healy’s autocratic control of the Party’s policies, members and 
finances.

"The 1984-85 miners’ strike raised troubling questions among the members about 
Party policies. On 1st July 1985, Healy’s secretary went into hiding, leaving a 
letter exposing his decades-long sexual abuse of Young Socialists and women 
Party members. The work of the five conspirators was beginning to bring about 
his downfall."


https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/history-politics-society/my-search-for-revolution/
 


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Re: [Marxism] New Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Alliance founded in London

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> On Oct 26, 2019, at 5:12 PM, John Edmundson via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> I have seen
> calls for "TERFs" to be raped and murdered (without a squeak from the
> leftist allies involved in the same discussion)….

> 
> It seriously concerns me that calls for women to be raped and murdered
> should be able to go unchallenged by the Left.

Without knowing which discussion this was or which “leftist allies” were 
involved, there’s no way to judge the accuracy of the first statement. Calls 
for violence have no place in these discussions and have been frequently 
condemned — including on this list. Vague accusations of alleged failures by 
leftists to live up to leftist values has become a standard trope of the 
alt-right. It’s the main reason that red-herring-laden “invitations” to debate 
like this one are so tedious.

Meanwhile, I’ll just offer this as my final response on this thread:

“The current storm around trans people bears all the hallmarks of a moral 
panic. Trans people are blamed for a number of – often contradictory – harms. 
In 2017, these included corrupting children, changing the English language and 
threatening free speech, violence against women and seeking to both dismantle 
and reinforce problematic gender norms.

“The “news” often turns out to be several years old, or based on serious 
misinterpretation of what somebody said. Stories frequently include factual 
inaccuracies. For example, a story about the proportion of trans sex offenders 
was found to be based on false statistics, as were frequent reports about the 
number of people who “detransition”, or return to identifying with the gender 
they were assigned at birth.

“This current media onslaught bears a striking resemblance to previous moral 
panics, notably the one against gay men in the 1980s. Like trans people now, 
gay men then were branded as paedophiles. Any mention of homosexuality was 
deemed to risk “turning children gay” in the same way that there’s now concern 
that young people will be “turned trans” if they learn about gender diversity.” 

http://theconversation.com/a-trans-review-of-2017-the-year-of-transgender-moral-panic-89272

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Re: [Marxism] New Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Alliance founded in London

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> On Oct 26, 2019, at 11:41 AM, Me  wrote:
> 
> Biology is such a terf hey? 
> 
> https://twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1129742277134508033 
> 

Ah yes: A random Twitter thread as authoritative source. Why didn’t I think of 
that? Actually, he sounds a lot like those “edgy anti-imperialists” explaining 
how criticizing US involvement in “regime change” in Syria doesn’t make them 
supporters of Assad. The fact that their premise is self-servingly wrong is 
irrelevant to them.

Meanwhile, this seems better (as does the piece Daniel Lindvall posted):

“Some sexual scientists have tried to chart the many different expressions of 
sex/gender identity, putting together formal models of what we know about 
variations in sexual identity (man, woman, something else), gendered identity 
(masculine, feminine, androgynous, something else; note: the term “gender 
identity” is often conflated with sexual identity, here I use gendered identity 
to refer to the degree a person is typically masculine and/or feminine for 
their society), sexual orientation (androphilic [finding male bodies erotic], 
gynephilic [finding female bodies erotic], bisexual, asexual, something else), 
mating orientation (monogamous, polyamorous, open, something else), and other 
important forms of sexual diversity.

“Leading sexual scientist Sari van Anders (2015) recently made an excellent 
attempt at integrating several of these sex/gender diversities here. She 
distinguishes between sex (including male and female as dimensions), gender/sex 
(man and woman as dimensions), and gender (masculine and feminine as 
dimensions), emphasizing variation in the intensity of each sexual 
configuration. The esteemed Anne Fausto-Sterling (2012) has argued for using 
dynamical systems theory to understand varying influences on sex/gender 
diversity (see also Fausto-Sterling et al., 2012). She emphasizes the John 
Money's classic 5-sexes approach of Genetic Chromosomal Sex (XX, XY, 45X, 
47XXY, XYY, etc.), Fetal Gonadal Sex (ovaries versus testicles and sex as 
subsequent gamete production), Fetal Hormonal Sex (in utero exposure to 
testosterone and subsequent organizational effects), Internal Reproductive Sex 
(uterus/cervix/fallopian tubes vs. vas deferens/prostate/epididymis), and 
External Genital Sex (vagina/clitoris vs. scrotum/penis). Sexological legend 
Milton Diamond also has a compelling model of sex/gender diversity he calls 
Biased-Interaction Theory (see Diamond, 2006). Sexual scientists have learned a 
lot about sex/gender identities, but really we’ve just begun to understand the 
causes underlying the myriad ways humans express their sexual selves. There is 
much work to be done.” 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sexual-personalities/201605/sex-and-gender-are-dials-not-switches

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Re: [Marxism] New Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Alliance founded in London

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> On Oct 26, 2019, at 10:55 AM, Me via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
> You are confusing biological sex which is indeed binary with gender
> which is a made up thing. People born with atypical genitalia have a
> biological sexual development disorder. They are not a third sex.

Rather, you are confusing the order of language with the order of being: the 
fact that “sex" and “gender" can be definitively distinguished in language does 
not mean they are definitively distinct in the world. Not even genitalia are 
“binary”: No genitalia are “typical” in any sense that implies normativity; 
anyone with any reasonable familiarity with evolutionary biology or taxonomy 
would understand that. Unfortunately, too few do.

The political right is busy these days trying to shore up that distinction, not 
unlike the ways in which ruling elites and their bigoted dupes in the past have 
insisted on substituting differences in language for variation in reality 
(e.g., “white / black” for race, vs. diverse phenotypes among human population 
groups). Thankfully, the people you dismiss as having a “sexual development 
disorder” increasingly have a voice. Maybe you should write to the author of 
the piece I linked and ask if they feel like they have a “disorder.”

It seems to me just about the last thing the world needs right now is a 
reactionary network of self-identified LGB folks helping out with the right’s 
dirty work.
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Re: [Marxism] New Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Alliance founded in London

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> On Oct 26, 2019, at 5:36 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/10/26/new-lesbian-gay-bisexual-alliance-formed-in-london/
>  
> 
From this page:

“Sex is a binary.” 

Also from this page:

"The new group aims to be an umbrella organisation that supports… accurate 
biological definitions of sex.” 

From reality:

“I was born with both male and female genitalia. In India, the Supreme Court 
has recognized people like me as a third gender, known as kinnars: We are 
neither male nor female. I was taunted and humiliated for being myself. I was 
about 14 when I decided to leave home and find my own community.” 

https://www.ozy.com/true-story/i-was-afraid-to-reveal-my-gender-to-my-boyfriend-and-i-lost-him/93384/

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[Marxism] Lebanon’s ‘October Revolution’ must go on! | openDemocracy

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Lebanon’s ‘October Revolution’ must go on!
Lebanon has a golden opportunity for the formation of an alternative, we should 
not let the ruling class reproduce itself again.
Rima Majed
20 October 2019


The ‘streets’ of Lebanon have exploded in massive protests since October 17th. 
Following months of austerity and dire economic conditions, a shortage of US 
dollars that caused a serious threat of devaluation of the Lebanese currency 
resulting in a potential crisis of gasoline and bread, the continuing power and 
water outages, and a catastrophic week with wildfires ravaging the country and 
exposing the ruling class, the government met on Thursday and agreed to impose 
new taxes on the people, including a tax on Whatsapp calls! While the uprising 
is not merely caused by the Whatsapp tax specifically, the newly agreed upon 
taxes (later reversed following street pressure) were perceived by most 
Lebanese as a ‘vulgar’ reflection of the government’s total neglect of people’s 
hardship and its priority to protect the interests of the ruling upper class at 
the expense of the majority of the population.

Not completely unexpected, mass protests have ravaged the country. While 
Lebanon has witnessed in its recent history similar massive “street explosions” 
against the ruling class (such as in 2015), the Lebanese ‘October Revolution’ 
of 2019 marks an important turning point in the history of contentious politics 
in the post-civil war era. After almost three decades of neoliberal policies 
that resulted in the deepening of class divides, people have taken to the 
streets this time to clearly denounce the ruling class that stands as the 
guardian of neoliberalism (and its own class interests), beyond sectarian 
divides that are usually an effective tactic deployed by the leaders to divide 
the streets. This time, the revolution started with the poorer classes of 
unemployed or underemployed - usually the backbone and constituencies of the 
hegemonic sectarian parties through complex networks of clientelism – turning 
against their ‘patrons’.

Thousands of ‘motorcycle riders’ mobilized on Thursday evening, following the 
government’s decision to impose new taxes, to block roads with blazing tyres 
and paralyze movement in the capital Beirut. The road blockades quickly spread 
to other regions and people started to gather in squares and roads across the 
country in a show of anger that clearly targeted all the rulers – for the first 
time, without any exception. The initial mobilizations that took the shape of a 
riot have – maybe surprisingly for some – gathered hundreds of thousands around 
them. While the protests of 2015 were led by a group of civil society 
organizations mainly representing the middle classes and rejecting most signs 
of riot or civil disobedience under the banner of protecting the protests from 
“infiltrators”, the recent protests have started specifically with those 
usually (and wrongly in most cases) considered to be the “infiltrators” 
themselves.

Not only is the tactic of protest different from previous movements in terms of 
road blockades and civil disobedience, but the scope of the protest is also 
much wider with regions such as the Beqaa, Tripoli, Nabatiyeh, Tyre and Zouk 
mobilizing in huge numbers, and the lexicon of the chants is clearly different 
with curse words and swearing at politicians forming the bulk of the slogans! 
The resonance of such “osé” chants with the wide majority of protesters in the 
squares, many of whom would have rejected and denounced such slogans a few 
years ago, speaks of an extreme level of anger that can challenge authority and 
morality at once (even amongst the middle classes!). These differences in the 
current movement compared to previous ones are not  details, they reflect 
deeper social transformations that have reached an extreme and that have been 
reflected in the radicalization of the movement. The mobilizations of the past 
few days have shown the start of the emergence of a new class-based alliance 
between the unemployed, underemployed, working classes and middle classes 
against the ruling oligarchy. This is a breakthrough.

Despite attempts by the regime to play the usual card of talking about 
“infiltrators” and the presence of “fifth columns” (which in most cases is no 
other than the regime itself), it is impressive how little resonance this 
discourse has had on protesters so far. This is not to say that such a 
discourse has been completely eliminated and such scenarios have been ruled 
out, but rather to highlight the importance of the newly emerging class-based 
awareness that is focused on targeting the 

Re: [Marxism] rising tide?

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> On Oct 21, 2019, at 9:27 PM, Dayne Goodwin via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Anti-Government Protests Sweep the Globe
> DemocracyNow! headlines, Oct. 21
> https://www.democracynow.org/2019/10/21/headlines 
> 

Meanwhile, RT publishes this vile piece of trash complaining about how 
difficult it is to be a law-and-order government when protesters take to the 
streets:

https://www.rt.com/news/471443-protests-spread-worldwide-response-/


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[Marxism] The tragedy of the Joker | Red Flag

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German social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, reflecting on 
Hollywood’s culture industry in the post-WWII period, maintained that comedy, 
musicals and the “happy ever after” dramas of mainstream cinema serve as 
distractions. “Fun is a medicinal bath”, they wrote. “The pleasure industry 
never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud 
practiced on happiness.” The culture industry functioned largely, they thought, 
to divert people’s longing for a society of genuine happiness into the 
transitory emotional satisfaction and false joy of narrative certainty. For 
those concerned with changing the world, however, it’s better to examine with 
sobriety the ills of society than succumb to the garish Technicolour illusions 
of mainstream cinema.

Present day cinema, even more than when Adorno and Horkheimer were writing, is 
an obscene and exploitative industry. It trades in pat clichés and the 
regurgitation of tired narratives. The endless remakes of superhero films 
suggest that something is rotten in the state of California – a crisis of 
imagination reflective of the broader malaise of a capitalist system consuming 
itself in its own excesses. Every now and then, however, something brilliant, 
challenging and disturbing appears. Todd Phillip’s Joker is one of those films.

https://redflag.org.au/node/6924 


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[Marxism] 10, 000 Farmers And Ranchers Endorse Green New Deal In Letter To Congress | HuffPost

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“Nearly 10,000 farmers and ranchers are endorsing the Green New Deal as the 
climate policy battleground expands from the oil fields to the agricultural 
fields.

“In a letter sent to Congress on Wednesday morning, the newly formed bipartisan 
coalition U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal threw its weight behind 
the sweeping industrial plan outlined in a resolution that Rep. Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) proposed in February.

…


“‘We believe these climate goals are achievable,’ the letter argues, ‘but only 
if the GND includes policies that spur two large-scale transitions: the 
transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy alternatives, and the 
transition away from industrial agriculture toward family farm-based organic 
and regenerative farming and land-use practices that improve soil health and 
draw down and sequester carbon.’” 



https://www.huffpost.com/entry/green-new-deal-farms-agriculture_n_5d814068e4b0fa0ba179722c
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[Marxism] Lausan - Sharing decolonial left perspectives on Hong Kong

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New online magazine:

"Lausan 流傘 is a collective of writers, researchers, activists and artists from 
Hong Kong and its diasporas, engaging with the city’s political struggle. 
Through translation, creation, and education, Lausan 流傘 aims to build 
solidarity on the international left with Hong Kongers’ unfinished fight to 
imagine emancipatory futures after colonialism, against both Chinese and 
Western imperialism.

"‘San’ 傘 is the character for umbrella, referencing our critical engagement 
with Hong Kong’s ongoing movements for self-determination, including the 2014 
Umbrella Movement. 流傘 is also a homophone of 流散 (diaspora/dispersal), which 
speaks to our location across the Hong Kong diaspora and our ambition to 
connect Hong Kongers’ struggles against capital, colonialism, and state power 
with unfolding histories of resistance around the world.

"We are 100% independent and volunteer-run."

Homepage: https://lausan.hk/


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Re: [Marxism] Kashmir

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> On Sep 13, 2019, at 9:49 PM, Marla Vijaya kumar via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> A vast majority of Indians believe that, but they 
> want a democratic solution to the Kashmir problem within the Indian Union.

It’s probably good that we have access to comrade Marla V-K’s reflections. I 
trust the comrade will eventually inform the list regarding the “democratic 
solution to the Kashmir problem.”

Meanwhile, I can’t help but be reminded of remarks from anti-pope Stephan 
Hoeller, delivered with a knowing snicker:

“Peace? Everyone wants peace — as long as it doesn't interfere with what they 
would like to do.” 

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