[Marxism] Threat of Turkish Planned Military Invasion Against Northern Syria: Internationalist Solidarity Needed

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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From: Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists 
Sent: Monday, 24 December 2018 8:48:12 PM


Hello ,
We have published new blog in our website. Alliance Statement on Threat of 
Turkish Planned Military Invasion Against Northern Syria: Internationalist 
Solidarity Needed
Donald Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw 2000 U.S. troops from Syria is a 
green light to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to decimate the Kurds in what remains of 
Rojava in northern Syria. Earlier this year, Turkey invaded the Afrin area with 
the assistance of Syrian reactionary armed opposition groups, leading to …
You may view the latest post at 
https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/alliance-statement-on-threat-of-turkish-planned-military-invasion-against-northern-syria-internationalist-solidarity-needed/


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[Marxism] Have a happy and merry December 25.

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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In just a few hours, the world will pause on the birthday of one of history's 
greatest men, whose teachings continue to benefit the entire human race, let us 
join in toasting the memory of Sir Isaac Newton, and of all the giants on whose 
shoulders he stood.


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


Silicon Valley 'Genius Pill' - Now Available Nationwide
brainnewsspecial.com
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5c21a46b258db246a2c4fst04vuc

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[Marxism] Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem? | The New Republic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I held off on reading this article since the internal life of the DSA 
just doesn't interest me that much but when I saw Adolph Reed 
intervening, I decided to read it:


https://newrepublic.com/article/152789/americas-socialists-race-problem

The gist of it is that the DSA is having trouble attracting people of 
color because it is class reductionist.


Reed jumped into the fray here:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/12/23/which-side-are-you

Reed, of course, is closely connected to Walter Benn Michaels who wrote 
a book titled "The Trouble With Diversity". I think that both of them 
are a throwback to the days of Eugene V. Debs when socialists had little 
interest in independent Black action, if not seeing it as a diversion. 
The CPUSA continued in this tradition, of course, after a brief fling 
with the Black Belt, a problematic policy with some good aspects.


I'll probably try to find time to put in my own two cents although 
neither side in this debate meshes with my own. My take on this owes a 
lot to George Breitman and Bob Desverney who wrote some great stuff in 
the 1960s when Black nationalism was a major force in American politics.

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Re: [Marxism] Declining US military superiority

[DW via Marxism]

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John, you didn't really read what I wrote: "The purpose of the Chinese and
Russian militaries, leaving aside nuclear WMD, is to defend their homelands
and a *limited* regional influence/domination."

I did NOT write what you said I did here: "David Walters cites the lack of
Chinese and Russian military bases outside of their immediate region as
evidence that their military is for self defense purposes only. "only"???
What "only"??? What I wrote still stands: their military deployments and
development internally is to defend their homelands and LIMITED regional
influence *AND* domination. I cited the example of Syria and Crimea as an
example of this. (the latter two do no follow investments). No one,
including me, argues that the Russian intervention in Syria was for self
defense of Russia.

Your citing of the Chinese involvement in the much delayed and hopefully
stymied Canal Project in Nicaragua is...quite open and not hidden. You
write like it's some kind of revelation. It's not a secret in Nicaragua or
anywhere for that matter. The Chinese papers were touting this a few years
ago. This is generally true for all of Chinese overseas STATE investments
that I'm aware of (I haven no idea about non-state Chinese investments or
they carry them out). But you write "As is inevitable, these investments
are also tied in with interference in the domestic politics of the
countries where the investments lie." Really? Do tell. The reason I want to
know is that I would like more exploration of the "no strings attached"
investment policies of the Chinese state (guiding both state and private
enterprises in their overseas investment patterns).

As you noted one of the talked about issues is asset staking and the
Chinese take over of the port in Colombo. This has arisen again under the
still being built port in Pakistan. Chinese investments in Pakistan I
believe are more than ALL the combined investments in Africa and other
parts of Asia. It is a big issue (the South China Morning Post, a
conservative daily of record published in Hong Kong covers this extensively
if you need to know) but it is not like as you write either "the classic
"debt trap" that US finance capital has used so often" .Yeah...no, it's
not. There is absolutley nothing "classic" about what the Chinese are
doing. What US capital does, that is transnational capital, is to demand
the state targeted for the infrastructure project roll back all state
subsidies, cut payments for health care, education, transportation and
anything that could suck up capital for "useless labor". The Imperialists
when selling such debt to developing countries do in fact include asset
forfeiture...so they can then cut it up the assets and sell them to recover
their costs. The Chinese, state nor private, appear to have ever done that
at all. Their investments are not for immediate return...which IS part and
parcel of every Imperialist bank loan ever made, bar none, even under
'favorable terms'. So this is more complex than just placing an
"Imperialist" label next to Chinese investment and expect everyone to
assume, as you clearly do, it's the "same" as traditional Imperialist
investments. It's not, not even close. For that matter, Imperilism doen't
even invest in infastructure anymore though they still demand roll backs in
state owned enterprises, reform of labor codes, public health, etc as I
noted above The Chinese do not do this, John. Why don't they?

Secondly, your breathless "...I've read, the port has very little
commercial potential, so what is the aim of the development of the port?
Isn't it likely that it will be used as a naval base? And we know that
China is advancing its naval
development in general." "likely"? Maybe not at all? One can write anything
I suppose but it is not necessarily logical either. Chinese navel assets
already have right of call at 3 dozens Asia/South Asian/African ports.
Again their only BASE  is in Djibouti. Maybe they will, maybe they wont
demand that this base turn into a navy base for them of the Sri Lankan
gov't. I just don't see a shred of evidence they will because they haven't
anywhere else that I'm aware of.

I think there are many nuances to Chinese State capitalism and they don't
fit neatly into previous cookie cutter molds. I recommend people explore
these nuances.

David
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[Marxism] The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327532667_The_Rule_of_Violence_Subjectivity_Memory_and_Government_in_Syria
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Re: [Marxism] Declining US military superiority

[DW via Marxism]

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I have no issues with the article's main thesis but it's a really
impossible task to do comparisons. The purpose of the Chinese and Russian
militaries, leaving aside nuclear WMD, is to defend their homelands and a
*limited* regional influence/domination.  It is not to protect/police
Imperialist interests internationally. The number of troops each side has
is wholly irrelevant to this question because they are only so good as each
countries ability to project those troops to foreign shores. The Russians
have done in a very narrowly focused area where they can concentrate their
very limited navy and air force power. That is in Syria and, if one wants,
the Crimea. The Chinese have exactly one foreign shores military base, and
that's Djibouti near the outlet of the Suez Canal (around 700 yards from
the US base there it seems).

That the Chinese and Russian have fighters as or more advanced than the US
is also irrelevant as they can't really support an overseas defensive or
preemptive attack on US forces. They simply don't have enough and by enough
I don't mean jets, I mean the logistics to support such an effort.
Conversely in a war with China the US simply has no logistics, to "invade"
mainland Asia. It can really done because the Chinese defensive capability
based on their own land, would be near impossible to overcome.

So we'd have to look at real world scenarios instead of comparing the
military gonads of each state. The only real world conflict I can see
arising is over the Chinese claim to the entire South Chinese Sea (SCS).
The U.S. is legally/technically correct that the Chinese claim...a claim
first elucidated by the Chinese Imperial Court in the 18th or 19th
Centuries I think...is an artificial claim that violates the sovereignty of
every country bordering the sea. The Chinese have no tried to enforce this
notion to my knowledge except rhetorically. No country in the world has
asked the Chinese regime to sale through it with their merchant vessels
(and by this I mean all the bordering countries AND S. Korea and Japan who
use it).

Secondly, the SCS countries are all taking the *opposite* position the
belligerent US is taking. Instead of trying to force the issue, these
nations are *negotiating* with the Chinese over economic and military
limits, etc. But the US does have the strongest navy in the world and
outnumbers the Chinese  in both tonnage and capability by a factor of 10 to
1 or more (the 'number' of ships is about even but that's only true when
you compare small ships of the Chinese to the larger ones the US has). At
any rate, no country in the region, even Japan, really wants the US to
force this issue.

David
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[Marxism] DMZ

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Those who watch as much TV as I do may have seen the commercial DMZ The Land of 
Peace Awaits You.
I haven’t retrieved that commercial, but I have found some relevant materials.
I’m not sure what this tells us, but it is a straw in the wind and tells us 
something about popular sentiment.
ken h

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/ATR/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=2559472 


http://www.kocis.go.kr/eng/webzine/201806/sub04.html 

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[Marxism] The Jonestown We Don’t Know | by Gaiutra Bahadur | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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More than a century later, Jones would claim to have seen in Guyana both 
natural abundance and an invitation to reimagine society. Before 
stamping the People’s Temple acres there with his own name, for years 
previously, during which the mission to grow subsistence crops in a 
self-sustaining socialist commune was an idea without a location, Jones 
had called it the Promised Land. He borrowed this name directly from the 
farm that his role model, Father Divine, the son of a slave, had 
established in upstate New York in the 1930s to feed his communes housed 
in hotels. Jones had sought out and cultivated Divine, a prominent, 
flamboyant, and unorthodox religious leader whose Peace Mission was 
celebrated by some as an idealistic social reform movement and denounced 
by others as an ascetic cult.


https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/12/21/the-jonestown-we-dont-know/
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[Marxism] Declining US military superiority

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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This Washington Post article claims that the US military is no longer the
most powerful in the world, or at least it can be challenged by the Chinese
and Russian militaries. The article is significant for a couple of reasons:

First, it shows that the US strategists are seriously thinking about a
possible war with China and/or Russia.

Second, the article makes a convincing-sounding case as far as the relative
decline in the US military. It seems that that decline is at least in part
due to the economic deterioration of the US, which can no longer afford to
spend the money "needed" without sacrificing by making major cuts in social
security - something that no politician has dared to do so far.

John Reimann

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/wake-up-americas-military-isnt-invincible/2018/12/23/bf0698e2-054c-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?utm_term=.4c67382ea3a5

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*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] Imperial Interventions, Withdrawal from Syria and Self-Determination

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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If you listen to what a certain segment of the left has to say, Assad is 
the only legitimate leader of an undivided Syria and therefore the Kurds 
should be seen as terrorist separatists who should either surrender or 
be crushed. The fact that they are an oppressed people with a right to 
self-determination and who are trying to implement leftist ideals on the 
ground instead of only talking about them on the internet seems to 
matter little to them. Their logic seems to be: the US invaded Assad’s 
Syria; Assad has a right to defend himself and his country; the YPG 
allied itself with the US; the YPG is the enemy. This is a kind of knee 
jerk anti-imperialism that casts aside any sense of human decency, and 
presumably also of irony, in that they want to defend the oppressed by 
opposing the Empire that right now is the only thing standing between 
the oppressed and carnage. They seem to participating in a who’s more 
anti-imperialist game where anyone who doesn’t immediately oppose US 
presence anywhere automatically loses their leftist credentials.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/24/imperial-interventions-withdrawal-from-syria-and-self-determination/
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[Marxism] Alexandria The Millennial

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Why not call this the Democrat New Deal instead of the Green New Deal? 
Well, because no one likes the Democrats. Ocasio-Cortez gets a million 
times more coverage than her corporate counterparts precisely because 
the mainstream media wants to convince us that there is a solution 
inside the Democratic Party. And she is better. But not replicable under 
our corporate duopoly system. And not radical enough to scare anyone as 
a singular leader.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/24/alexandria-the-millennial/
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[Marxism] Exploitation and Expropriation, or Why Capitalism Must be Attacked with Equal Force on Every Front

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/24/exploitation-and-expropriation-or-why-capitalism-must-be-attacked-with-equal-force-on-every-front/
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[Marxism] The Optimistic Activists for a Green New Deal: Inside the Youth-Led Singing Sunrise Movement

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The New Yorker, December 23, 2018
The Optimistic Activists for a Green New Deal: Inside the Youth-Led 
Singing Sunrise Movement

By Emily Witt

Sunrise, founded a year and a half ago by a dozen or so 
twentysomethings, has established itself as the dominant influence on 
the environmental policy of the Democrat’s young, progressive 
wing.Photograph by Michael Brochstein / SOPA / Getty
On a Sunday in mid-December, some eight hundred young people filled the 
pews and the aisles of Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. 
They had trickled in from all over the country, in vans and buses, 
carrying backpacks and sleeping bags, some of them college students and 
others still in high school. They belonged to an environmental movement 
called Sunrise, and they had come to the capital to pressure their 
congressional representatives on the issue of climate change. The next 
day would be one of visits and protests, where the young people planned 
to lobby the incoming Democratic majority to begin work on a Green New 
Deal. The plan they hope to see adopted—to make the United States 
economy carbon neutral—would be nothing less than a total overhaul of 
our national infrastructure.


Sunrise, founded a year and a half ago by a dozen or so 
twentysomethings, began its campaign for the Green New Deal last month, 
when two hundred activists occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office a week after 
the midterm elections. The movement has allied with the incoming 
congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who joined them outside Pelosi’s 
office (and whose run for Congress was inspired, in part, by her 
participation in the anti-pipeline protests at Standing Rock), and 
Justice Democrats, the progressive campaign incubator started by former 
staffers of Bernie Sanders. As the Republican-led government has forced 
more established environmental organizations into defensive positions, 
Sunrise has established itself as the dominant influence on the 
environmental policy of the Democratic Party’s young, progressive wing.


Just as the March for Our Lives has changed gun-control activism from a 
movement of grieving parents to one led by students, Sunrise is part of 
a generational shift in the environmental movement. For years, rhetoric 
about climate change has invoked the future generations who will have to 
live with the flooding, storms, droughts, diseases, and food shortages 
of a warmer world. The young people of Sunrise are telling lawmakers 
that the future is here: they are the children in question, and the 
consequences of climate change are affecting them now. And, like other 
activist movements of their generation, they see their cause as 
inseparable from the broader issues of economic and social inequality. 
In a proposal that Ocasio-Cortez has circulated in Congress, she 
describes the Green New Deal as “a historic opportunity to virtually 
eliminate poverty in the United States.”


Inside Luther Place Memorial Church, cheers erupted as activists 
unfurled a yellow and black “green new deal now” banner from the 
balcony. The crowd hushed as the first speaker, Varshini Prakash, came 
to the microphone. Prakash, who is five feet tall and has long curly 
hair, is one of Sunrise’s co-founders. She later told me that a 
highlight of her activism career was when she participated in a musical 
disruption of a Trump Administration panel at the United Nations climate 
conference in Bonn, in 2017, and a story about it trended on Reddit.


“We’re going to kick things off the way we always do,” Prakash said, 
“raising our voices in unison in song.” Part of what makes the Sunrise 
Movement’s activists seem so optimistic is that they conduct most of 
their protests while singing. Their ranks did not conform to the dour 
stereotype of an environmental movement composed of 
white-upper-middle-class Appalachian Mountain Club members. I spoke to 
Sunrise members whose families had roots in India, Iran, Croatia, 
Mexico, and working-class neighborhoods in American cities. There were 
some students in Carhartts and beanies, who looked like they might go 
camping, but one young person standing near me wore a Sisters 
sweatshirt, the brand started by the YouTube makeup artist James 
Charles, who is the first male spokesperson for CoverGirl. Sunrise’s 
principles include: “We are Americans from all walks of life,” “We are 
nonviolent in word and deed,” and “We shine bright.” The dominant 
culture is cheerfulness.


After leading the group in a song called “We’re Going to Rise Up,” 
Prakash introduced herself. She is from a town outside of Boston, but 
her grandparents are from southern India, and she told the story of a 

[Marxism] Hollywood's Obsession with Women of Color as "the Help" | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Putting "Roma" in context.

https://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2018/12/hollywoods-obsession-with-women-of.html
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[Marxism] YPG leader trusted US imperialism

[RKOB via Marxism]

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I think this quote from an interview with the YPG/SDF military leader 
tells us a lot about the love affair between the YPG and the U.S. as 
well as about the total trust the "leftist" YPG put in U.S. imperialism. 
(which, in turn, tells us also a lot about those leftists who put trust 
in the YPG!)


"The voice of Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish commander of the Syrian 
Democratic Forces militia, is tight and controlled as he describes 
President’s Trump’s decision 
 
to withdraw U.S. troops from the country and leave America’s allies to 
their fate.


“This was something we never expected,” he said somberly in a telephone 
interview Saturday night from his command headquarters in northeast 
Syria. “Honestly, until now, everything the Americans told us, they 
fulfilled, and the same thing for us. . . . So we were surprised and 
confused. We were not ready for a decision like this.”


*What Trump’s Syria decision means on the front lines of the fight 
against the Islamic State*


By David Ignatius 
Columnist 
December 23 2018, 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/what-trumps-syria-decision-means-on-the-front-lines-of-the-fight-against-the-islamic-state/2018/12/23/f4735f9c-06ff-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html?utm_term=.2864448008c6


--
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
ak...@rkob.net
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314



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