[Marxism] The Persisting Relevance of Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” - Los Angeles Review of Books

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-persisting-relevance-of-walter-rodneys-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/
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[Marxism] The Middle East Is Facing Years, If Not Decades, of Turmoil

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Gilbert Achcar interview.

https://www.fairobserver.com/region/middle_east_north_africa/interview-professor-gilbert-achcar-middle-east-politics-security-hope-16512/
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[Marxism] Sudan after Bashir

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https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/april/sudan-after-bashir
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[Marxism] Adam Shatz · Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel · LRB 18 April 2019

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https://www.lrb.co.uk/2019/04/18/adam-shatz/trumps-america-netanyahus-israel
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[Marxism] Claudia Andujar: Witness to the Yanomami’s Last Struggle | by Alma Guillermoprieto | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/17/claudia-andujar-witness-to-the-yanomamis-last-struggle/
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[Marxism] Serengeti on the Seine

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NY Review of Books, MAY 9, 2019 ISSUE
Serengeti on the Seine
Natalie Angier

Europe: A Natural History
by Tim Flannery, with Luigi Boitani
Atlantic Monthly, 357 pp., $27.00

Alytes obstetricans, the common midwife toad, may be as small as a bar 
of hotel soap with skin as drab as leaf litter, yet its life story is, 
quite simply, one for the ages. The job that lends the toads their 
informal name is done by the male. Come breeding season, a female toad 
will solicit the services of a male, who mounts her from behind, 
gripping her torso with his front legs while angling his rear toes to 
stimulate her genitals. A few minutes pass, he gives her midriff a firm 
squeeze, and out pops the “baby”: a glistening mass of toad eggs, linked 
together like pearls on a string, which the male promptly fertilizes 
with a shot of sperm. As the female hops away—her task is 
through—midwife becomes nursemaid: the male carefully untangles the 
inseminated strands of eggs and wraps them around his body. He will 
carry this cargo everywhere for the next month or two, cleaning and 
hydrating the eggs until they’re ready to hatch. Yes, he’s a model 
modern father.


Alytes is also more European than a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. As Tim 
Flannery explains in Europe: A Natural History, his deeply satisfying 
and splendidly written survey of the geological, zoological, 
climatological, and biophilosophical roots of that heavyweight set of 
coordinates we call Europe, midwife toads are among the only animals 
that survive from the dawn of the European project 100 million years 
ago. That is when the European subcontinent, then a tropical 
archipelago, began to consolidate and take the shape it more or less has 
today, and when Europe as a biologically distinct landscape emerged.


It was the last phase of the age of the dinosaurs, and Europe certainly 
had its share of fantastic giants. In 2002 researchers discovered in the 
Transylvania region of Romania what may have been the world’s largest 
pterodactyl. Hatzegopteryx had enormous, leathery wings that could 
enfold it like Dracula’s cloak or open to a thirty-foot span—about as 
long as a London bus—and a nine-foot head equipped with a dagger-like 
beak, perfect for spearing the smaller dinosaurs on which it preyed. 
Ammonite mollusks with spiraling opalescent shells the size of truck 
tires swam in the tropical waters off Europe, while in the north vast 
sheets of planktonic algae called coccolithophores bobbed in the waves, 
their skeletons destined to end up as the large chalk deposits found in 
Belgium, France, and, most famously, the white cliffs of Dover.


Nearly all of the “core fauna” from Europe’s infancy have long since 
gone extinct, but not the midwife toads. “More venerable and more 
distinctly European than any other creatures, the alytids are living 
fossils that should be considered nature’s nobility,” Flannery writes. 
They are “as precious as the platypus and lungfish.” And if the name 
“midwife toad” has a faintly literary feel to it, evoking an image of a 
beloved Victorian children’s book, so do other creatures in Flannery’s 
European bestiary. We learn about true moles, sleekly pelted mammals 
with tiny eyes, tiny ears, and large claws that spend most of their 
lives underground. Members of the Talpidae family are now found 
scattered throughout the world, but recent research suggests that the 
mole first evolved in Europe—appropriate enough for the star of The Wind 
in the Willows. Europe’s most ancient mammalian group turns out to be 
the dormice, which are not mice but rather small, arboreal rodents with 
furry tails that episodically hibernate: no wonder Lewis Carroll’s 
tea-partying dormouse was a chronic narcoleptic. Literary and biological 
archetypes at times fortuitously intertwine.


But what exactly is Europe, and who or what counts as European? Flannery 
realizes that the definitional task is “a slippery undertaking.” After 
all, contemporary Europe is not a distinct continent but “an appendix—an 
island-ringed peninsula projecting into the Atlantic from the western 
end of Eurasia.” Flannery finds unity in geology: for his purposes, 
“Europe is best defined by the history of its rocks.” Similar underlying 
rock formations link Ireland in the west to the Caucasus region in the 
east, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the north to Syria and 
Gibraltar in the south. So defined, Flannery writes, “Turkey is part of 
Europe, but Israel is not; the rocks of Turkey share a common history 
with the rest of Europe, while Israel’s rocks originate in Africa.”


Of course, there’s also the more amorphous condition of feeling like a 

[Marxism] Nitrogen Crisis: A neglected threat Earth's life support systems

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https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/04/18/nitrogen-crisis-a-neglected-threat-earths-life-support-systems/
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[Marxism] Pete Buttigieg is the Democrats' flavour of the month. Just don't ask what he stands for | Nathan Robinson | Opinion | The Guardian

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/16/pete-buttigieg-democrats-flavour-month
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[Marxism] The Mueller Report Is an Impeachment Referral - The Atlantic

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/mueller-report-impeachment-referral/587509/
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Re: [Marxism] SWV on Earth Day 2019 and trends in environmental movement

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Thanks for your comment on the SWV leaflet, Patrick. 
It's important to have consultation on what's going on in 
the movement. As to Seattle Workers' Voice and DWV, we 
support the struggle for climate justice as an important 
part of the overall environmental struggle.  Both in Seattle 
and Detroit, we have raised the issue of environmental 
racism repeatedly. This can be seen by looking for 
"environmental racism" in the search engine on the Communist 
Voice Organization website. And for example, the 
Detroit/Seattle Workers Voice mailing list has been covering 
the struggle against the expansion of the toxic waste 
facility deceptively called "US Ecology" in Detroit, which 
is a fight against environmental racism as well as against 
poisoning in general. 

That said, I would be happy to know more about the 
current state of the climate justice movement. We see what 
it's doing in the Detroit and Seattle areas, but I would be 
eager to hear your description of its activities elsewhere 
and of its overall direction. The SWV article didn't 
describe the militant section of the environmental movement; 
a short article can only deal with so much. Instead it 
focused on showing not just the necessity, but the 
possibility, of extending the relationship of the 
environmental movement to the working masses. Elsewhere we 
have talked about the militant section of the movement, and 
what its present limitations are. The climate justice 
movement contains many militant groups, is involved in many 
struggles,  has more criticism of market measures than most 
other sections of the movement, but it's not the whole 
militant movement, and it has limitations in its standpoint. 

With respect to Earth Day activities in Seattle this 
year, the climate justice groups didn't seem that 
interested. Some years ago, various climate justice groups 
in Seattle were much more visible in the general 
environmental movement. But since then some political groups 
that had been excited about climate justice, seem to have 
abandoned it, while Got Green Seattle focuses simply on 
community organizing on various fronts. Got Green, for 
example, is having its annual Green-A-Thon close to Earth 
Day, but this event is solely to ask people to promote or 
contribute to community organizing. Got Green also is taking 
part in a protest in the Washington state capital of Olympia 
against Governor Inslee's cap and trade proposal, but that 
action is barely mentioned on its website. Thus, with regard 
to Earth Day, the events organized by Extinction Rebellion 
stood out.

Environmental racism is also a major issue in Detroit 
and Southeast Michigan. The poisoning of Flint is 
well-known, but there are many issues in Detroit as well. 
But while there are many groups concerned with climate 
justice and environmental racism, they are connected to 
different political or activist trends, and don't form a 
unified climate justice movement. The different groups are 
involved in different spheres of community organizing, and 
different struggles. We have carried material about some of 
these struggles in the D/SWV list.

But to help strengthen these struggles, there is the 
need to develop a conscious alternative to establishment 
environmentalism. Naomi Klein talked about the treacherous 
role of "Big Green" in her book "This Changes Everything", 
albeit a bit ambiguously; this was a very important part of 
the book, although I don't know if she still uses this 
phrase.  The denunciation of "false solutions" by various 
climate justice groups is also important, but the issue 
eventually arises of what lies behind them, and this is 
connected to who will fight against them. I don't think that 
denigrating the phrase "climate action" is very helpful or 
understandable; there is always going to be a fight within 
the environmental movement between different standpoints. 
This difference occurs even within the struggle for climate 
justice, while the clash with establishment environmentalism 
will become even sharper in the future. The militant 
movement, if it is to grow and become a consistent 
opposition to establishment environmentalism, is going to 
have to take this into account. It needs to discuss this 
with activists.

But look what happens at present. In 2017,  the Climate 
Justice Alliance and the Indigenous Environmental Network 
put out a valuable 32-page pamphlet, "Carbon pricing: A 
Critical Perspective for Community Resistance/Building 
Solidarity Against the Threat of Linking Carbon Markets" 
(October, 2017). It vigorously and vehemently denounced 
market measures, including the carbon tax. At one time, the 
climate 

[Marxism] Billionaires face 'yellow vest' scorn over Notre-Dame pledges

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/17/billionaires-face-yellow-vest-scorn-cathedral-pledges/
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[Marxism] Did the Anthropocene start in 1950 or 12,000 years ago?

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“If you look at the main parameters of the Earth-system metabolism, then …
things only began to change sharply and dramatically with
industrialization,” he told me. He believes that the most significant event
in humanity’s life on the planet is the Great Acceleration
,
the period of rapid global industrialization that followed the Second World
War. As factories and cars spread across the planet, as the United States
and U.S.S.R. prepared for the Cold War, carbon pollution soared. So too did
methane pollution, the number of extinctions and invasive species, the
degree of surface-level radiation, the quantity of plastic in the ocean,
and the amount of rock and soil moved around the planet."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/great-debate-over-when-anthropocene-started/587194/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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[Marxism] 'I'm Fucked, ' And Other Damning Revelations From The Mueller Report | HuffPost

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mueller-report-does-not-exonerate-trump_n_5cb619a6e4b098b9a2db6c69
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[Marxism] Life or death | Richard Seymour on Patreon

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All disagreements aside, Extinction Rebellion is right to try to shut 
down the centre of London. It's "Life or Death", as they say. There is 
no middle ground. Either we drastically transform our metabolic 
relationship with the planet, or we prepare our extinction.


https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-or-death-26191840
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[Marxism] Inequality Fuels Rage of ‘Yellow Vests’ in Equality-Obsessed France

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NY Times, April 18, 2019
Inequality Fuels Rage of ‘Yellow Vests’ in Equality-Obsessed France
By Peter S. Goodman

BOURGES, France — In a world seething with anger over the widening gap 
between the rich and everyone else, France stands out as a country 
elaborately engineered to protect social peace.


It has less economic inequality than the United States, Canada and 
Britain, according to the World Bank. Its people enjoy comprehensive 
health care under a national insurance program. Only Denmark, Belgium 
and Sweden spend a larger percentage of their economies on social 
welfare programs for working-age citizens, according to an analysis by 
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.


Even so, France is consumed by a ferocious and sustained outpouring of 
social unrest. The tumultuous, intermittently violent protests of the 
so-called Yellow Vest movement have shaken the country since they began 
in November, intensifying in recent weeks.


President Emmanuel Macron had been preparing to address the nation last 
Monday to detail new measures in response to the demonstrations. But as 
the Notre-Dame cathedral went up in flames that evening, Mr. Macron 
scrapped his address, and used the devastation of a beloved and iconic 
monument to call for national unity.


It may be a hard sell. The anger drawing people to the barricades has 
been fueled by a sense that the national interest has long been 
undermined by Mr. Macron’s own economic class, the globe-trotting 
financiers who have turned France into a sanctuary for the rich. That 
grievance was amplified by concerns that France’s wealthiest would be 
able to benefit from tax breaks for their sizable donations to rebuild 
the cathedral.


In part, the anger drawing people to the barricades reflects forces at 
work in much of the developed world, as the bounty of economic expansion 
flows disproportionately to the wealthy. But the demonstrations have 
also drawn fuel from more narrowly French laments: The traditionally 
generous social welfare system is increasingly neglecting key slices of 
the populace, especially young people, tripping deep-seated notions 
about fairness that date back to the French Revolution.


“The government promotes equality very strongly,” says Louis Maurin, 
director of French Inequality Watch, a research institution in the city 
of Tours. “In every school in France, it’s written on the walls: 
liberté, égalité, fraternité. Yet everyone thinks people are gaming the 
tax system. The feeling of being cheated can make you really angry.”


Though France may seem a bastion of egalitarianism compared with 
conspicuously unequal societies like the United States, it has seen a 
widening of the gap separating the affluent from the rest of the nation. 
Average incomes for the richest 1 percent of French households doubled 
between 1983 and 2015, while the bottom 99 percent saw incomes rise by 
only one-fourth, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty.


Beneath these broad indicators, France is cleaved by profound forms of 
inequality: between urban and rural communities; full-time employees and 
temporary workers; graduates of prestigious universities and the 
plebeian masses. And not least, between retirees, who maintain the 
divine right of pensions, and younger people excluded from social 
welfare programs.


The Yellow Vests reverberate as a primal scream from working-class 
France at the tax-avoiding, wealth-hogging Parisian glitterati enabled 
by a government now headed by one of its own, Mr. Macron, a former 
investment banker. But the movement is also consumed with a historical 
French aspiration: protecting and even expanding national welfare 
programs in the face of worries over mounting debts and stagnant 
economic growth.


Such tensions were already active when Mr. Macron assumed the presidency 
two years ago.


He prescribed reforms aimed at rejuvenating the economy. In his telling, 
outdated strictures on business and institutionalized hostility toward 
the wealthy hindered entrepreneurialism. A labor code forged over 
centuries to protect workers discouraged investment, yielding an 
unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.


Mr. Macron vowed to make France hospitable to global capital, trading 
worker protections for economic revival. He made it easier for employers 
to fire workers on the assumption that this would enhance their 
inclination to hire. He cut taxes on the wealthiest French households.


Outside France, financiers celebrated the young, charismatic new 
president who had replaced the narrative of decline with vibrancy. Yet 
inside France, and especially outside Paris, 

[Marxism] This is the Hour of Madness: The Sixteenth Newsletter (2019).

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 13 April 1919, a hundred years ago, the British officer General Dyer 
had his troops open fire on thousands of unarmed Indians in Jallianwalla 
Bagh (Amritsar). That massacre galvanised the Indian people into the 
freedom struggle, which eventually removed Britain from South Asia. A 
hundred years after, the British government still refuses to acknowledge 
the brutality of the act and refuses to be honest about its imperialist 
history.


https://mailchi.mp/e107fd489c9e/this-is-the-hour-of-madness-the-sixteenth-newsletter-2019?e=77bd6c9887
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[Marxism] Judith Clark, Getaway Driver in Deadly Brink’s Heist in 1981, Is Granted Parole

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NY Times, April 18, 2019
Judith Clark, Getaway Driver in Deadly Brink’s Heist in 1981, Is Granted 
Parole

by Michael Gold

Judith Clark, who as a young woman took part in a deadly robbery of a 
Brink’s armored car that represented one of the last gasps of the 
violent left-wing extremism of the 1960s and 1970s, was paroled on 
Wednesday after being imprisoned in New York for 37 years, her lawyers said.


Ms. Clark, 69, was the getaway driver in the bungled 1981 heist in a 
suburb of New York City in which two police officers and a guard were 
killed.


After her arrest and during her trial, Ms. Clark remained defiant in her 
revolutionary beliefs. She said she was “an anti-imperialist freedom 
fighter” and maintained violence was “a liberating force.”


But during her decades in prison, she has said she abandoned those 
beliefs and faced the pain she had caused the victims and their 
families. “I had to grapple with what happened to my humanity,” she said 
in 2017. She apologized, devoted herself to good works and became a 
model of rehabilitation.


Many liberal elected officials viewed Ms. Clark as a symbol of the need 
for clemency and forgiveness, maintaining that she had to be released 
from prison if the state correctional system was to live up to its 
ideals, even in politically charged cases involving the deaths of police 
officers.


“We are grateful that the parole board affirmed what everyone who has 
interacted with Judy already knows — that she is a rehabilitated, 
remorseful woman who poses no threat to society,” said Michael Cardozo, 
one of Ms. Clark’s lawyers.


She is scheduled to be released from prison by May 15.

But for law enforcement groups, many Republican elected officials and 
some victims of the shooting and their families, she was the face of 
terrorism and deserved no mercy.


“We’re outraged and sickened by this whole decision,” said Michael 
Paige, whose father was killed in the shooting. “Judith Clark is a 
murderer, plain and simple. She deserves nothing but to spend the rest 
of her life behind bars.”


Arthur Keenan, a former detective who was wounded in the robbery, said 
that he was “absolutely not” in favor of Ms. Clark’s parole. He said her 
record of good behavior in prison hardly outweighed her crime.


“Doesn’t what happened to the people who lost loved ones and were 
wounded matter?” he said.


Ed Day, the county executive of Rockland County, where the killings took 
place, called the parole board’s ruling a slap in the face to the 
victim’s families.


“This perversion of justice is a sad continuation of the deadly assault 
on police officers happening across our nation,” Mr. Day, who was 
formerly a New York police officer, said in a statement.


The decision to release Ms. Clark came after a lobbying campaign 
involving 11 members of Congress, 11 state senators, the former 
Manhattan district attorney, a former chief judge, four former parole 
board commissioners and a former superintendent of the prison where she 
was housed.


Her supporters, including 70 elected officials, sent a letter to the 
parole board arguing that the state’s correctional system should not 
exist solely for retribution, but also for rehabilitation, and that Ms. 
Clark had served a long sentence, accepted responsibility for her crime 
and shown genuine remorse.


Ms. Clark, then 31, drove a getaway car during the robbery of a Brink’s 
truck on Oct. 20, 1981, outside a mall in Nanuet, about 30 miles north 
of New York City in Rockland County.


The heist was part of a joint scheme by the Black Liberation Army and 
the May 19th Communist Organization — an offshoot of the Weather 
Underground, a radical left-wing group — to steal $1.6 million to 
finance a guerrilla uprising. They hoped to establish the Republic of 
New Afrika, a separate black nation in the southern United States


During the robbery, a Brink’s security guard, Peter Paige, was gunned 
down, and later, two Nyack police officers, Sgt. Edward O’Grady and 
Officer Waverly Brown, were shot and killed at a roadblock where they 
had attempted to stop a U-Haul van involved in the robbery.


Ms. Clark represented herself at her trial. Still fueled by the beliefs 
that made her a willing participant in the robbery, she was deeply 
uncooperative and defiant in court. During jury selection she decried 
the court proceedings as “fascist" and “racist.”


She was found guilty of all charges, and the sentencing judge said she 
was beyond rehabilitation. She was imprisoned at Bedford Hills 
Correctional Facility for women in Westchester County.


Ms. Clark has said that building a relationship with her daughter, 

[Marxism] Long Snake Moan: How Capitalism’s Productivity Failure Is Driving Debt and Speculation | Novara Media

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://novaramedia.com/2019/04/17/long-snake-moan-how-capitalisms-productivity-failure-is-driving-debt-and-speculation/
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[Marxism] ‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed About Class on Campus

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Chronicle of Higher Education, APRIL 17, 2019  PREMIUM
‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed 
About Class on Campus

By Jack Stripling

Long after the spectacle is over, when the rogue coaches and television 
actresses have made their final legal pleas, the fallout from the 
admissions-bribery scheme in which they’ve been implicated will live on.

It has exposed too much, confirmed too much.

Anyone who suspected that the game was rigged can find new evidence in 
the scandal, which showed how wealthy parents, including a couple of 
celebrities, paid off coaches and testing administrators to buy their 
children’s way into the likes of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown. Those 
institutions enroll only a tiny fraction of college students, suggesting 
that the scandal’s broad resonance supersedes personal connections to 
highly selective universities. It has tapped into populist skepticism 
about money and power.


Criminal prosecutions stemming from the admissions scheme have been 
limited to a few dozen parents, coaches, and William (Rick) Singer, the 
college consultant who masterminded it. That narrow scope has allowed 
university leaders to distance themselves from the scandal, 
characterizing their institutions as the unwitting victims of a few bad 
actors. But that won’t forestall tough questions about the codependent 
relationship between the nation’s top-tier colleges and the power elite 
who fuel their endowments, finance their buildings, and willingly pay 
full freight for their children to attend.


Faculty members see it every day. In his three decades as a sociology 
professor at Wake Forest University, Ian Taplin says, he has seen the 
privilege of the university’s student body rise in tandem with its 
national prestige. Wake Forest, which was targeted in the admissions 
scheme, was always a place where North Carolina’s “good and great” sent 
their children, Taplin says, in part because it offered elitism without 
the “nasty Yankees” one would encounter up the road at Duke. But now 
Wake is an international destination for the well-to-do, Taplin says.


“If you walk around campus, you’re most likely to get knocked down by a 
Range Rover or a high-end Audi,” he says.


Taplin, who researches luxury goods and writes about wine, recalls being 
taken aback when he asked a student about her go-to house vino.


“She said, Every now and again I’ll really splurge,” Taplin says, “but 
on a general day I drink Tignanello,” which runs about $100 a bottle. 
“This was a 22-year-old.”


Katie Neal, a spokeswoman for the university, says Wake Forest is making 
progress toward greater socioeconomic diversity. The average need-based 
scholarship, she says, is about $47,000, which covers 66 percent of the 
total cost of attendance. A decade ago, the average need-based 
scholarship covered only 45 percent of the total attendance cost.


Statistically speaking, however, most universities targeted in the 
bribery scandal are provinces of privilege, a recent study suggests. At 
Wake Forest, 22 percent of students come from families in the top 1 
percent of the income scale, meaning that their parents earn more than 
$630,000 a year, researchers reported in 2017. In general, these are 
places where the “one percenters” on the income scale outnumber or rival 
the mere mortals in their midst.


Provinces of Privilege

The admissions-bribery scandal has renewed criticism that elite 
institutions cater to the wealthy. Of the six private universities 
involved, all have more students from families in the top 1 percent of 
the income scale than the bottom 40 percent.


About the Data: Family-income data come from Opportunity Insight’s 
report “The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility.” Families in 
the bottom 40 percent make less than $38,400 a year, families in the top 
20 percent make at least $110,200 a year, and families in the top 1 
percent make more than $630,500 a year. Data are based on the 1991 
birth-year cohort, which is approximately the undergraduate Class of 
2013. Enrollment data are from the National Center for Education 
Statistics for the fall of 2017, and include only first-time, 
degree-seeking undergraduates.


Jennifer L. Mnookin, dean of the law school at the University of 
California at Los Angeles, describes the scandal as the “criminal 
leading edge” of a much more deeply rooted problem. Appalling as it was 
to learn that a Bruins soccer coach had allegedly accepted bribes to 
help rich students, Mnookin says, “my students are just as concerned 
with the legal version” of privilege in admissions.


“There’s nothing illegal about spending the 

[Marxism] It Gets Worse - bookforum.com / current issue

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What’s in store as the planet heats up


https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/026_01/20803
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[Marxism] A Hidden Order of Reality | Boston Review

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion-literature-culture/gili-kliger-hidden-order-reality
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[Marxism] The Political Lives of Mario Vargas Llosa | The Nation

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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SABERS AND UTOPIAS: VISIONS OF LATIN AMERICA: ESSAYS
By Mario Vargas Llosa; Anna Kushner, trans.

“Literature is fire,” Mario Vargas Llosa declared in 1967, when he 
accepted a prize commemorating Rómulo Gallegos, the esteemed Venezuelan 
novelist and former president. Gallegos represented the center-left 
tradition in Latin America, and Vargas Llosa was determined to challenge 
his audience from the left. Literature, the Peruvian novelist continued, 
“means nonconformism and rebellion…. Within ten, twenty or fifty years, 
the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in 
Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the 
order that despoils it, from the castes that exploit it, from the forces 
that now insult and repress it.”


Nearly 40 years later, in 2005, Vargas Llosa received a very different 
sort of prize and delivered a very different kind of speech. Accepting 
the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute, he 
denounced the Cuban government and called Fidel Castro an “authoritarian 
fossil,” praised the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises as a 
“great liberal thinker,” and defended calls for privatizing pensions. It 
was quite a remarkable transformation. In the opening paragraph of 
Vargas Llosa’s 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, the 
protagonist asks: “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” It 
is a question that many people have asked as well of Peru’s greatest 
novelist.


full: 
https://www.thenation.com/article/mario-vargas-llosa-sabres-and-utopias-book-review/

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[Marxism] Eurasia’s Great Game and the Future of the China-Russia Alliance – LobeLog

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Potential rivalry in Central Asia is not the only thing gnawing at the 
fundaments of a Chinese-Russian alliance. So is anti-Chinese sentiment 
and Russian public suspicion of Chinese intentions and commercial and 
social practices, already pervasive in the region’s former Soviet republics.


Increasingly, Russian leaders are facing mounting public anger in the 
Lake Baikal region and the country’s Far East at their alleged 
connivance in perceived Chinese encroachment on the region’s natural 
resources, including water.


A petition by prominent Russian show business personalities opposing 
Chinese plans to build a water bottling plant on the shores of Lake 
Baikal attracted more than 800,000 signatures, signalling the depth of 
popular resentment and pitfalls of the Russian alliance with China.


Protests have further erupted in multiple Russian cities against Chinese 
logging in the country’s Far East that residents and environmentalists 
charge has spoiled Russian watersheds and is destroying the habitats of 
the endangered Siberian tiger and Amur leopard. The protesters, who 
denounced construction of housing for Chinese workers, are demanding a 
ban on Russian timber exports to China.


full: 
https://lobelog.com/eurasias-great-game-and-the-future-of-the-china-russia-alliance/

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