Re: [Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Ha, I thought you were being facetious . . . Cheers, John On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 6:55 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > POSTING RULES & NOTES > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > * > > On 6/10/19 2:53 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: > > I guess the fact that they are generating much public hatred indicates > > that they have backed off from some very bad positions. > > Obviously meant to say not generating. > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/johnedmundson4%40gmail.com > -- The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Trotsky’s Ideas in Cuba – Interview with the organizer of the Trotsky Conference in Havana, May 6-8, 2019 | Socialist Action – Canada
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Frank Garcia Hernandez says: "For the event to have been better it should have had 4 days. The tables (panels) would have had extensive debates, which is, along with the translations and the time that was lost due to the translations, the main weak point of the event. But those of us who live in Cuba know that the economic crisis we are facing today, largely because of the imperialist blockade, did not allow us to hold an event that lasted four days." This is one small example of how the blockade affects Cuba. In the early years of the revolution, the blockade forced Cuba to become reliant on the Soviet Union for trade and aid, including military aid to deter a US invasion. This material dependence, combined with the ideological influence of the PSP, caused Cuba to be influenced by aspects of Stalinist ideology and practice. The hostility to Trotsky was one aspect of this. Today Venezuela is also subject to a severe economic blockade and the threat of invasion. Hence it has become reliant on Russia and China for trade and other forms of support, including a small Russian military contingent. This dependence on Russia and China is likely to have various adverse effects. To defend these revolutions we need to campaign vigorously against the blockades. This is important not just for Cuba and Venezuela, but also for the development of anti-imperialist and socialist consciousness amongst the people of the United States and its allies. Chris Slee From: Marxism on behalf of Louis Proyect via Marxism Sent: Tuesday, 11 June 2019 4:30 AM To: Chris Slee Subject: [Marxism] Trotsky’s Ideas in Cuba – Interview with the organizer of the Trotsky Conference in Havana, May 6-8, 2019 | Socialist Action – Canada POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://socialistaction.ca/2019/06/04/trotskys-ideas-in-cuba-interview-with-the-organizer-of-the-trotsky-conference-in-havana-may-6-8-2019/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/chris_w_slee%40hotmail.com _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Arrest of a Russian Investigative Journalist Prompts Outrage and Solidarity | The New Yorker
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Re: [Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * In addition to the interview with Earl Silbar, Platypus Issue #117 contains interviews with SDS activists David Gilbert and Carl Davidson. https://platypus1917.org/category/pr/issue-117/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Ted Postol on Douma attacks on Real News Network
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I leave the task of refuting his interview to other parties with better insights than I possess https://youtu.be/R6sgXY-n4LQ Best regards, Andrew Stewart _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 6/10/19 2:53 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: I guess the fact that they are generating much public hatred indicates that they have backed off from some very bad positions. Obviously meant to say not generating. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Semyon Rozenfeld, Last Known Survivor of Death Camp Escape, Dies at 96
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, June 5, 2019 Semyon Rozenfeld, Last Known Survivor of Death Camp Escape, Dies at 96 By Palko Karasz Semyon Rozenfeld first escaped death in the gas chambers by inventing a trade for himself when he arrived at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, in the fall of 1943. Questioned by a German officer, he said he was a glazier and was taken aside for work detail. About a month later he was among about 600 prisoners who staged a historic uprising against their captors and tried to escape. Only about 300 made it to the fences, and most of the rest were recaptured in the surrounding countryside. But some managed to make it to freedom, Mr. Rozenfeld among them. He died at 96 on Monday at a hospital in Rehovot, Israel, near Tel Aviv, and was believed to be the last known survivor of Sobibor. The Jewish Agency for Israel confirmed his death. He was cited as the last survivor after the death of Selma Wynberg Engel last December in East Haven, Conn., also at 96. She had been one of the first to tell the world of the camp’s existence. Mr. Rozenfeld was born in 1922 in Ukraine, the son of a tailor. He was drafted by the Red Army before falling prisoner to the Germans and was held first in Minsk, in today’s Belarus, and later in Sobibor. The camp in Sobibor began operating in the spring of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to exterminate Polish Jews. Only a small minority of detainees were allowed to work, mostly in operating the camp, including the disposal of bodies. Most people were killed in gas chambers shortly after their arrival. At least 167,000 people and possibly as many as 350,000 were murdered there. The site of the former Sobibor concentration camp. After about 600 prisoners staged an uprising and a mass escape there, 300 or so made it only to the fences, and most of the rest were recaptured in the surrounding woods. But some made it to freedom, Mr. Rozenfeld among them.CreditAnton Denisov/Sputnik, via Associated Press Mr. Rozenfeld was part of a group of prisoners who planned an escape in October 1943. They were to kill as many guards as they could with knives and axes before storming the main gate. They vowed to tell the world what had happened at Sobibor. In testimony to the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum, Mr. Rozenfeld said Alexander Pechersky, who led the escape, had asked him if he felt capable of killing someone with an ax. “I’m not capable of killing a human being,” Mr. Rozenfeld recalled saying. “But a Nazi — yes.” On Oct. 14, the revolt was set in motion. Hundreds of prisoners didn’t make it out of the camp, but 300 or so did, under fire, and then only to face minefields. Mr. Rozenfeld climbed a nine-foot fence and kept running despite a bullet wound to his leg. “I was not afraid,” he said, “because I didn’t have time to think about fear. I only thought about life.” Those who escaped and made it through the minefields went into hiding in the surrounding forest, and some sought help from local residents. Many prisoners were captured by Nazi guards and Polish collaborators. The camp was closed soon after the revolt. Fewer than 60 escapees survived the war. The last of the guards to be tried for killing Jews at Sobibor was John Demjanjuk, a former autoworker in Ohio. In 2011, in a German court, he was found guilty of taking part in the murder of 28,000 people and sentenced to five years in prison. He died in a nursing home in 2012 while appealing the conviction. As the Red Army arrived in the city of Chelm, where Mr. Rozenfeld had taken refuge, Mr. Rozenfeld again joined their ranks and fought to liberate Berlin. He returned to Ukraine, married and lived there until moving to Israel in 1990. He was most recently living in a nursing home in Yad Binyamin, south of Tel Aviv. He is survived by two sons, Michael and Roman; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 6/10/19 2:47 PM, A.R. G wrote: I thought their name sounded familiar: https://louisproyect.org/2010/04/25/q-what-is-a-platypus-a-an-american-eustonite/ This group apparently was a Zionist cult, though some of their more recent postings imply they have had some degree of a change of position. Amith R. Gupta I ran into one of their members at an HM/Jacobin conference in NYC a couple of months ago and he struck me a really good guy. Only 5 minutes into the chat, he admitted somewhat sheepishly that he was a Platypus member. I haven't paid much attention to them in close to a decade. I guess the fact that they are generating much public hatred indicates that they have backed off from some very bad positions. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I thought their name sounded familiar: https://louisproyect.org/2010/04/25/q-what-is-a-platypus-a-an-american-eustonite/ This group apparently was a Zionist cult, though some of their more recent postings imply they have had some degree of a change of position. Amith R. Gupta On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 2:33 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > POSTING RULES & NOTES > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > * > > Interview with co-author of book on PL and the SDS/WSA. > > > https://platypus1917.org/2019/06/01/nobody-wanted-to-hear-youre-reactionary-in-what-youre-doing/ > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/amithrgupta%40gmail.com > _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Interview with co-author of book on PL and the SDS/WSA. https://platypus1917.org/2019/06/01/nobody-wanted-to-hear-youre-reactionary-in-what-youre-doing/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Trotsky’s Ideas in Cuba – Interview with the organizer of the Trotsky Conference in Havana, May 6-8, 2019 | Socialist Action – Canada
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[Marxism] World's largest plant survey reveals alarming extinction rate
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[Marxism] The Apparel Industry’s Environmental Impact in 6 Graphics | World Resources Institute
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * With so much focus on alternative energy production as the be-all and end-all of ecosocialism, it tends to suck up all the oxygen in the room and evade the questions of how humanity can survive when there is no "alternative" method for producing cotton. As the key commodity of capitalism in the 19th century, it is still a vital "use value" for garments--unless we want to walk around in loincloths under socialism. (Maybe not a bad idea.) Is there a way or producing cotton that is "Green"? I doubt it. Charlie Post argues that the plantation system under slavery was a "precapitalist" mode of production, as if the despoliation of southern lands were somehow feudal. Except for the replacement of human labor with machinery, cotton production continues to be a prime example of capitalist contradictions and a challenge to the ecomodernist left with its nuclear and Walmart obsessions. https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environmental-impact-6-graphics _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Americans’ Extinction Denial Syndrome
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * When I go into a Lowe’s or Home Depot store to buy plumbing or electrical supplies, I’m assaulted as soon as I go in the door by the smell of lawn chemicals. Plastic jugs of Roundup are stacked six feet high right near the entrance of these stores for easy grabbing by shoppers heading for the garden supply area. At Costco, I found myself in line at the checkout counter behind a man who had a huge bag of grass seed that the label on the bag promised was already treated with “fertilizer and weed killer for a perfect lawn.” The weed killer, I discovered on checking further, is of course Roundup. Most of Europe has banned Roundup because of both a determination that is carcinogenic and because its widespread use has been linked to the decimation of the world’s bees, essential for the pollination of some 90 percent of all plants and of 30 percent of food crops, and Monsanto/Bayer has so far lost three major lawsuits levying a total of over $2.4 billion in punitive damages against the company for cancers found caused by their glyphosate herbicide. Yet despite all this, the American public wants its pristine green lawns, unblemished by dandelions and other transgressors like violets, buttercups and wild strawberries. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/10/americans-extinction-denial-syndrome/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] When the social industry bans the people we hate | Richard Seymour on Patreon
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * When more 'good speech' doesn't avail, the social industry turns to algorithmic remedies. If the machine seems to be producing depression, or precipitating suicidal ideation, modify the feed. Use its sentiment analysis programmes to detect risk and promote anti-suicide material. If it seems to encourage cyberbullying, or enable racist harassment, modify the feed. Change what users see, filter out the most egregiously awful materials, just enough to staunch the backlash. After all, the whole point of the feed is that it is already highly curated. It is designed, hyperpersonalised thanks to the data you supply, to maximise your engagement with it. If the current feed results in complaint about death threats and stalking, then the feed must be tweaked. https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-social-bans-27523240 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Seymour Hersh memoir review
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Review of Books, JUNE 27, 2019 ISSUE A Muckraker’s Progress by Scott Sherman Reporter: A Memoir by Seymour M. Hersh Vintage, 355 pp., $17.95 (paper) Seymour Hersh has been the premier American investigative reporter of the last half-century. In the late 1960s his articles (some of which appeared in these pages) helped inspire a partly successful campaign to abolish America’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. His 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre, based on an interview with the man who ordered it, Lieutenant William Calley, revealed the savagery of the Vietnam War. He provided the first comprehensive account of President Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. His disclosure in 1974 that the CIA had spied on antiwar activists prompted the creation of two congressional investigating committees. He led the effort to unearth American dirty tricks in the early 1970s against Chile’s democratic socialist president, Salvador Allende. After September 11, he warned that US intelligence was being manipulated to justify an invasion of Iraq, and in 2004 he brought to light the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison. Hersh has also been dogged by criticism, some of it legitimate. He has bullied sources, lashed out at colleagues, succumbed to hoaxes, and destroyed the reputation of at least one blameless person: Edward M. Korry, the US ambassador to Chile between 1967 and 1971. In 1974 Hersh reported in The New York Times that Korry had facilitated the CIA’s efforts to foment internal opposition to Allende, who committed suicide during a coup that overthrew him in 1973. In fact, the White House and the CIA had bypassed Korry. After Hersh published his story, the ambassador loudly proclaimed his innocence. According to Korry’s wife, Patricia, Hersh then tried to essentially blackmail her husband, offering to clear his name in return for his assistance in implicating Henry Kissinger, whom Hersh despised. In 1981 Hersh apologized to Korry in a long, highly unusual, page-one correction in the Times, after which Hersh admitted to Time magazine, “I led the way in trashing him.” Now eighty-two, Hersh has told his own story. At its best, Reporter is a lively self-portrait of a maverick and troublemaker. But it is scrubbed and sanitized. He appears in a half-light; the book does not illuminate the darkest corners of his long career. In an interview with Kissinger in the early 1970s, Hersh told him, “The only spirit is truth.” But Hersh is less than truthful in chronicling, for instance, the Korry affair, about which Reporter contains two hasty, misleading paragraphs that ignore the damage he inflicted. (Hersh insists that he was “very surprised” to learn in 1980 that Korry “had not been trusted by the CIA station chief” in Chile.) For a full view of Hersh and an authoritative sense of his career, which embodies the expansive possibilities of muckraking as well as its many perils, one must look elsewhere. Hersh’s Yiddish-speaking father, Isadore, was, in his son’s words, a “man of mystery” from Lithuania, who died when Seymour was seventeen; his mother was born in Poland. Six decades later, Hersh discovered that his father’s farming village, near Vilnius, was devastated by a German Einsatzgruppe during World War II: 664 Jews were executed in August 1941. After his father’s death, Hersh was told by a family friend from the local synagogue to “fuck them before they fuck you!” He took over the family business, a dry cleaning store located in what he calls a “black ghetto” on Chicago’s South Side. He was a lackluster student: after being kicked out of the University of Chicago Law School at twenty-two, he worked at Walgreens. But he soon stumbled into a job at the City News Bureau, an outfit that supplied information, mainly about crime and sports, to Chicago’s thriving dailies. With its tobacco haze and cynical scribes, the bureau evoked Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page. It was here that Hersh began to acquire his moral education: “the cops were on the take, and the mob ran the city.” In Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (2013), his comprehensive, largely admiring biography, the journalism professor Robert Miraldi suggested that Hersh developed some bad habits in Chicago. A City News Bureau veteran told Miraldi that “in the end, whatever went into a story was accurate, but the methods might not have been ethical.” Bureau reporters would pose as cops or coroners to coax information from unwitting citizens. “Those tactics,” wrote Miraldi, “seem remarkably similar to what Hersh used in finding Lieutenant William Calley a decade l
[Marxism] Bellingcat and How Open Source Reinvented Investigative Journalism | by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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[Marxism] Interesting exchange on slavery and the American Constitution
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Review of Books, JUNE 27, 2019 ISSUE No Property in Man’: An Exchange Sean Wilentz and James Oakes, reply by Nicholas Guyatt In response to: How Proslavery Was the Constitution? from the June 6, 2019 issue (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/06/how-proslavery-was-the-constitution/) To the Editors: Nicholas Guyatt’s review of my No Property in Man [NYR, June 6] charges that the book isn’t really a work of history at all but, at bottom, a political polemic disguised as history, an act of projection aimed at Bernie Sanders and Guyatt’s own “younger generation of scholars.” I can only conjecture why Guyatt, a former student in my Princeton graduate seminar, felt compelled to defame my professional integrity. On the level of historical scholarship, Guyatt’s constant distortion of the book’s evidence and contentions betrays a peculiar confusion in which historical dogma and its imperatives prevail over facts and reason. At every turn, Guyatt either garbles or corrupts my arguments. According to him, the book makes a “case for an antislavery Founding” and advances “a form of antislavery originalism.” It does neither. According to him, the book offers the “familiar” apology that without “sweeping concessions” to slavery there would have been no Constitution; and he says I think that, in his words, “we weaken our politics when we argue that the Founders protected slavery.” But the first claim is false and the second fabricated, the exact opposite of what I think. Guyatt suppresses my main argument. He says my book recognizes the framers’ proslavery concessions but invents an antislavery founding anyway. On the contrary, I attempt “to move beyond what has become a sterile debate among historians over whether the Constitution was antislavery or proslavery.” The surviving sources show that the Constitution was both. The concessions to the slaveholders helped secure slavery where it already existed while leaving open its expansion. Yet by emphatically refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of slavery—or, as the phrase went, “property in man”—the Constitutional Convention excluded slavery from national law. While the framers would perforce tolerate state laws recognizing slavery, they would not enshrine slavery as an institution immune to federal restriction. The majority at the Constitutional Convention upheld this view on matters ranging from the privileges and immunities clause to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. These facts form the heart of my book. Guyatt ignores them. Instead he fixates on a single powerful quotation from James Madison and on the chance that Madison may not have spoken those words, or those exact words, in the convention debate. Petty squabbles aside, it’s not as if my case rests on one remark. Guyatt ignores the delegate Elbridge Gerry’s declaration that the convention should have “nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to Slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it.” Likewise, the convention’s repudiation of a proslavery proposal that, Madison recorded, “seemed to wish some provision should be included in favor of property in slaves.” Likewise, the convention majority’s other painstaking efforts to remove any implication that “slavery was legal in a moral view.” Guyatt apparently thinks he can disprove an argument by disregarding the evidence behind it. Guyatt gives his game away when he repeatedly twists my actual conclusion into an absurd claim that the framers deliberately slipped in antislavery language for later generations to use. The convention majority was not clairvoyant. It just wanted to limit slavery’s legitimacy under the new national government. Some antislavery delegates said those limits were sufficiently strong that, as James Wilson averred, they would soon lead to “banishing slavery out of this country.” Proslavery delegates elided the exclusion of property in man and proclaimed that the Constitution gave slavery iron-clad protection. The struggle over slavery and the Constitution was there from the beginning. But that negates the doctrine according to William Lloyd Garrison to which Guyatt clings, a sectarian doctrine the majority of abolitionists rejected, insisting that there was no real struggle, no antislavery inflection; and that the framers simply forged a diabolical “covenant with death”—facts to the contrary be damned. Guyatt alleges that my book has no room for anyone outside “white elites,” and that it dismisses “a whole field” of fugitive slaves and grassroots activists. In fact, the book describes a crucial part of the antisl
[Marxism] To Be Effective, Socialism Must Adapt to 21st Century Needs
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Vijay Prashad interview. https://truthout.org/articles/to-be-effective-socialism-must-adapt-to-21st-century-needs/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Africa's Lost Kingdoms | by Howard W. French | The New York Review of Books
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disney cartoons that depict barely clothed African cannibals merrily stewing their victims in giant pots suspended above pit fires.1 Among intellectuals there is a wealth of appalling examples. Voltaire said of Africans, “A time will come, without a doubt, when these animals will know how to cultivate the earth well, to embellish it with houses and gardens, and to know the routes of the stars. Time is a must, for everything.” Hegel’s views of Africa were even more sweeping: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” One can hear echoes of such views even today from Western politicians. Donald Trump referred to a number of African nations as “shithole countries” in 2018, and French president Emmanuel Macron said in 2017, “The challenge Africa faces is completely different and much deeper” than those faced by Europe. “It is civilizational.” full: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The heroes of finance and Powell’s put | Michael Roberts Blog
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * At the weekend G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Japan, the world’s finance leaders tried to put a brave face on the situation. Tension over the intensifying trade war between China and the US was the biggest talking point at the meetings. Officials also wrangled over wording for a final communique on how to describe their concerns for world growth. While they flagged that it appears to be ‘stabilizing’, they also warned that the risks were tilted to the downside. “Most importantly, trade and geopolitical tensions have intensified. We will continue to address these risks, and stand ready to take further action”, the communiqué said. https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/06/10/the-heroes-of-finance-and-powells-put/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Back in the MLA | A survivor of academia returns to a troubled field
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * The distinct stench of decaying sense floated over the Hyatt Regency during the Modern Language Association annual convention in Chicago this year. For me, the smell was oddly reminiscent. I left a secure job as an English academic for the wilderness of writing more than ten years ago. Going back to academia was a bit like going back to the old hometown that has fallen on hard times: it’s mostly the same people, they’re just older. The town drunk’s still there. The local restaurant’s lousier than you remember. Of the friends who stayed, some have flourished, others look battered. But, of course, I don’t live there anymore so its problems aren’t really mine. And what problems. The MLA this year took, as its principal subject, the death of its own significance. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/back-in-the-mla/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
