Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg's 'The Accumulation of Capital', , 100 years on

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/09/06 06:41 PM, Walter Daum via Marxism wrote:


Hi Patrick, Of course I agree that the three “grabs” you mention 
occur, and that they are crucial for capitalist production. But I 
don’t agree that they are, in today’s conditions, non-capitalist. They 
are part of how capitalist economy works; they exist in addition to 
the direct extraction of surplus-value in the sphere of production. 


The "in addition to" is what we're trying to get at, using the theory of 
uneven and combined development in application sites such as South Africa.


Luxemburg held that capitalism required not just the grabbing of extra 
surplus-value outside the production sphere – it needed to loot by 
force non-capitalist *modes of production.* 


Yes, the way we have traditionally described that process in this part 
of the world is as the "articulations of modes of production" (Harold 
Wolpe developed the concept during the 1970s, making some unfortunate 
errors en route, by failing to distinguish necessary from contingent 
processes within this articulation, such as the apartheid state form).


Harvey's student Neil Smith remarked how this process of articulation 
was a moment within capitalism's uneven development. (More on this: p.5 
of 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304622213_Uneven_Development_and_Scale_Politics_in_Southern_Africa_What_We_Learn_from_Neil_Smith_Uneven_Development_in_Southern_Africa 
)


The Marikana massacre was the forcible suppression of a strike within 
capitalist production, a strike by proletarian miners whose labor was 
super-exploited by capitalists. 


Yes, but in a context of migrant labour, which is the main symptom here 
of articulations of modes of production. There's not space in Louis' 
allowed commentary - still, I think 35kb - but there are plenty of good 
articles and a few books which make it abundantly clear how the workers 
demanded a $1000/month living wage because they were compelled to keep 
two households - one in the shack settlements of Nkaneng and Wonderkop, 
and the other back in their home region. This was the logic of a system 
in which Lonmin draws profits not just from surplus value at the point 
of production, but also from "free gifts of nature" (platinum, water, 
coal to fire electricity) and from ongoing disruption of the 
reproduction of a rural society (in labour-sending areas) that, for 
centuries before mining-based colonialism, was itself a coherent mode of 
peasant production. Marikana must be seen in context.


Luxemburg’s scheme doesn’t apply here. As John Smith said in the post 
that triggered this discussion: “Harvey is right to draw attention to 
the continuing and even increasing importance of old and new forms of 
accumulation by dispossession, but he does not recognize that 
imperialism’s most significant shift in emphasis is in an entirely 
different direction – toward the transformation of its own core 
processes of surplus-value extraction through the global labor 
arbitrage-driven [i.e., by super-exploitation] globalization of 
production, a phenomenon that is entirely internal to the 
labor-capital relation.” Yes, my comments were grumpy. I grump 
especially at reformist institutions that inappropriately appropriate 
Luxemburg’s revolutionary good name. But my main point was to grump at 
theorists (Harvey and Wolff) who suggest that the center of 
imperialism has moved South, or that it is the oppressed countries in 
the global South that extract surplus-value from the imperialist 
countries in the global North. Those fictions turn the real 
imperialist globe upside down. Walter


Look, I'm rushed now, but I think is an ungenerous, indeed uncomradely 
reading of Harvey - and I really doubt he'd agree that "the center of 
imperialism has moved South" (though it is unevenly developing, as the 
rise of the sub-imperialist BRICS shows).


Full respect to MR for advancing the debate - and my two cents on how 
Africa looks in this context is here: 
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/09/01/africa-rising-in-retreat/ - but it 
would have been better for Smith (and you, Walter), to seriously 
consider what the Harvey/Smith approach to uneven development looks like 
as it has developed over the past 50 years or so since Harvey first 
start confronting extreme uneven urban development in Baltimore. 
Otherwise you risk caricature.


More soon...

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[Marxism] The point

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The point is it not that the 'social-fascist' line one was one of the
factors in producing the great disaster that was the Nazi regime.?

comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] on the Centre

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Aaron Bastani of Novara Media London has a link on his twitter feed to a
blog on Scottish politics <
https://petermccoll.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/history-is-back/>.


There Peter McColl cobbles together Fukuyama's End of History thesis with
the notion that elections could only be won from the Centre. The now
retired leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Kezia Dugdale, was a centrist
and she was apparently astonished when in the last British election,
Corbyn's break with the centrist politics proved electorally popular.
McColl concludes that centrist politics are dead and that history is back.


McColl's article suffers from the weakness of a non-processual view of
reality. That leads one to think that concepts such as a Centre are fixed
and unchanging.


It is vital to reject such a view and to grasp that the Centre is an
abstract, geo-historical, relational concept.  Basically it is a cluster of
common sense ideas as to what is politically possible. It is formed in the
struggle between the social classes. It changes over time and space.



What is happening is that a new Centre is coming into being.


I am old enough to recall when the Centre was Keynesian.  That changed in
the 70s & 80s to the neo-liberal Centre. That change came out of brutal
struggles such as the Chilean Coup & the miners' strike in the UK.


In Australia we had our own very Aussie type of  Coup with the sacking of a
Keynesian treasurer, Jim Cairns on the 2nd July 1975 and then with the
dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government on the 11th of November 1975. As
is the way with things, the history of the struggles was lost or
misunderstood or misinterpreted by the victors. The  truth is that the new
neo-liberal Centre came *into the world dripping* from head to foot,
from *every
pore*, with *blood and dirt*.  But alas the loss of history meant that the
new Centre was treated as if it fell from heaven upon the place beneath.


For those of us who are into conspiracy theories, Milton Friedman visited
Australia in April 1975.



Now we are seeing a swing back to something like a Keynesian Centre.  When
it takes root, if it does, a new common sense will take hold and once more
elections will be won from the Centre.


comradely


Gary
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[Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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On 9/6/17 3:30 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote:
Ken Hiebert replies:
Whatever criticism we have of the Communist Party of Germany and other 
Stalinist organizations, we must respect that many militants stayed at their 
posts even in the darkest days of Nazi rule and contributed to the defeat of 
the Nazis.


Louis Proyect:
What defeat are you talking about? Hitler took power in 1933 and threw all the 
CP'ers into concentration camps. Those who avoided this fate worked in a very 
weak underground. It was military force that defeated Hitler unless I don't get 
your point.


Ken Hiebert:
I was thinking of the military defeat of Germany.  It is my understanding that 
CP militants were able to send information to the Soviet Union.  This does not 
take away from your point that the German CP was for the most part crushed and 
survived only in a much weakened state.
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Re: [Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/6/17 3:30 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote:


Ken Hiebert replies:
Whatever criticism we have of the Communist Party of Germany and other 
Stalinist organizations, we must respect that many militants stayed at their 
posts even in the darkest days of Nazi rule and contributed to the defeat of 
the Nazis.


What defeat are you talking about? Hitler took power in 1933 and threw 
all the CP'ers into concentration camps. Those who avoided this fate 
worked in a very weak underground. It was military force that defeated 
Hitler unless I don't get your point.

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[Marxism] A clear analysis of the North Korean-American nuclear danger

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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This is published in Counterpunch. As nearly as I can tell this author 
is a Burkean conservative for whom a thorough materialist analysis is a 
third rail, but he otherwise has a very helpful view of the background.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/06/mayday-korea-america-on-the-brink-of-nuclear-war/ 




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Re: [Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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n 9/6/17 2:36 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Fast forward a bit, though, and you will find Harro Schulze-Boysen 
(mygrandmother's favorite cousin) leading a Red Orchestra group of Communists 
who harassed the Nazi regime from the early 1930s, and fed information to 
Moscow (and later Washington), until they were caught and executed in 1942. 
There was no ideological confusion there.

Louis Proyect:
Yeah, well, look. The official policy of the KPD was to oppose "social 
fascism". This meant regarding the social democrats as bad as Hitler, even 
worse. I am working on an article about this right now in fact, mostly as a way 
of showing how stopping Hitler could not be reduced to "punching a Nazi”.


Ken Hiebert replies:
Whatever criticism we have of the Communist Party of Germany and other 
Stalinist organizations, we must respect that many militants stayed at their 
posts even in the darkest days of Nazi rule and contributed to the defeat of 
the Nazis.
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Re: [Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Fast forward a bit, though, and you will find Harro Schulze-Boysen (my 
grandmother's favorite cousin) leading a Red Orchestra group of 
Communists who harassed the Nazi regime from the early 1930s, and fed 
information to Moscow (and later Washington), until they were caught and 
executed in 1942. There was no ideological confusion there.





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Re: [Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/6/17 1:36 PM, Glenn Kissack wrote:



"Oh yes, we admit that we're in league with the National Socialists, that we 
together with the National Socialists, want to destroy the existing social system . . . 
Bolshevism and Fascism share a common goal; the destruction of capitalism and of the 
Social Democratic Party. To achieve this aim we are justified in using every means."

--Horst Sindermann, German CP leader, 1930


Are you sure about the date? Wikipedia has this about Sindermann:

"Horst Sindermann joined the Communist Youth Federation (KJVD) in 1929 and in 
1932 became a local functionary in Dresden. The group was banned by the Nazi regime 
and in June 1933, Sindermann was arrested and condemned to eight months of 
imprisonment for illegal political activities. In September 1934, he became 
political director of the KJVD's Dresden branch.”

In 1930, Sindermann was not a CP leader. What is the source?



It was his older brother Kurt Sindermann, not Horst, that I was 
referring to.


https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Sindermann

In 1925 Sindermann became head of the KJVD in East Saxony. He proved 
himself and in the beginning of 1927 was also entrusted with the 
management of the RFB in East Saxony. From November 1927 to March 1929, 
the KPD sent him as a student to the International Lenin School in Moscow.


With the necessary ideological armaments, he ran for the Saxon Landtag 
and became his deputy in the 4th and 5th electoral period until 1933. 
After his duties in East Saxony, Sindermann became head coach of the KPD 
in Chemnitz in 1930 and was instrumental in eliminating divergent KPO 
Groups.

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Re: [Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Glenn Kissack via Marxism]

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> "Oh yes, we admit that we're in league with the National Socialists, that we 
> together with the National Socialists, want to destroy the existing social 
> system . . . Bolshevism and Fascism share a common goal; the destruction of 
> capitalism and of the Social Democratic Party. To achieve this aim we are 
> justified in using every means."
> 
> --Horst Sindermann, German CP leader, 1930

Are you sure about the date? Wikipedia has this about Sindermann:

"Horst Sindermann joined the Communist Youth Federation (KJVD) in 1929 and in 
1932 became a local functionary in Dresden. The group was banned by the Nazi 
regime and in June 1933, Sindermann was arrested and condemned to eight months 
of imprisonment for illegal political activities. In September 1934, he became 
political director of the KJVD's Dresden branch.”

In 1930, Sindermann was not a CP leader. What is the source?


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Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg's 'The Accumulation of Capital', , 100 years on

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Hi Patrick, Of course I agree that the three “grabs” you mention occur, 
and that they are crucial for capitalist production. But I don’t agree 
that they are, in today’s conditions, non-capitalist. They are part of 
how capitalist economy works; they exist in addition to the direct 
extraction of surplus-value in the sphere of production. Luxemburg held 
that capitalism required not just the grabbing of extra surplus-value 
outside the production sphere – it needed to loot by force 
non-capitalist *modes of production.* The Marikana massacre was the 
forcible suppression of a strike within capitalist production, a strike 
by proletarian miners whose labor was super-exploited by capitalists. 
Luxemburg’s scheme doesn’t apply here. As John Smith said in the post 
that triggered this discussion: “Harvey is right to draw attention to 
the continuing and even increasing importance of old and new forms of 
accumulation by dispossession, but he does not recognize that 
imperialism’s most significant shift in emphasis is in an entirely 
different direction – toward the transformation of its own core 
processes of surplus-value extraction through the global labor 
arbitrage-driven [i.e., by super-exploitation] globalization of 
production, a phenomenon that is entirely internal to the labor-capital 
relation.” Yes, my comments were grumpy. I grump especially at reformist 
institutions that inappropriately appropriate Luxemburg’s revolutionary 
good name. But my main point was to grump at theorists (Harvey and 
Wolff) who suggest that the center of imperialism has moved South, or 
that it is the oppressed countries in the global South that extract 
surplus-value from the imperialist countries in the global North. Those 
fictions turn the real imperialist globe upside down. Walter On Tue, 5 
Sep 2017 17:09:06 +0200 Patrick Bond  wrote: There 
are questions in this (exceedingly grumpy) review posed to me, so I sent 
back this quick answer to Walter Daum:


Walter: [Bond] repeatedly quotes her statements to the effect that
?capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist relations.?
But the main examples he provides are those of extractive industries
that strip the continent of minerals, and he vividly describes the
infamous massacre of platinum miners at Marikana in 2012. How is this an
example of ?super-exploitative relations between capitalist and
non-capitalist spheres? being confirmed in Africa today?

My reply: The super-exploitation of the non-capitalist sphere entails:
1) land grabs of the soil above which the minerals are found;
2) nature grabs of the minerals themselves;
3) grabs of the social reproduction of labour power in the form of
super-exploited women suffering the conditions of migrant labour in
neo-apartheid SA (more athttp://womin.org.za)

Sorry I didn't make that clear, but you'd agree?

Cheers,
Patrick

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[Marxism] OP-ed in SF Chronicle We are all antifa

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/We-are-all-antifa-12174947.php

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[Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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"Oh yes, we admit that we're in league with the National Socialists, 
that we together with the National Socialists, want to destroy the 
existing social system . . . Bolshevism and Fascism share a common goal; 
the destruction of capitalism and of the Social Democratic Party. To 
achieve this aim we are justified in using every means."


--Horst Sindermann, German CP leader, 1930
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[Marxism] Antifa and free speech

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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In today's Counterpunch there are two articles defending antifa that are 
problematic to say the least. One, written by Berkeley attorney Dan 
Siegel, advocates a ban on people like Richard Spencer giving speeches 
because they fall within the rubric of the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court 
ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio that there is no free speech right to 
advocate violence when there is a likelihood that violence will actually 
occur. He endorses this ruling despite his acknowledgement that 
"Brandenburg occurred primarily in cases overturning the criminal 
convictions of people found guilty of supporting the Marxist teaching of 
the necessity for the violent overthrow of governments dominated by the 
capitalist ruling class."


The other is by Stephanie Basile who endorses the new book by Mark Bray 
that has become to the antifa "movement" what Regis Debray's "Revolution 
within the Revolution" was to the guerrilla movements in Latin America 
in the 60s and just as wrongheaded. Bray, like Siegel, endorses the kind 
of strict enforcement of hate speech laws, referring to European 
standards as a model. I suppose Basile is not aware that in France this 
law was used in the prosecution of Palestinian solidarity activists 
since opposition to Zionism is considered hateful.

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[Marxism] Fwd: America on the Brink of Nuclear War: Background to the North Korean Crisis

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Written by a 98 year old former Harvard professor who is related to 
President James K. Polk. Hard for me to imagine that anybody that old 
could produce such a powerful and lucid article.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/06/mayday-korea-america-on-the-brink-of-nuclear-war/
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[Marxism] The First Time I Met Americans: Essay by Bao Ninh

[mkaradjis . via Marxism]

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Beautiful piece by Bao Ninh, author of The Sorrow of War

The First Time I Met Americans

Bao Ninh

SEPT. 5, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/opinion/vietnam-war-writers.html?emc=edit_tnt_20170905=16428923=y

U.S. planes dropping bombs in the Dong Hoi and Vinh areas of North
Vietnam in 1966. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

HANOI, Vietnam — I first visited the United States in the summer of
1998, when I was invited to attend a literary conference in Montana
with four other Vietnamese writers. We flew from Hanoi to Taiwan to
Los Angeles. As we crossed the Pacific Ocean, passing through many
time zones, I buried myself in sleep and woke up only when the plane
hit the tarmac. At passport control, we found ourselves in a huge
hall, and I was abruptly taken aback: There were Americans all around
us, lots of them! I will never forget that strange feeling. It was
bizarre, unbelievable, surreal, that I, a veteran of the Vietnamese
People’s Army, was in the United States, surrounded by Americans.

The first time I ever saw Americans was when I was 12 years old. It
wasn’t actually blond-haired, blue-eyed Americans that I was seeing up
close. The Americans I saw that day were F-4 Phantom bombers, brutally
attacking small towns on the shore of Ha Long Bay. It was Aug. 5,
1964, and I was at the beach on a school trip, swimming with my
classmates. That was right after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the day
President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his decision to expand the war
throughout Vietnam.

After that day my life, the lives of my parents, brothers and sisters,
the lives of all Vietnamese, were turned upside down. From then on, we
lived under a sky that was almost always ablaze with the roar of jets,
bomb blasts and sirens. Bomb shelters were dug along all the streets
and beneath every house in Hanoi. Electricity and running water were
in short supply. We dimmed the lights at night. Food, clothing and
fuel, paper, books and other necessities of life were rationed, but
there wasn’t enough of anything to meet the needs of the people. There
were long lines outside stores. Children 16 and younger were evacuated
to the countryside, separated from their parents. It was not so
different from the experiences of British children in London in 1940,
but the children of Hanoi endured all of this much longer — from 1964
to 1973 — and our life during wartime was tougher.

My family was originally from Dong Hoi, a small town in central
Vietnam so flower-filled it was called “the Town of Roses.” In 1946,
most of my extended family moved to Nghe An, in North Vietnam, where I
was born in 1952. In 1954, after the Geneva Accords, my parents moved
to Hanoi. In the early days of the bombing, our village, Dong Hoi, was
almost completely leveled; all that remained was the charred wall of
our church and the tower of a water reservoir. Bombs and artillery
from the American Seventh Fleet killed 32 people in my extended family
in 1965 alone.

Still, as far as I can remember, in spite of the death and
destruction, people did not seem demoralized. Contrary to what the
Pentagon expected, the relentless bombing motivated many of us to join
the military. I wanted to sign up in September 1969, a few months
before my 18th birthday. Why? I wanted to fight foreign aggression, to
be an honorable man and to be a good citizen. My parents urged me to
go to college and refused to sign the form to permit me to enlist at
17. But I was determined, and in the end, they gave in. My mother
cried when she signed the papers.

By then the war had already been going on for five years, and the
level of violence was at its peak. In 1969, no one in Hanoi really
believed what the official government propaganda had been telling us
about the war. When I volunteered, I had no illusions about my fate. I
was not brave or fast or especially creative. I was not a warrior. I
knew I had little chance of surviving. Nevertheless, regardless of
whatever happened to me, I was sure that the Vietnamese people would
defeat any aggressor and that we would reunify the country. I didn’t
think we would win a victory like my father’s generation had at Dien
Bien Phu, and I also understood that the Americans were many times
stronger than the French. But I strongly believed, as did most of my
comrades, what President Ho had told us many times — that eventually
the United States would give up and go home.

In January 1970, after three months of boot camp, where we were taught
to use AK-47s, grenade launchers and hand grenades, our unit set off
on the long march down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Central Highlands.
We arrived in Kon Tum in May and were dispersed to different combat

[Marxism] Fwd: The flooded landscape of 21st century capitalism | SocialistWorker.org

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Fred Magdoff interview.

https://socialistworker.org/2017/09/06/the-flooded-landscape-of-capitalism
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[Marxism] Fwd: How Labor Scholars Missed the Trump Revolt - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Labor-Scholars-Missed-the/241049
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[Marxism] Fwd: How Sony, Obama, Seth Rogen and the CIA Secretly Planned to Force Regime Change in North Korea | Alternet

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(Alternet/Graystone, usually a vehicle for Blumenthal and Norton's 
Assadist propaganda, finally publishes a useful article.)


It’s difficult to overstate how reactionary Obama’s policies became. In 
contrast to Bush, and even Trump, Obama flatly rejected the idea of 
negotiating with the North without a prior commitment to 
denuclearization. He also expressed no interest in the DPRK’s offer to 
sign a peace agreement. More disturbingly, he was the first president in 
history to refer to the Korean War, which has been universally 
recognized as a bloody stalemate, as a “victory.” In doing so, Obama 
revived a right-wing trope that was first used in the 1950s and 
resurrected during the Bush years by David Frum and other neocons. So 
from the onset, Obama caused America’s policy toward Korea to take a 
sharp right turn.


The tensions were exacerbated by the covert cyber war Obama launched 
against North Korea to damage and slow its missile program. During the 
Obama years, North Korea tested three more nuclear bombs, and despite 
the cyber war, rapidly expanded its missile abilities. As the situation 
deteriorated, Obama embarked on a series of military exercises with 
South Korea that increased in size and tempo over the course of his 
administration. They included unprecedented overflights by B-52 and 
stealth B1-B bombers as well as training in “decapitation strikes” 
designed to take out Kim and his leadership. All of this led straight to 
the crisis Trump inherited and has only made worse.


But while Trump critics rightly chafe over his reckless allusions to a 
nuclear attack on Korea, it’s often forgotten that Obama himself made 
similar statements, couched in his trademark cool. “We could, obviously, 
destroy North Korea with our arsenals,” Obama told CBS News in April 
2016. A few months later, Daniel Russel, the president’s senior diplomat 
on Asia who had earlier viewed The Interview at Sony’s request, actually 
threatened North Korea's destruction. If Kim gets “an enhanced capacity 
to conduct a nuclear attack,” Russel told defense reporters, he would 
“immediately die.”



full: 
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/how-sony-obama-seth-rogen-and-cia-secretly-planned-force-regime-change-north-korea

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