Re: [Marxism] Compulsory Veils? Half of Iranians Say ‘No’ to Pillar of Revolution

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Feb 5, 2018, at 7:39 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> The office of Iran’s president on Sunday charged into the middle of one of 
> the most contentious debates over the character of the Islamic Republic, 
> suddenly releasing a three-year-old report showing that nearly half of 
> Iranians wanted an end to the requirement that women cover their heads in 
> public.


Well at least now we know where the missing $800 million from the Defense 
Logistics Agency ended up: they’ve been bribing 49.8% of Iranians to pretend to 
support the separation of church and state as part of their latest 
regime-change operation. It’s all going according to plan. And it only cost us 
$20 a head — quite a bargain as regime change operations go.

More seriously: I can hardly wait to see how the “anti-imperialist” 
islamophobes are going to try to spin their way out of this one.
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[Marxism] Compulsory Veils? Half of Iranians Say ‘No’ to Pillar of Revolution

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Feb. 5, 2018
Compulsory Veils? Half of Iranians Say ‘No’ to Pillar of Revolution
By THOMAS ERDBRINK

The office of Iran’s president on Sunday charged into the middle of one 
of the most contentious debates over the character of the Islamic 
Republic, suddenly releasing a three-year-old report showing that nearly 
half of Iranians wanted an end to the requirement that women cover their 
heads in public.


The report’s release comes as dozens of women in recent weeks have 
protested in public against being forced to wear the veil, a symbol of 
Iran’s revolution as much as it is deemed a religious requirement.


The decision to release the report — which found that 49.8 percent of 
Iranians, both women and men, consider the Islamic veil a private matter 
and think the government should have no say in it — appears to pit 
President Hassan Rouhani directly against Iran’s hard-line judiciary, 
which on Friday said that 29 people had been detained in connection with 
the protests. They have called the demonstrations “childish,” insist 
that the large majority of Iranians support Islamic veiling and have 
called for harsher measures against those protesting the veil.


At least as striking as the report’s findings was the timing of its 
release. The study is from 2014, and publishing it now suggests that the 
president saw this as a moment to challenge the hard-liners, who hold 
ultimate power, about such a symbolically potent issue.


Observers said the release of the report, by one of Mr. Rouhani’s 
closest advisers, was probably a politically calculated decision by the 
president, an Islamic cleric, to bolster support for social reforms and 
to signal to the authorities to temper their response to the veil protests.


“The government wants to show that any crackdown against the veil is 
illegal and not democratic,” said Fazel Meybodi, a reformist cleric from 
the city of Qom. “Anyway, crackdowns and punishment are not a part of 
Islam.”


Mr. Rouhani, a moderate compared to Iran’s hard-liners, decades ago 
prided himself on having been the one responsible for introducing the 
law on the compulsory Islamic veil. But since his election as president 
in 2013, and continuing after his re-election last year, he has called 
for more freedoms for Iranians.


“Mr. President wants to be popular, and his team knows that an 
increasing number of women do not like the Islamic code of dress,” said 
Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the government. “They 
want to woo the women and make sure the popularity of the president does 
not diminish even further.”


Mr. Rouhani’s adviser who released the report, Hesameddin Ashna, heads 
the Center for Strategic Studies, a government research group that in 
2014 conducted a nationwide survey of public opinion about the 
compulsory Islamic veil.


One of the women who protested on the street last week by taking off her 
scarf, and who requested anonymity out of fear of being arrested, said 
that the report was helpful, but that it did not go far enough. Women 
are demanding full freedom, the 28-year-old woman said, adding that the 
report showed that many people agreed with that view.


This past week, dozens of women made the same symbolic gesture and 
shared their actions on social media: taking off their head scarves in 
public and waving them on a stick. They were emulating a young woman who 
had climbed onto a utility box on Dec. 27, removed her scarf and was 
subsequently arrested. Activists say she has since been released, but 
she still has not resurfaced in public.


The protests, while small in number, are nevertheless significant as a 
rare public sign that dissatisfaction with certain Islamic laws 
governing personal conduct may have reached a tipping point in Iran.


The first protest in December took place on a Wednesday and seemed 
connected to the White Wednesday campaign, an initiative by Masih 
Alinejad, an exiled Iranian journalist and activist living in the United 
States. Ms. Alinejad has reached out to Iranian women on 
Persian-language satellite television, through social media and through 
a website she runs called My Stealthy Freedom. On the website, women 
post images of themselves without head scarves, demanding an end to the 
compulsory head scarf law.


The Islamic head scarf, or hijab, is seen by Iranian ideologues as a 
pillar of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The law regarding the scarf has 
been enforced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and a head scarf is 
obligatory for every woman in the country, even tourists and visiting 
foreign dignitaries.


Although women are subject to broader laws on matters like 

[Marxism] Fwd: Fact-checking the latest propaganda rolling off the Assadist assembly-line | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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One of the most off-putting things about Assadist propaganda is that it 
advertises itself as a corrective to the “mainstream media” even as its 
purveyors adopt the journalistic norms of Judith Miller. What explains 
the cavalier attitude toward the truth? To a large extent, it is a 
function of deep-seated Islamophobia that is rooted in 9/11. Back then, 
Christopher Hitchens earned the contempt for most of us on the left for 
his close ties to the Bush administration. Even if it was becoming 
obvious that the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was based on a 
mountain of lies, Hitchens gave the Bush administration a free pass 
because he saw al-Qaeda as the greatest threat to “Western Civilization” 
since Adolph Hitler.


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2018/02/05/fact-checking-the-latest-propaganda-rolling-off-the-assadist-assembly-line/

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[Marxism] [UCE] Re: [Critical-Syria] Leaders of Turkish Medical Association jailed for antiwar stance

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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turns out they were released today (but hundreds remain in jail).

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 1:47 PM, Andrew Pollack  wrote:

> that's great, thanks
>
> On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 1:20 PM, Senay Ozden  wrote:
>
>> Actually, there were 8 of them. They got released today.
>>
>> Andrew Pollack  şunları yazdı (5 Şub 2018 21:12):
>>
>> The new International Viewpoint article "Class war ın tıme of war"
>> describes how Erdogan is using his aggressive war to try to crush a wave of
>> labor militancy. In the article there is also mention of the recent
>> detention of the heads of the Turkish Medical Association for opposing
>> Erdogan's war.
>>
>> Quotes from TMA leaders, and their antiwar statement, are at links 2 and
>> 3 below.
>>
>> The World Medical Association has protested the arrests, hopefully public
>> health workers and activists can speak out.
>>
>> 1. http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article5360
>>
>> 2. https://bianet.org/english/militarism/193827-statement-by-
>> world-medical-association-for-turkish-medical-association
>>
>> 3. http://bianet.org/english/human-rights/194017-doctors-protes
>> t-detentions-of-turkish-medical-association-members
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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>>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Patrick Bond wrote: David's just replied to the latest version of the 
critique by John Smith, published recently in the Review of African 
Political Economy:

http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

I’m not convinced. Harvey claims that Smith’s GPS is cockeyed and that 
is wrong to interpret the reversal of the East-to-West drain as the same 
as South-to-North. He says that for him the East means the block 
consisting of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. And he 
says that “wealth has moved from West to East.”


It is of course true that this East has grown much wealthier, and has 
gained relatively in comparison to the rest of the world. But that is 
not exactly what he said in his commentary that Smith quoted and in 
previous works – namely, that the "flow of value" had shifted and has 
largely been reversed, so that the East is now "draining" value from the 
West. There is a difference between the amount of wealth in a region and 
which way the wealth flows.


Moreover, as to East vs South, in a 2009 article on Socialist Project 
(and the next year in The Enigma of Capital), Harvey wrote that this 
unprecedented shift "has reversed the long-standing drain of wealth from 
East, Southeast and South Asia to Europe and North America that had been 
occurring since the eighteenth century." Here, with Southeast and South 
Asia included, it appears that the reverse drain now goes not just to 
China, Japan and the "Tigers" but also to poorer countries like India, 
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and 
Indonesia.


Harvey supplies no figures, but I think it hard to believe that the new 
wealth in Harvey's East is derived from draining value from the West. 
(All the harder to believe this of Cambodia and Bangladesh!) Where, for 
example, does China's growth and wealth come from? Above all, from the 
super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of *Chinese* workers, many of 
them migrants driven economically out of their rural homes to the cities 
where they live and labor under miserable conditions (remember the 
Foxconn suicides) with wages one-tenth or less of those in the West.


Yes, China and Japan own lots of US debt. But the rate of return they 
get on it is close to zero, as Larry Summers has gloated. More 
generally, China's overseas investment income has been in the red for years.


It is an extremely dubious proposition that the flows of centuries have 
reversed direction and that the East in Harvey’s terms is draining value 
from the West – and even more dubious that, as he implied previously, 
that the South is draining value from the North. I can believe that the 
East, like the West, is draining value from the South. But that is not 
what Harvey’s GPS tells us.


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[Marxism] how a US-backed university in Vietnam unleashed old demons

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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In the audience, Ton Nu Thi Ninh, whose 20-year diplomatic career included
a post as Vietnam’s ambassador to the European Union, was aghast. On
February 25, 1969, Kerrey led an operation in the Mekong Delta village of
Thanh Phong, aiming to kill local Viet Cong leaders.

His Navy team reported they had killed 21 Viet Cong, which earned Kerrey a
Bronze Star; in fact, at least 20 women, children and elderly men lay dead
in the village. Not a single Viet Cong fighter was killed. The deaths were
unknown until 2001, when the *New York Times Magazine*

 and “60 Minutes II”
 published an
account of the events. At the time, some, including the Vietnamese
government, called for Kerrey to be charged with war crimes. He apologized,
and the outcry subsided, as American commentators, including then-Senator
John Kerry, largely concluded that Bob Kerrey himself was a victim of an
unjust war. As a high-level Vietnamese official, Ninh had met Kerrey before
and says she welcomed his involvement in education initiatives. But she was
shocked that he had accepted a top leadership position at a university
meant to symbolize newly warm ties between Vietnam and America.

“How can those closely involved in this choice be so insensitive?” Ninh
said in an interview in January. “We set the past aside and we move
forward. We want to make friends, but not everything goes.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/48289-how-a-us-backed-university-in-vietnam-unleashed-old-demons
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Whole Foods Becomes Amazon Hell Foods as Employees, Managers Quit, Cry on the Job....and These People Want to Run Your Healthcare? | naked capitalism

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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By coincidence today's Times has an article on Amazon's investing strategy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/technology/amazon-asked-for-patience-remarkably-wall-street-complied.html?ref=todayspaper

On the face of it Amazon's interest in plowing profits into corporate
development rather than dividends makes sense in corporate terms, and has
historical precedent.

On the other hand, as explained in Nick Srnicek's "Platform Capitalism,"
such development won't exempt Amazon et al. from the pressures of
capitalist competition.

P.S. I'm glad the article mentions cloud computing, the focus of Amazon Web
Services. For all the coverage of consumer purchasing, AWS is more
significant for Amazon's desire to be a dominant player in the economy.
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/09/03 01:00 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/


David's just replied to the latest version of the critique by John 
Smith, published recently in the Review of African Political Economy:


http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

Realities on the Ground: David Harvey replies to John Smith

John Smith is lost in the desert and dying for water. His trusty GPS 
system tells him there is fresh water ten miles to the East. Since he 
believes ‘for East to West’ one should ‘read South to North,’ he heads 
off to the South never to be seen again. This is alas the quality of the 
argument he makes against me.


The East whereof I speak when I comment that wealth has moved from West 
to East in recent times, is constituted by China, now the second largest 
economy in the world (if Europe is not considered as one economy) 
followed by Japan as the third largest economy. Add in South Korea, 
Taiwan and (with a bit of geographical license) Singapore and you have a 
power block in the global economy (once referred to as the ‘flying 
geese’ model of capitalist development) that now accounts for roughly a 
third of total global GDP (compared to North America that now accounts 
for just over a quarter).  If we look back at the world as it was 
ordered in, say, 1960, then the astonishing rise of East Asia as a power 
center of global capital accumulation will be blindingly obvious.


The Chinese and the Japanese now own large chunks of a spiraling US 
government debt. There has also been an interesting sequence of each 
national economy in East Asia taking its turn in searching out a spatial 
fix for the massive amounts of surplus capital being accumulated within 
their borders.  Japan began capital export in the late 1960s, South 
Korea in the late 1970s, Taiwan in the early 1980s.  A lot of that 
investment went to North America and Europe.


Now it is China’s turn.  A map of Chinese foreign investment in 2000 was 
almost totally empty.  Now a flood of it is passing not only along the 
‘One Belt One Road’ through Central Asia into Europe, but also 
throughout East Africa in particular and into Latin America (Ecuador has 
more than half its foreign direct investment from China).  When China 
invited leaders from around the world to attend a One Belt One Road 
conference in May of 2017, more than forty world leaders came to listen 
to President Xi enunciate what many there saw as the initiation of a new 
world order in which China would be a (if not the) hegemonic power.  
Does this mean China is the new imperialist power?


There are interesting micro-features to this scenario.  When we read 
accounts of awful super-exploitative conditions in manufacturing in the 
global South it often transpires that it is Taiwanese or South Korean 
firms that are involved even as the final product finds its way to 
Europe or the United States.  Chinese thirst for minerals and 
agricultural commodities (soy beans in particular) means that Chinese 
firms are also at the center of an extractivism that is wrecking the 
landscape all around the world (look at Latin America).  A cursory look 
at land grabs all across Africa shows Chinese companies and wealth funds 
are way ahead of everyone else in their acquisitions. The two largest 
mineral companies operating in Zambia’s copper belt are Indian and Chinese.


So, what does the fixed, rigid theory of imperialism to which John Smith 
appeals have to say about all of this?


According to John Smith I failed to take up the question of imperialism 
in The Limits to Capital.  I mentioned it only once, he says.  The index 
records some 24 mentions and the last chapter is entitled “the 
dialectics of imperialism.” It is perfectly true that I there found the 
traditional conception of imperialism derived from Lenin (and 
subsequently set in stone by the likes of John Smith) inadequate to 
describe the complex spatial, interterritorial and place-specific forms 
of production, realization and distribution that were going on around 
the world.


In this I was later intrigued to find a fellow spirit in Giovanni 
Arrighi who in The Geometry of Imperialism (written around the same 
time) abandons the concept of imperialism (or for that matter the rigid 
geography of core and periphery set out in world systems theory) in 
favor of a more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within 
the world system.  Neither of us deny that value produced in one place 
ends up being appropriated somewhere else and there is a degree of 
viciousness in all of this that is 

[Marxism] Uber, the “Metropocalypse,” and Economic Inequality in D.C.

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Public transit infrastructure in Washington, D.C. is crumbling. Metro and
bus services have been cut. Fares have gone up. And, safety remains a
problem. After 40 years of deferred maintenance, poor management, and the
lack of decent, long-term funding, the Metro system needs $1.4 billion
worth of repairs, and it must close a $290 million budget gap just to
continue basic operations. Some call this the “metropocalypse
.”

Private taxi services haven’t been much better. It’s often hard to get a
cab, especially for people of color or people who live outside of the
wealthy, White areas of the city. Racial prejudice among the mostly
immigrant taxi drivers means that Black residents are regularly refused
service

.

In light of these transit problems, Uber might seem like an obvious win for
D.C. Ridesharing services are cheap for riders, require no significant
public investment, and limit some of the discrimination that has made
getting a taxi so difficult for so many people. Our research

 shows otherwise. Indeed, Uber could undermine the very thing city
officials are working hard to address: economic inequality.
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/02/05/uber-the-metropocalypse-and-economic-inequality-in-d-c/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Signs Of Economic Trouble Ahead | Reports from the Economic Front

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Marty Hart-Landsberg

https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/signs-of-economic-trouble-ahead/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Frightening Far-Right Militia That’s Marching in Ukraine’s Streets, Promising to Bring ‘Order’

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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So a burgeoning fascist movement in Ukraine share's the separatist 
opposition to the EU.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-frightening-far-right-militia-thats-marching-in-ukraines-streets-promising-to-bring-order?ref=home
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