[Marxism] ICE attempts to deport Jewish historian of the Holocaust
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. * Don't know if this one got circulated yet. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/26/renowned-french-historian-invited-texas-university-held-10-hours/ _ 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: Other Russias | 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. * Largely through connections made through Russian Reader blogger Thomas Campbell, I have learned about important developments involving the Russian left that defy the stereotype of Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin as neoliberal snakes. To be sure, such snakes exist but the Western left has an obligation to keep abreast of our comrades there, who are opposed to capitalism just as much as us. In addition to Thomas Campbell’s blog, another important asset is the journal n+1 that largely because of the presence of co-founder Russian émigré and Marxist Keith Gessen (Masha’s brother) on the editorial board has a pipeline to the Russian revolutionary movement that makes it indispensable to our ongoing political enlightenment. It was through an introduction to Keith Gessen made by Thomas Campbell that I learned of a tour by Kiril Medvedev, the revolutionary socialist poet, journalist, activist and–most distinctively–translator of Charles Bukowski. n+1 published Medvedev’s “It’s No Good“, a book whose $16 price tag goes against capitalist rationality, just as does every word in his Molotov Cocktail of Russian literature. The good news is that n+1 has now published another voice of the Russian left: Victoria Lomasko, the author of Other Russias, which was translated by the good Thomas Campbell. Vika is an artist and activist whose work reminds me both artistically and politically of Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”. Satrapi’s work was a comic book after the fashion of Harvey Pekar but Lomasko’s is much more text with powerful illustrations to make key points such as the ones shown below that come from the chapter on Pussy Riot. full: https://louisproyect.org/2017/02/26/other-russias/ _ 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] Ten proposals to beat the European Union and avoid a repetition of the Greek capitulation
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 collective document from across the European left on how to challenge the EUs stranglehold on economic and social justice. By Eric Toussaint, Miguel Urbán Crespo, Teresa Rodríguez, Angela Klein, Stathis Kouvelakis, Costas Lapavitsas, Zoe Konstantopoulou, Marina Albiol, Olivier Besancenot, Rommy Arce February 21, 2017 Introduction This collective text (full list of signatories here) initiated by Eric Toussaint of the CADTM campaign for the abolition of the debt of the global South, has been collectively discussed and co-signed by personalities and activists from more than 15 European countries representing a wide range of forces of the radical and anticapitalist Left: Podemos and Izquierda Unida in Spain, the Portuguese Left Bloc, the Left Party in Britain, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste and Ensemble in France, Popular Unity and Antarsya in Greece, the radical Danish left and activists from countries such as Cyprus, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary. It is signed by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from different parties and countries, by the head of finance of the City of Madrid, by the former president of the Greek Parliament, by a series of members of the Commission For the Truth on the Greek Debt. All the signatories are involved in the ongoing discussions about a plan B for Europe. The aim of this text is to analyze the balance of power in the European Union and elaborate a series of radical but necessary proposals against austerity, neoliberal policies and for an alternative to the existing form of European integration. The ten proposals put forward in this text are the outcome of an analysis of the situation in Europe since 2010. It takes into account the experience of the confrontation between Syriza and the Troika in the first half of 2015 and of the defeat that followed, but also the Spanish, Irish or Cypriot experiences. Recent events have clearly demonstrated the need for a left-wing government to have the courage to disobey the injunctions of European authorities and break decisively with the framework of the founding treaties of the EU. This must be accompanied by a popular mobilization triggered by the initiatives of the left-wing government and by a series of robust measures to be implemented immediately: organize a debt audit with citizen participation, put in place a control of capital flows, socialize the financial sector and the energy sector, reform radically the tax system. And of course, the inevitable debate on the euro area needs to be publicly conducted, with exit as an option that must be defended at least in some countries. The cold analysis of the European policies of recent years invariably leads to this conclusion: only strong sovereign and unilateral self-defense measures will enable any progressive national government and the social forces who back it to break with austerity and neoliberalism and address the issue of the illegitimate debt. Full: http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2017/02/ten-proposals-to-beat- european-union.html or http://tinyurl.com/guvjckn _ 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: Amazon Deforestation, Once Tamed, Comes Roaring Back - The New York Times
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. * Should be read on the NYT website for the graphics. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/energy-environment/deforestation-brazil-bolivia-south-america.html _ 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] What’s Left of Communism?
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. * (Worries over the old mole.) NY Times Op-Ed, Feb. 24 2017 What’s Left of Communism A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, can a phoenix rise from the ash heap of history? by David Priestland Oxford, England — “Ura! Ura! Ura!” I vividly remember the wall of sound as stern, gray-uniformed soldiers met their commander’s greeting: “Congratulations on the 70th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution!” An exchange student in Moscow in 1987, I had traveled to Gorky Street on that crisp November morning to see the military parade making its way to Red Square. A row of assembled Soviet and foreign dignitaries presided as the young servicemen paid homage at Lenin’s Mausoleum. This impressive-seeming display was to showcase the enduring revolutionary energy of Communism and its global reach. The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, spoke of a movement reinvigorated by the values of 1917 before an audience of left-wing leaders that included Oliver Tambo of the African National Congress and Yasir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Banners bore the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s proclamation “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live forever!” The claim had a hollow ring, for the economic problems of the U.S.S.R. were evident to all, especially my Russian student friends, dependent on poorly provisioned universities for food. Even so, the system still seemed as solid as the mausoleum’s marble. I, like most observers, would not have believed that within two years Communism would be crumbling, and within four, the Soviet Union would itself have collapsed. Soon, popular views of 1917 changed entirely: Unfettered markets seemed natural and inevitable, while Communism appeared to have always been doomed to Leon Trotsky’s “dustbin of history.” There might be challenges to the globalized liberal order, but they would come from Islamism or China’s state capitalism, no longer a discredited Marxism. Today, as we mark the centenary of the February Revolution — prequel to the November coup of Lenin’s Bolsheviks — history has turned again. China and Russia both deploy symbols of their Communist heritage to strengthen an anti-liberal nationalism; in the West, confidence in free-market capitalism has not recovered from the financial crash of 2008, and new forces of the far right and activist left vie for popularity. In America, the unexpected strength of the independent socialist Bernie Sanders in last year’s Democratic race, and in Spain, the electoral gains of the new Podemos party, led by a former Communist, are signs of some grass-roots resurgence on the left. In 2015 Britain, Marx and Engels’s 1848 classic, “The Communist Manifesto,” was a best seller. So did I witness Communism’s last hurrah that day in Moscow, or is a Communism remodeled for the 21st century struggling to be born? There are hints of an answer in this complex, century-long epic, a narrative arc full of false starts, near-deaths and unpredicted revivals. Take the life of Semyon Kanatchikov. The son of a former serf, he left rural poverty for a factory job and the thrill of modernity. Energetic and sociable, Kanatchikov set out to improve himself with “The Self-Teacher of Dance and Good Manners” as his guide. Once in Moscow, he joined a socialist discussion circle, and ultimately the Bolshevik party. Kanatchikov’s experience made him receptive to revolutionary ideas: a keen awareness of the gulf between rich and poor, a sense that an old order was blocking the rise of the new, and a hatred of arbitrary power. Communists offered clear-cut, convincing solutions. Unlike liberals, they championed economic equality; but unlike anarchists, they embraced modern industry and state planning; and against moderate socialists, they argued that change must come through revolutionary class struggle. In practice, these ideals were difficult to combine. An over-powerful state tended to stifle growth while elevating new elites, and the violence of revolution brought with it periodic hunts for “enemies.” Kanatchikov, too, became a victim. Though awarded prestigious appointments after the revolution, his association with Stalin’s archrival, Trotsky, brought about his demotion in 1926. By then, the outlook for Communism was grim. The first flames of revolution in Central Europe in the aftermath of World War I had been extinguished. The U.S.S.R. found itself isolated, and Communist parties elsewhere were small and beleaguered. The American-forged modernity of the Roaring Twenties was unapologetically consumerist, not communist. But the flaws of laissez-faire
[Marxism] Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story.
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. * (Very perceptive and cheeky article.) NY Times, Feb. 26 2017 Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story. By GLENN THRUSH and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM WASHINGTON — The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of low-road, New York Post-style gossip: “Page Six reporter.” Whether the New England-bred spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald J. Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip. He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, Mr. Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.” His latest swipe — pulling out of Washington’s so-called nerd prom — came via Twitter on Saturday. “I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!” He has made a sharp break from previous presidents — and from his own comfortable three-decade tango with the tabloids. “New York is extremely intense and competitive, but it is actually a much smaller pond than Washington, where you have many more players with access to many more sources,” said Howard Wolfson, who has split his career between New York and Washington, advising former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “In New York, you can create a manageable set of relationships in a smaller universe,” Mr. Wolfson said. “In Washington, that becomes a lot more complicated.” There is another fundamental difference: During his Page Six days, Mr. Trump was, by and large, trafficking in trivia. As president, he is dealing with the most serious issues of the day. They involve the nation’s safety and prosperity, and it is the role of news organizations to cover them. If Mr. Trump’s slap-and-tickle relationship with reporters had a model back then, people close to him say, it was the gregarious, unavoidable-for-comment style of Edward I. Koch, the three-term New York mayor. But his mood in Washington has turned darker, and over the last week he has executed, alongside Mr. Bannon and Mr. Spicer, what amounts to the most sustained White House campaign against the news media since Richard M. Nixon’s second term. “It’s like Nixonian times again,” said George Rush, a veteran New York gossip columnist who has covered Mr. Trump for decades. “I just thought he would have a thicker skin.” Linda Stasi, who chronicled Mr. Trump’s up-and-down marriage to Marla Maples in the 1990s for two New York papers, said she could have predicted the presidential agita. “He would plant stories and he would get mad if they didn’t come out exactly as he wanted,” she recalled of earlier dealings with Mr. Trump. “It never occurred to him that he couldn’t control everything.” Now, Ms. Stasi said, “he is shocked that he is not in control of the press.” Attacking the news media, which has an abysmal approval rating among Republican voters, is sound politics in the short term. But Mr. Trump’s fury is less strategic than heartfelt. He watches cable TV at night and exhorts aides like Mr. Spicer and his policy adviser Stephen Miller to be tougher, according to White House aides. His anger is compounded by his belief that he should still be able to plant and steer stories. That was a lot easier to do when he was running a close-knit real estate and branding business with an aggressive legal team that demanded that nearly everyone in his orbit sign nondisclosure agreements. For the first time in his life, Mr. Trump is on the public payroll and subject to a tangle of laws and rules no businessman — especially one accustomed to overseeing every aspect of a relatively small family business — would tolerate. To some extent, the clash with the press was inevitable. Mr. Trump may be noisier
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: What is to be done? An invitation for submissions to North Star
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. * My reply on the North Star: I invite any of you out there to examine this question and post, discuss, and submit your thinking to multiple venues. I believe the The North Star Network is an open space for multiple perspectives. However, here are my initial comments: 1. it is is well and good for people to talk, to analyze, and think broadly about what "should be done". But it CANNOT be "done" in contradiction to ongoing action. There is collectively a "mass ferment" as well as a mass level of shock and paralysis as even our largest actions seem (I say "seem") unable to keep Trump and his willing (and unwilling) accomplices (Republican and Democrat) from rushing headlong into barbarism and the dismantling of democratic rights and protections. It is at one most uncomfortable for some sections of the capitalist class to try to roll back class relations to before thee 1930's and at the same time, the capitalists see this event of Trumpism as a singular opportunity to do that very thing. The reformist-minded rulers (headed by the Democrats of all ilk) likely fear that such a rollback is not possible because they fear the backlash of the masses to defend Our gains. Trump and his followers are, in fact, calling our "bluff" betting that mass discontent will be quelled by a combination of Trump-inspired repression and the Democratic Party's historic role in encompassing mass movements and dissipating them into support for "realistic" electoral politics. In short, Trump and the Democrats hope to use the next four to eight years to effect a new era of "class peace" where all of US can learn to expect even less than what we've become increasingly used to accepting today. We Must Not talk and stop acting. Even directionless, the mass movements that are emerging create a different context. Indeed, the recent "debate" within the Democratic Party National Committee to elect a new chair received far too much attention by people who were just a month ago in the streets beginning to feel our power. "Discussing and analyzing" devoid of action, no matter how less effective such action might be without leadership, creates breathing room for the oppressors. Those of us who see ourselves as revolutionaries must continue to participate in every form of struggle no matter how small or seem! ingly insignificant. In this period, every struggle, every town hall meeting, every issue becomes a basis to "stop Trump", which equals today to meaning stop capitalism's assaults. 2. Those of us who consider ourselves "leftists" or socialists need to unite not simply "in spite" of our differences, but BECAUSE of our differences. We need to show the masses both how to fight and how to make united decisions, especially when we disagree. The Trumps and the Democrats have historically relied (knowingly and unknowingly) on this very real propensity of internecine warfare "in the streets" among those who have become moved to oppose them. Indeed, the rise of the trade union bureaucracy during earlier revolutionary times has been a model, not necessarily fomented by the rulers but certainly been used to their advantage. The ruling class has historically had a singular weapon of mass (movement) destruction; their ability to open and close the "spigot" of reforms that created the material basis to buy off large sections of the working masses that allowed for the dissipation of mass movements. Capitalist greed is inexorable, but it is wholly capable of using its greed--a nd its vast stores of accumulation--to protect and defend itself. Its best weapon is that which can foment discord and disruption among the revolutionary class across all its potential fault lines of division. The longer we take--as potential revolutionaries--to find a way to unite in discussion, debate, decision-making and ACTION, the longer it will take to overcome the "crisis of leadership" of the masses that so many have "analyzed" is a problem. The results of our inability to unite are already apparent; they are bloody and the more consciously we refuse to change, the more that blood is also on our hands. 3. While there is not as yet an effective and permeating fascist threat, the attempts by Trump and his base of highly ignorant and fearful "petit bourgeois and lumpens" to create an "authoritarian" state raise the real possibility of such a fascist movement. That movement of reaction will NOT look like Hitler's fascism or Mussolini's or even of previous "American" attempts. However, such a movement will SURELY be aided by a) the continued "leaderlessness" of mass ferment b) the resulting
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: It’s Their Party | Jacobin
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. * The article says SDS promoted "Half Of The Way With LBJ." This myth seems to go on and on and on. The slogan was "Part of the Way With LBJ." I was there and voted against it. T -Original Message- >From: Louis Proyect via Marxism>Sent: Feb 26, 2017 10:05 AM >To: Thomas F Barton >Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: It’s Their Party | Jacobin > >SDS and the Democratic Party. Interesting history. > >https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/democratic-party-realignment-civil-rights-mcgovern-meany-rustin-sanders/ >_ >Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm >Set your options at: >http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/thomasfbarton%40earthlink.net _ 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: What is to be done? An invitation for submissions to North Star
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * In Donald Trump’s first month in the White House, the left has been confronted by the biggest challenge in decades. Unlike the administrations of the post-WWII period, there is wide agreement that Trump is something different and constitutes the biggest threat to bourgeois democracy since Joseph McCarthy. Discussions about how to theorize “Trumpism” overlap with those about strategy and tactics. All this takes place in the context of massive demonstrations and the growth of the left that also requires analysis, especially since by most accounts the Democratic Party is fueling the anti-Trump movement. When the North Star website was launched in 2012, it was never understood by its editors as offering a “line” that the left should follow. Its primary purpose was to defend a non-sectarian approach to building the left that departed from “Leninist” orthodoxy. In this, it was hearkening back to the original vision of Peter Camejo’s North Star Network of the early 80s that was the first attempt to unify a badly fractured left around a broad left program with the most important elements being rejection of the two-party system, the creation of a revolutionary party based in the working class and the need for a total transformation of American society based on socialism. Within the broad discussion taking place on the left around a series of interrelated questions, the North Star editorial board would like to invite submissions dealing with the period we have entered. To give you an idea of the kind of analysis we would like to publish, we urge you to consider editorial board member John Reimann’s articles on “Donald Trump and the World Capitalist Crisis” and “The Trump-Putin Connection”. While these bullet points should not be considered as constituting the boundaries of the analysis we would like to provide a platform for, they do represent our impressions of what the left has been grappling with: What is Trumpism? Is Donald Trump a fascist? What are the class forces that constitute his base of support both at the top and the bottom? Under what circumstances can we see a break with bourgeois democracy? A massive terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11? full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13183 _ 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: The mystery of ‘populism’ finally unveiled | openDemocracy
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 G.M. Tamas, leading Hungarian Marxist. https://www.opendemocracy.net/wfd/can-europe-make-it/g-m-tam-s/mystery-of-populism-finally-unveiled _ 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: It’s Their Party | Jacobin
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. * SDS and the Democratic Party. Interesting history. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/democratic-party-realignment-civil-rights-mcgovern-meany-rustin-sanders/ _ 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: More than 50 detained in immigration raids at Asian restaurants in Mississippi - LA Times
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. * http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-mississippi-immigration-raids-20170223-story.html _ 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: Key Question About DNC Race: Why Did Obama White House Recruit Perez to Run Against Ellison?
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://theintercept.com/2017/02/24/key-question-about-dnc-race-why-did-white-house-recruit-perez-to-run-against-ellison/ _ 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