[Marxism] New on Redline

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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Trump, Friedman, Israel and Zionism:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/trump-friedman-israel-and-zionism/

Productive and unproductive labour in capitalist society:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/productive-and-unproductive-labour-in-capitalist-society/

Guaranteed Income, Universal Basic Wage or the Abolition of the Wages
System:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/12/25/guaranteed-income-universal-basic-wage-or-the-abolition-of-the-wages-system/

Palestinian struggle - active solidarity more important than UN
resolutions:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/12/24/palestinian-struggle-active-solidarity-more-important-than-security-council-resolutions/
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[Marxism] Fwd: After Aleppo’s fall, Hamas finds itself resisting Tehran as well as Tel Aviv | Middle East Eye

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The fall of Aleppo to Iran-backed pro-government forces has brought a 
bubbling conflict between Iran and Hamas to the boil, with the former 
making thinly-veiled threats to cut off the Palestinian group.


The threats came from Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a member of the 
Iranian Foreign Affairs and National Security Committee, in the wake of 
increasing solidarity from Hamas to Aleppo.


In an interview last week with the reformist Qanun newspaper, 
Falahatpisheh made clear there would be material consequences if Hamas 
did not change its position on Iran’s role in the region, not least its 
intervention in Syria.


full: 
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/after-aleppo-s-fall-hamas-finds-itself-resisting-tehran-well-tel-aviv-1017030317



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[Marxism] Fwd: Professor behind 'white genocide' tweet says he has university support | Reuters

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pennsylvania-professor-idUSKBN14G1OA


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Re: [Marxism] Economists versus the Economy by Robert Skidelsky - Project Syndicate

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Dec 27, 2016, at 7:50 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but 
> economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. 
> Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could 
> teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. 
> Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. 
> The economists are the idiots savants of our time.


There’s a nice two-part lecture by SOAS’ Ben Fine on Youtube that explores this 
ground further:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbawrxfmqhg 


Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEDniCBl4kE 


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[Marxism] Fwd: Another university flunks the free-speech test - LA Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Strong statement.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-free-speech-drexel-20161227-story.html


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[Marxism] Seller-Financed Deals Are Putting Poor People in Lead-Tainted Homes

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Dec. 27 2017
Seller-Financed Deals Are Putting Poor People in Lead-Tainted Homes
By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON and MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN

BALTIMORE — A year after Tiffany Bennett moved into a two-story red 
brick house at 524 Loudon Avenue here, she received alarming news.


Two children, both younger than 6, for whom Ms. Bennett was guardian, 
were found to have dangerous levels of lead in their blood. Lead paint 
throughout the nearly 100-year-old home had poisoned them.


Who was responsible for the dangerous conditions in the home?

Baltimore health officials say it was an out-of-state investment company 
that entered into a rent-to-own lease with the unemployed Ms. Bennett to 
take the home in 2014 “as is” — chipping, peeling lead paint and all.


Ms. Bennett, 46, and the children moved out, but they should never have 
been in the house at all. City officials had declared the house “unfit 
for human habitation” in 2013.


Throughout the country, tens of thousands of rundown homes have been 
scooped up by investment companies that have offered high-interest 
financing or rent-to-own deals largely to poor people. Many of these 
homes were foreclosed on during the housing crisis.


These investors, however, often put no money toward renovation, or for 
fixing lead paint problems. The low-income buyers and renters are forced 
to make all repairs. When there are serious problems with the homes, 
victims can be required to sign confidentiality agreements to keep them 
quiet in a settlement after they have been compensated, as happened in 
Ms. Bennett’s case.


As a result, seller-financed housing contracts have aggravated a 
persistent problem of lead poisoning among young children in this country.


About 535,000 children a year nationwide test positive for lead in their 
blood, which can cause brain damage and other developmental delays. 
Problems with lead-tainted water in Flint, Mich., put the issue on the 
map. Yet exposure to lead paint in aging and poorly maintained homes 
remains the biggest source of poisoning.


It is not known how many homes nationwide are in seller-financed 
contracts, and not every state requires that such contracts be recorded. 
Still, health officials say they are increasingly seeing a connection 
between homes that are in seller-financed contracts and lead-poisoning 
cases.


“Unfortunately they have this contract which removes the actual owner of 
the home from the liabilities of fixing the home and requires these 
people who have no money to fix their own home,” said Dr. Jennifer 
Lowry, chief of toxicology in the pediatrics unit of Children’s Mercy 
Hospital in Kansas City.


Dr. Lowry said she had seen an increase in patients with lead poisoning 
who live in homes bought through a seller-financed contract on both the 
Missouri and Kansas sides of the city.


“What I care about is this kid who has elevated blood levels and yet I 
can’t get anybody to fix the home,” she said.


Ms. Bennett entered into a rent-to-own contract with Vision Property 
Management of Columbia, S.C., one of the biggest players in this 
fast-growing market.


Vision failed to register the property with Baltimore housing officials 
after buying it in 2014 from Fannie Mae, the government-controlled 
mortgage finance firm. It then ignored the city’s previous building code 
violation, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times.


The details of Ms. Bennett’s situation were pieced together through 
interviews with public officials, court records and documents provided 
through public records requests to various city and state agencies. Some 
of the documents were redacted to protect the privacy of the children.


In many cases, families who had been affected by lead poisoning declined 
to comment when reached, citing concerns about reprisals.


Baltimore has fined Vision more than $11,300 for failing to register 43 
homes in the city, a requirement that applies to all landlords. State 
lead investigators visited at least two other Vision homes earlier this 
year but could not physically enter and inspect them.


A representative for Vision said that the company “does not comment on 
the specific details of matters pertaining to tenants or properties” and 
that noted the matter with Ms. Bennett had been resolved.


Vision, which was featured in a front-page article in The Times, manages 
more than 6,000 homes across the country through nearly two dozen 
limited liability companies.


When it came to fixing the lead issues in Ms. Bennett’s home, Vision did 
not respond to the city’s request in late 2015. The company has argued 
its contracts put all responsibility for repair

[Marxism] GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER: Statement on My Satirical Christmas Tweet

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/27/statement-on-my-satirical-christmas-tweet/


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[Marxism] Fwd: Defend George Ciccariello-Maher | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2016/12/27/defend-george-ciccariello-maher/



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Economists versus the Economy by Robert Skidelsky - Project Syndicate

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Skidelsky: "/Unfortunately, the frictions that disrupt the machine’s 
smooth operation are human beings. One can understand why economists 
trained in this way were seduced by financial models that implied that 
banks had virtually eliminated risk/."


Hmmm, so he /has /engaged Keynes' theories of disequilibrium but hasn't 
considered Marx's?


On 2016/12/27 08:52 AM, Jim Farmelant via Marxism wrote:

...The first person to hold an academic chair in economics was Alfred Marshall. 
Marshall studied mathematics as an undergraduate. He then pursued studies in 
philosophy which led to his becoming interested in economics.


But isn't context everything?

Wasn't Marshall's contribution mainly in marginalist theory, especially 
in the micro-economics of corporate behavior, in which marginal revenue 
and marginal cost curves were increasingly important to understanding 
the logic of a relatively new form of economic activity: the 
corporation? If you invest your money in a corporation, you want to know 
its inner workings (a reliable indicator of its source and direction of 
profitability), and then logically you want an economic theory that can 
put this information into a scientific-sounding form.


If so, isn't the degradation of what we call neo-classical economics - 
i.e. its origins in serving the rise of a speicifically corporate power 
that sought a pseudo-scientific basis for its existence - parallel to 
the degradation of so many other social sciences that began in the 19th 
century to serve power?


German sociology to serve Bismarck's modernising, urbanising society 
(Weber and Toennies)? British geography to serve the empire's 
geopolitical expansion and later its containment of Bolshevism 
(Mackinder)? Anthropology with its focus on racist craniometry to serve 
European imperialism (Morton, Vacher de Lapouge)? Political science with 
its commitment to social Darwinian and legitimating growing state power 
(Adams, Wilson, Beard)?


And if so, don't we need to restructure intellectual disciplinary 
arrangements to recognise that so many of those core knowledge systems 
dating to the late 19th century are hard-wired with ongoing service to 
mainly wicked forms of power, forms that still maintain many residual 
features of their origins? (Just watch the way 'economic geographers' 
engage in spatial fetishism, for instance, or how sociologists adhere to 
dualistic epistemologies so as to avoid engaging life's dialectics.)


The 20th century gave us add-ons, such as Development Studies, Planning, 
area studies, gender and race studies, and various others with a largely 
/inter/disciplinary orientation.


For effective 21st century intellectual work, isn't it time for 
/anti-/disciplinary approaches? I like the way the New School is 
structuring "Capitalism Studies" (not just as historical US business 
studies as happens elsewhere), but with people like Nancy Fraser, a much 
more integrated approach to the topic that avoids the old disciplinary 
territorial boundaries like the plague... Is that the way forward, to 
deal with the /cul de sac /- or in many cases cliff-face - that so many 
Marxist economists encountered in trying to reform the discipline from 
within?



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Against the Assad Regime’s Conquest of Eastern Aleppo - Black Rose Anarchist Federation

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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What a great statement! I don't know much about this particular wing of the
anarchist movement, but their analysis and appeal for solidarity is so on
point - and in synch with what's been written by other anarchists such as
Leili al-Shami and Budour Hassan, who refer to the inspiration of the
martyred Omar Aziz.
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[Marxism] Fwd: Against the Assad Regime’s Conquest of Eastern Aleppo - Black Rose Anarchist Federation

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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One of the reasons I have grown to respect anarchists over the past 5 years.

http://www.blackrosefed.org/assad-regimes-conquest-eastern-aleppo/


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[Marxism] Nearly in Ruins: The Church Where Sages Dreamed of a Modern Brazil (NY Times)

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/world/americas/nearly-in-ruins-the-church-where-sages-dreamed-of-a-modern-brazil.html

By SIMON ROMERODEC. 25, 2016



RIO DE JANEIRO — Neighbors from surrounding apartment buildings toss empty beer 
bottles through a gaping hole in the roof of the once-majestic church. Pigeons 
roam the cavernous nave, their excrement piling up on the floor. A watchman 
guards treasures from the thieves who prey on the city’s derelict buildings.

The neoclassical Positivist Church of Brazil, with its soaring columns and a 
cryptic sign above its entrance proclaiming, “The Living Are Forever and 
Increasingly Governed by the Dead,” was long a captivating sight on Benjamin 
Constant Street near the old city center.

These days, the crumbling, graffiti-tagged church, whose freethinking founders 
helped modern Brazil rise from the ashes of an empire, is just another emblem 
of how Rio de Janeiro neglects its past, allowing grandeur to fall into ruin.

“Congregants once gathered here to debate incendiary ideas originating in 
Paris, the holy city for the positivists,” said Christiane Souza, 48, the 
church’s heritage director. “Tragically, our institution now finds itself in a 
state of neglect, as if history is something Brazil should disdain.”

Indeed, few Brazilians know much about positivism, the secular religion that 
was spread in Brazil in the second half of the 19th century by followers of the 
French philosopher Auguste Comte, except, perhaps, that two of his tenets — 
order and progress — remain emblazoned on the Brazilian flag.

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Roughly defined, Comte’s philosophy of positivism sought to reorganize society 
around the concept that explanations derived from science should be prized as a 
way of understanding the world. Positivism drew admirers in places including 
Mexico, Britain and Turkey. Taking things a step further, Comte created his own 
religion to spread his beliefs.

Some facets of his Religion of Humanity resembled Roman Catholicism. The 
interior of the decaying church here in Rio still has the feel of an austere 
cathedral, albeit one where services stopped after part of the roof collapsed 
during a storm in 2009. Worshipers exalted a female icon similar to the Virgin 
Mary and modeled on Clotilde de Vaux, with whom Comte was in love.

But Comte also told followers to worship humanity, not God, and created a new 
calendar. Its starting year was 1789, when a mob stormed the Bastille in a 
defining moment of the French Revolution; he named months after historical 
titans like Gutenberg, Charlemagne, Shakespeare and Dante.

Brazil, a slaveholding empire ruled by a monarchy for most of the 19th century, 
was fertile ground for the Religion of Humanity. Francophile adherents to the 
faith included leading figures in the tumultuous period after the 1889 coup 
that toppled Brazil’s emperor, such as Cândido Rondon, the explorer who mapped 
out far-flung stretches of the Amazon rain forest with Theodore Roosevelt.

In other countries, the site where such luminaries assembled might today be 
enshrined as a museum. Not in Rio, where the authorities last year opened a 
lavish Museum of Tomorrow to contemplate the future, even as Belle Époque 
buildings in the city waste away in various stages of decay.

Still, Giovanni Fernandes, the custodian of the Positivist Church, sometimes 
lets a visitor or two slip inside, offering a glimpse into Brazil’s 
not-so-distant past. Scattered around the entrance are century-old pamphlets in 
Portuguese and French that the positivists once printed in the basement.

The titles of the rotting booklets reflect the issues, political infighting and 
prejudices that used to consume Brazil: “Obligatory Vaccination and the 
Politics of the Republic,” “The Question of the Border Between Brazil and 
Argentina,” “In Defense of Brazilian Savages.”

One room with a spiral staircase contains a trove of sculptures shrouded in 
dust, including a statue of Clotilde de Vaux cradling an infant. Decaying 
paintings on the wall seem to depict aristocrats in European-style attire lost 
in philosophical reflection.

Once in a while, scholars emerge from the church with coveted discoveries, as 
when a mildewy drawer stuffed with old papers yielded the original sketche

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Economists versus the Economy by Robert Skidelsky - Project Syndicate

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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It's only since the end of the 19th century that economics emerged as an 
academic specialty in its own right with its own academic departments, degrees, 
and professional journals. The great economists before then were all trained in 
other fields. Thus, Adam Smith was a professor of moral sciences, who 
considered himself to be mainly a philosopher.  Besides The Wealth of Nations, 
his other main work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. David Ricardo was a 
businessman. J.S. Mill was a polymath, who had been a child prodigy. He spent 
most of his adult life working for the East India Company, where he was the 
equivalent of a high level civil servant. Karl Marx was trained as a 
philosopher, made his living as a journalist, and was a lifelong revolutionary. 
The first person to hold an academic chair in economics was Alfred Marshall. 
Marshall studied mathematics as an undergraduate. He then pursued studies in 
philosophy which led to his becoming interested in economics.

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


-- Original Message --
From: Louis Proyect via Marxism 
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Economists versus the Economy by Robert Skidelsky - 
Project Syndicate
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2016 07:50:45 -0500

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What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad 
education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of 
understanding the economy. The giants of earlier generations knew a lot 
of things besides economics. Keynes graduated in mathematics, but was 
steeped in the classics (and studied economics for less than a year 
before starting to teach it). Schumpeter got his PhD in law; Hayek’s 
were in law and political science, and he also studied philosophy, 
psychology, and brain anatomy.

Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost 
nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own 
discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. 
Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic 
method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has 
monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants 
of our time.

full: 
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mathematical-economics-training-too-narrow-by-robert-skidelsky-2016-12


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1 Fruit That "Destroys" Diabetes (Try This Tonight)
Medical Health Advisor
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[Marxism] Fwd: Vera Rubin, astronomer who verified existence of dark matter, dies at 88 - The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/vera-rubin-astronomer-who-verified-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88/2016/12/26/545e617c-cb9d-11e6-a747-d03044780a02_story.html

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[Marxism] Fwd: Iranian commander: Aleppo is the ‘frontline of Islamic revolution’ - Al Arabiya English

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(So, let me get this straight. The purpose of Assad's genocidal war is 
to root out sectarianism? Laugh out fucking loud.)


https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2016/12/26/IRGC-Commander-Aleppo-is-the-frontline-of-Islamic-revolution-.html


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[Marxism] Fwd: Economists versus the Economy by Robert Skidelsky - Project Syndicate

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad 
education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of 
understanding the economy. The giants of earlier generations knew a lot 
of things besides economics. Keynes graduated in mathematics, but was 
steeped in the classics (and studied economics for less than a year 
before starting to teach it). Schumpeter got his PhD in law; Hayek’s 
were in law and political science, and he also studied philosophy, 
psychology, and brain anatomy.


Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost 
nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own 
discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. 
Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic 
method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has 
monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants 
of our time.


full: 
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mathematical-economics-training-too-narrow-by-robert-skidelsky-2016-12



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[Marxism] Fwd: Drexel censures professor for white genocide tweet.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A remarkably perceptive article from the centrist Slate magazine.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/12/26/drexel_censures_professor_for_white_genocide_tweet.html


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[Marxism] Fwd: Crossing the Red Line | Human Rights Watch

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A court in Russia has sentenced Alexei Kungurov, a 38-year-old blogger 
from Tyumen, Western Siberia, to two-and-a-half years in prison for 
“justification of terrorism.” His crime? A blog post he wrote in October 
2015, after Russian warplanes conducted their first airstrikes in Syria.


full: https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/12/22/crossing-red-line


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