[Marxism] PFLP on death and legacy of Fidel
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[Marxism] The 'transformation problem' and Marx's crisis theory
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[Marxism] Imperialism and labour aristocracy in 21st century
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * A while back Redline blog initiated a study/discussion group on Imperialism. We began with Lenin's classic work and are currently studying John Smith's groundbreaking book on imperialism in the 21st century. Folks may be very interested in two recent contributions to the study/discussion, one by John and one by another participant, Walter Daum. https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/imperialism-study-group-some-discussion-on-the-labour-aristocracy/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Merci, Patron | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I strongly urge New Yorkers to see “Merci, Patron”, a laugh-out-loud radical French documentary that has the power of a Molotov cocktail, which will be screened one night only on Thursday, December first at 7:30pm in FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street (between Madison & Park). Described by the FIAF (French Institute Alliance Française) publicist as “A surprise box-office hit in France, this Michael Moore-inspired documentary takes on the fashion industry, globalization, and the richest man in France in an entertaining, personal look at one of today’s biggest issues.” full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/11/29/merci-patron/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Cuba and the "Clean Hands" problem
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * It has been said both that Fidel Castro was a bad man whose henchmen tortured and sometimes killed dissidents, and that Castro was a good man who gave Cuba a healthcare and literacy programme to rival many in the developed world. The BBC, in its quest for ‘balance’, says that people in Havana and Miami (‘only ninety miles away’), which hosts Trump’s only significant Hispanic constituency, are saying these things. Philosophers chew over the ‘problem of dirty hands’ – thought to arise when a politician does something morally wrong in the name of securing a public good or preventing a public bad. It’s notable that the problem is framed in that way, rather than as one that arises when a politician fails to secure the public good or prevent the bad by avoiding doing something morally wrong – the ‘problem of clean hands’, as it might be called. The notion that actors can acquit themselves of blame often relies on the fantasy that they act in a historical vacuum. Fidel Castro was responsible for the deaths of many people. Amnesty International counted 216 completed death sentences in Cuba between Castro’s coming to power and 1987; the figure may be much higher when extrajudicial killings are included. It is however a clean-hands fantasy to think that political actors could simply have implemented a liberal democracy in Cuba at the time of the revolution against Batista’s kleptocracy, which John F. Kennedy credited with 20,000 political murders during the dictatorship of 1952-59. Castro began as a land reformer, but various forces, US policy not least among them, pushed him towards ideological complicity with Marxism and geopolitical complicity with Moscow. Non-alignment on the Bandung model was hardly an option. ‘It is no wonder,’ Kennedy said in a presidential campaign speech <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25660> in October 1960, ‘that during these years of American indifference’ – under Batista – ‘the Cuban people began to doubt the sincerity of our dedication to democracy.’ Elsewhere in the speech Kennedy lambasted the Eisenhower administration’s record on Cuba, noting that at the start of 1959, US companies owned 40 per cent of Cuban sugar plantations, 80 per cent of the country’s utilities and most of its cattle ranches, mines and oil businesses. US arms funnelled to Batista were ‘justified in the name of hemispheric defence’, Kennedy said, but ‘their only real use was to crush the dictator’s opposition.’ Once in office, Kennedy got with the programme, including the black ops and the economic embargo designed to crowbar Castro from office. The likelihood of Castro’s moving in a liberal direction wasn’t improved by the CIA’s various attempts to kill him (eight between 1960 and 1965, according to the committee chaired by Frank Church), or by Kennedy’s invasion attempt in 1961, which ended in fiasco. For the US, Castro’s great crime wasn’t heading a repressive regime – ‘strong men’ such as Batista, Rafael Trujillo, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko or General Suharto got away with murder as long as they were US clients – or even his professed Marxism (Nixon and Kissinger were happy enough to cosy up to Mao Zedong when interest dictated); but that his regime was a standing rebuff to US might. Kennedy was ready to risk nuclear apocalypse to put paid to it. It would be pleasing to think that the post-Castro era might herald an end to internment without trial on the island of Cuba, and the release of prisoners who have been tortured while in custody. Unfortunately, Barack Obama’s administration has failed to carry out its promise to close Guantánamo. http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/11/29/glen-newey/the-clean-hands-problem/?utm_source=LRB+online+email_medium=email_campaign=20161129+online_content=usca_nonsubs _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Trump the Great — Paul Craig Roberts | Veterans News Now
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I think the vets involved are a mixed bag. I saw one early announcement with a bizarre phrase from one of the supposed organizers calling other activists worms or something like that. And Islamophobe Tulsi Gabbard is part of the mix, as is the stalinoid VFP. On the other hand so is IVAW, and some laid-back vets I know from Palestine work in NYC (Adalah-NY). _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Trump the Great — Paul Craig Roberts | Veterans News Now
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * This strikes me as the real thing, fascism-wise, a full-throated attack on the "oligarchs" connected with an appeal to support the "strong man" so he can make it better "from above." Roberts I don't care about so much, but the vets group is troubling. I know that Vets for Peace in places has been overrun by the same Stalinoids who are hating on Syria everywhere. They appeared in full ancientness at a showing of The White Helmets in Olympia. I hope thy are not the same Vets heading for Standing Rock. There is clearly some money being put into this newspaper/website/zine, Veterans News Now. Most vets groups I know of don't have a pot to pee in so I am curious how such a website is organized. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Trump’s Promises Will Be Hard to Keep, but Coal Country Has Faith
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, Nov. 29 2016 Trump’s Promises Will Be Hard to Keep, but Coal Country Has Faith By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG WILLIAMSON, W.Va. — If a single moment captured coal country’s despair this year, it was when Bo Copley, a soft-spoken, out-of-work mine maintenance planner, fought tears as he asked Hillary Clinton how, having dismissed coal’s future in language that came back to haunt her, she could “come in here and tell us you’re going to be our friend.” That was in May. Mr. Copley, 39 and a registered Republican, was “very uncomfortable” with Donald J. Trump then, he said. But over time, in a paradox of the Bible Belt, Mr. Copley, a deeply religious father of three, put his faith in a trash-talking, thrice-married Manhattan real estate mogul as a savior for coal country — and America. “God has used unjust people to do his will,” Mr. Copley said, explaining his vote. Now coal country is reckoning with an inconvenient truth: Experts say Mr. Trump’s expansive campaign promise to “put our miners back to work” will be very difficult to keep. Yet as he prepares to move into the Oval Office, Appalachians are eyeing Washington with a feeling they have not had in years: hope. The American market for coal is shrinking, industry analysts agree. Utility companies have drastically reduced their reliance on coal, in part because of President Obama’s aggressive regulations to cut emissions from power plants, but also because natural gas is cheaper. Nationally, about 300 coal-fired power plants have closed since 2008, according to the National Mining Association, a trade group. Many of those plants — including one in nearby Louisa, Ky., where a giant cooling tower was recently demolished after the plant converted from coal to natural gas — are not coming back. Politicians and economists agree that what Appalachia really needs is a diversified economy, a goal that has eluded Mr. Obama and state and local politicians. But in this land of staggering beauty and economic pain, Trump backers said over and over again that while coal might never be what it once was, the businessman they helped send to the White House could indeed put them back to work — if not in mining, then in some other industry. “I don’t think he can ever fulfill all the promises he made even in four or eight years,” Danny Maynard, 59, said after Bible study at the Chattaroy Missionary Baptist Church. Mr. Maynard lost his job at a coal company last year. “But I think we’re headed in the right direction,” he said. “He wants to make America great again.” Mr. Trump pummeled Mrs. Clinton in coal country. Here in West Virginia, he won every county and took 69 percent of the vote, a landslide also fueled by his promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who would roll back abortion rights. As Mr. Copley put it, “Coal is secondary to me.” It is difficult for outsiders to fathom how deeply faith and work are intertwined here, or the economic and psychological depression that sets in when an entire region loses the only livelihood many of its people have ever known. Coal has always been boom and bust; its decline began long before Mr. Obama took office. But in West Virginia alone, 12,000 coal industry jobs have been lost during his tenure. At the Huddle House on Route 119, Kayla Burger, 32, a waitress, has worked three jobs since her husband lost his; they take home less than a quarter of the roughly $100,000 he used to earn. She took an offer for miners’ wives to train as phlebotomists, but with so many miners out of work, the phlebotomy market was flooded. She also substitute teaches and cooks at the school. They have given up cellphones and sold their boat; one car has been repossessed; the only reason they still have their house, she said, is that they saw layoffs coming and saved money. Her husband, who cares for the children, has experienced depression. “He doesn’t feel like a man,” Ms. Burger said. Her father was a miner, too; he and her mother drive tractor-trailers now. In Williamson — population roughly 3,100, down from 4,300 two decades ago — everyone has a story. The city used to market itself as “the heart of the billion-dollar coal fields,” but it now wraps its tourism pitches around the Hatfield-McCoy trails that run through the nearby mountains. (“We’re the 50-cent coal fields,” said Natalie Taylor, the executive director of the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce.) Williamson’s downtown, on the border with eastern Kentucky, sits between the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River and the Norfolk Southern Railroad tracks. At the newly opened pulmonary
[Marxism] Fwd: Trump’s ‘news’ source: Alien lizards, fluoride mind control and voter fraud - The Washington Post
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[Marxism] MRZine and East Aleppo
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I think most Assadists would be hesitant to gloat over the fall of East Aleppo under months of Russian bombing that culminated in the destruction of all four hospitals there. But not Yoshie Furuhashi who includes a tweet from the pro-Assad al-Masdar News about the Syrian army turning the water back on so that those in the government-controlled part of the city can take a bath again. There is something truly revolting about Furuhashi. You don't even see such brazen propaganda on Counterpunch now. What a slap in the face to the left. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: You're the Puppet - bookforum.com / current issue
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (By Tony Wood, one of the few people associated with NLR who is not a Putinite stooge.) What's particular to Russia is the closeness of the relationship between private wealth and the state. That relationship, often depicted as one of domination by the Kremlin over capital, is in reality closer to a symbiosis, in which political and economic power are intertwined—and mostly concentrated within the same small group of people. After the fall of Communism, the Yeltsin administration rushed to privatize large chunks of the economy, transferring factories, mines, oil fields, banking licenses, and so on to a select few individuals. The state played the decisive role in creating this new class, as the beneficiaries have readily acknowledged. Banker Pyotr Aven—currently ranked No. 317 on the Forbes list of billionaires—once observed that "to become a millionaire in our country it is not at all necessary to have a good head or specialized knowledge. Often it is enough to have active support in the government, the parliament, local power structures and law enforcement agencies. . . . In other words, you are appointed a millionaire." For most of the 1990s, the oligarchs created by the state seemed to have the upper hand, with figures such as Boris Berezovsky all but dictating government policy. But the 1998 ruble collapse and ensuing economic crisis weakened the oligarchs' position, while the rise in global commodities prices from 1999 onward suddenly sent floods of tax revenues into state coffers, strengthening the hand of the government. The tide now turned the other way, and state officials began to exert more pressure on business. The 2003 attack on Khodorkovsky confirmed the shift, and sent a signal to the other oligarchs that new rules were going to apply. But in neither phase did the idea of private profit-making as the governing principle come into question—only the distribution of the rewards. full: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/023_04/16815 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
