[Marxism] Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America | Global Public Affairs

[DW via Marxism]

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Thanks to Louis for posting this. It's heavy reading and long but well
worth it for those interested in the Imperialist results of the
"agro-industrial complex" as it relates to the mono-crop of Soy.
Fascinating read. It's kind of a survey of different research papers and it
encourages people to read the literature. I think the flat out commendation
of GM soy is not explained except in terms of the specifics of how it's
been employed. Which is pretty bad. There is a LOT of research, obviously,
in to GM soy which it seems the author doesn't know too much about outside
the specific kind used in Latin America that allows for massive use of
Round Up. But that is another subject. Overall this is quite good. The
authors endorse agro-ecological approaches to growing soy (which isn't
generally condemned only how it is used in the Imperialist market place and
what it's effects are socially on the land in South America). Well worth
the read.

David
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Re: [Marxism] Evo Morales Calls for UN Assembly to Address Amazon Fires

[Joseph Green via Marxism]

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"The perpetrators aren't known, but Bolivian President Evo Morales has 
justified 
people starting fires, saying: 'If small families don't set fires, what are 
they going 
to live on?'

"The disaster comes just a month after Morales announced a new 'supreme 
decree' aimed at increasing beef production for export.

"Twenty-one civil society organisations are calling for the repeal of this 
decree, 
arguing that it has helped cause the fires and violates Bolivia's environmental 
laws. Government officials say that fire setting is a normal activity at this 
time of 
year and isn't linked to the decree.
.
"Some Indigenous leaders are asking for a trial to determine responsibility for 
the 
fires, and the response to them. Alex Villca, an Indigenous leader and 
spokesperson, said: 'It is President Evo Morales who should be held 
accountable. 
What are these accountabilities going to be? A trial of responsibilities for 
this 
number of events that are occurring in the country, this number of violations 
of 
Indigenous peoples and also the rights of Mother Nature.'"

https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-not-just-brazil-s-amazon-bolivia-s-vital-forests-ar
e-on-fire-too/amp



Also,  an important indigenous coalition, the Coordinator of Indigenous 
Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA) declares Morales and 
Bolsonaro as persona non grata 
https://www.eldia.com.bo/index.php?c=Portada=Coica-declara-personas-
-no-gratas--a-Evo-y-Bolsonaro-tras-incendios=1=3_articulo=285193

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[Marxism] Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America | Global Public Affairs

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://global.luskin.ucla.edu/2016/05/17/sacred-groves-sacrifice-zones-and-soy-production-globalization-intensification-and-neo-nature-in-south-america/
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[Marxism] Evo Morales Calls for UN Assembly to Address Amazon Fires

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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 <https://www.telesurenglish.net/english/section/news>
Evo Morales Calls for UN Assembly to Address Amazon Fires
 
<https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Evo-Morales-Calls-for-UN-Assembly-to-Address-Amazon-Fires-20190826-0005.html>

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Evo-Morales-Calls-for-UN-Assembly-to-Address-Amazon-Fires-20190826-0005.html
 
<https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Evo-Morales-Calls-for-UN-Assembly-to-Address-Amazon-Fires-20190826-0005.html>


Bolivia Calls Meeting of Countries Affected by Amazon Fires
https://havanatimes.org/latin-america/bolivia-calls-meeting-of-countries-affected-by-amazon-fires/
 
<https://havanatimes.org/latin-america/bolivia-calls-meeting-of-countries-affected-by-amazon-fires/>
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Albion]: Shimko on David, 'Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and Britain's Atlantic Commerce, 1730-1790'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via 
https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
> Date: August 26, 2019 at 1:30:23 PM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Albion]:  Shimko on David, 'Trade, Politics, and 
> Revolution: South Carolina and Britain's Atlantic Commerce, 1730-1790'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> Huw T. David.  Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and 
> Britain's Atlantic Commerce, 1730-1790.  Columbia  University of 
> South Carolina Press, 2018.  280 pp.  $59.99 (cloth), ISBN 
> 978-1-61117-894-4.
> 
> Reviewed by Alison Shimko (Independent Scholar)
> Published on H-Albion (August, 2019)
> Commissioned by Patrick J. Corbeil
> 
> Shimko on David, _Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and 
> Britain's Atlantic Commerce, 1730-1790_
> 
> David Huw's _Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and 
> Britain's Atlantic Commerce, 1730-1790 _highlights the critical 
> relationship between London's "Carolina merchants" and the South 
> Carolina merchants in America for whom they petitioned, lobbied, and 
> advocated in the eighteenth century. This relationship evolved 
> before, during, and after the American Revolution as their political 
> and commercial interests disentangled. David argues that by exploring 
> the nuanced commercial and economic interests of London's Carolina 
> merchants, we may better understand "how economic and political 
> forces were interrelated in the growing disenchantment of South 
> Carolinians with their metropolitan trading partners and the system 
> they represented" (p. 2). Thus, David's Atlantic approach adds 
> another layer of complexity to the American Revolution: though the 
> relationship between London Carolina merchants and South Carolinians 
> was lucrative, their economic interests could only remain intact so 
> long as their political interests were aligned. Furthermore, the 
> tensions that developed between British merchants and their 
> counterparts in South Carolina "reflected in microcosm with 
> geopolitical shifts of the time and show at an individual level how 
> disenchantment with and then resistance to imperial authority 
> developed" (p. 6). 
> 
> David identifies the complex aspects of the London merchants' lives 
> that made them so invested in South Carolina's well-being, both 
> politically and commercially. London merchants were tied to South 
> Carolina because many of them had lived there for an extended period 
> of time, perhaps working as ship captains or serving as commercial 
> apprentices before entering the trading business (chapter 1). Thus, 
> they had family, property (absentee landholding is the subject of 
> chapter 3), and social connections across the Atlantic. These 
> personal factors compounded the commercial and economic interests 
> that drove London merchants to work in the interests of the colony. 
> This was unique for the mainland colonies and provided the foundation 
> for "the particular activism" of South Carolina's London merchants 
> (p. 72). 
> 
> One of the first major successes of the London merchants focused on 
> South Carolina's staple cash crop: the 1730 Rice Act. The act was the 
> result of twenty years of petitioning and lobbying, which resulted in 
> the liberalization of the trade of thousands of barrels of rice to 
> the Iberian Peninsula while still fitting into the mercantilist 
> paradigm. Direct export would benefit South Carolina but would also 
> benefit Britain in South Carolina's demand for boats and timber. 
> Britain's 1748 Indigo Bounty encouraging the production of indigo in 
> South Carolina with a sixpence-per-pound bounty on imports of indigo 
> further demonstrated how Carolina merchants aspired to fulfill both 
> South Carolina and London interests. Though they were not always 
> successful (for example, in their fight against the impressment of 
> traders in the Royal Navy during the War of Jenkins' Ear [1739-48] 
> and King George's War [1744-48]), merchants in London fighting on 
> South Carolinians' behalf solidified confidence in their relationship 
> and assured mutual interests. Petitions to the royal government 
> "articulated a familiar rhetoric of economic patriotism, carefully 
> attuned to prevailing political-economic discourse" that sought to 
> help both Britain and South Carolina (p. 64). 
> 
> David identifies a shift in the relationship between South Carolina 
> and London merchants in the 1760s in chapter 4. This evolution was 
> not due solely to the 

[Marxism] What Dominika Siemińska says about the graves in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Ukraine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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If you've been following this admittedly complex thread, you might 
recall that Furr held up the report of Dominika Siemińska as absolving 
Stalin. According to him, if this Polish archaeologist found physical 
evidence indicting the Nazis, how can anybody blame Stalin?


I just received a PDF copy of a book titled "The Materiality of Troubled 
Pasts: Archaeologies of Conflicts and Wars" from one of the 3 editors. 
Generally, I have access to just about everything from Columbia or other 
research libraries through Borrow Direct or ILL but in this case the 
book was not available from Columbia or Amazon.


I was interested in an article by Dominika Siemińska in the book titled 
"Archaeological Studies on World War II Totalitarianism in the Yard of a 
Mediaeval Hill Fort in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Ukraine". I plan to give it 
a thorough review but in the meantime this excerpt from the article will 
give you an idea of Furr's reliability:


In the case of Grave no. 4, excavated artefacts, the method of 
execution, and observations of taphonomical and post-depositional 
processes allow us to classify the remains as murder victims of the NKVD 
from 1940 or the first half of 1941. The majority were men as confirmed 
by recovered objects, garment fragments and anthropological analyses 
(Iwanek 2013). Footwear examples with elements cut off and primitive 
repairs can indicate that these persons had spent quite long periods in 
prison. It is possible they were the people building defensive 
embankments in the area of Volodymyr. On the one hand, objects such as 
large quantities of coins, knives or tool sets could not belong to 
people imprisoned for a long period and, therefore the victims could 
have been people murdered directly after being arrested (Głowacki 1997: 
21–23). On the other hand, fragments of uniforms and military equipment 
indicate soldiers and policemen were part of this group of victims.


Studying Grave no. 5, we can suppose that the execution coincided with 
the earliest dates of coins found with the year 1939. The 
characteristics of execution itself and the method of burial indicate 
the methods of NKVD. Most skulls have bullet inlets in occipital bones 
and their diameter is about 8 mm. Probably, guns in the calibre of 7.62 
or 7.65 mm were used. The individuals were shot in the back of the head 
and at a location outside the grave. All were adult men either civilian 
or soldier. These facts are confirmed by the garment fragments, 
footwear, equipment, and personal objects recovered by excavation. These 
people may have been representatives of administration, officials, 
functionaries, political and social activists, landowners or soldiers, 
all murdered after the Soviet army entered the territory and new 
authority structures were established (Filar 2012: 40–42; Bass 2013).

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[Marxism] NYT: "What Warren is telling Democratic Insiders"

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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When combined with the increasing worry that some of the tops of the
capitalist class feel (e.g. the Business Roundtable), plus the clear
incompetence of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren might just be the more
acceptable choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-democrats.html?action=click=Top%20Stories=Homepage

What Elizabeth Warren Is Quietly Telling Democratic Insiders

   - Aug. 26, 2019
   Updated 4:30 p.m. ET
   - 467

SAN FRANCISCO — When Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts addressed a
few hundred donors last week at a fund-raiser for the Democratic National
Committee, she called for “big, structural change” and hurled her familiar
populist lightning bolts at the forces of concentrated wealth.

But Ms. Warren did not attend the event just to recite her stump speech.
She had another, more tailored message for the Democratic check writers,
state party leaders and committee members who were gathered at the elegant
Fairmont San Francisco.

“Last year, I was running for re-election, but I didn’t hold back,” she
said, reminding attendees that in the midterms she had helped more than 160
congressional candidates and nearly 20 hopefuls in governors’ races. “In
fact, I raised or gave more than $11 million helping get Democrats elected
up and down the ballot around the country” and “sent contributions to all
50 state parties, the national committees and the redistricting fight.”

Her point was easy to grasp: While her liberal agenda may be further left
than some in the Democratic establishment would prefer, she is a team
player who is seeking to lead the party — not stage a hostile takeover of
it.


Most of the other White House contenders are, of course, also wooing party
officials. But the more establishment-aligned candidates like former Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris of California do
not face the same questions about their visions for party politics. And
interviews with about two dozen Democrats who have been in contact with Ms.
Warren reveal that her style of courtship has been unusually determined.


Troy Price, the chairman of Iowa’s Democratic Party, said Ms. Warren called
him the day he was re-elected to his post last year, immediately after the
midterm elections and on the day she entered the race.

“All of the sudden the cellphone is ringing and it’s her — not a staffer,”
added J. David Cox, the president of the American Federation of Government
Employees, calling Ms. Warren “the most aggressive” of the Democratic
contenders in pursuing him.

Ms. Warren’s wooing could prove important should the nominating contest
deadlock at the Democratic National Convention next summer: Many of the
officials she is courting are so-called superdelegates, who are able to
cast a binding vote should the primary go beyond a first ballot.

Beyond the potential electoral advantages, the relationships Ms. Warren is
cultivating could prove just as powerful for symbolic purposes.

While in San Francisco, Ms. Warren met privately with Randi Weingarten, the
president of the American Federation of Teachers, who in 2016 was one of
Ms. Clinton’s most outspoken supporters in the labor movement. Ms. Warren
and Ms. Weingarten have developed a close relationship, frequently talking
about education issues, and Ms. Weingarten recalled how the senator reached
out to her with encouraging words when her union sued Betsy DeVos, the
education secretary, over a student loan forgiveness program.

Then there is Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who was Mr.
Sanders’s first congressional supporter in the 2016 election but who is now
backing Ms. Warren.

So is Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, who last year became one of
the first Native American women elected to Congress.

Ms. Haaland attended the San Francisco fund-raiser, sporting a Warren lapel
pin, just a few days after she introduced and defended Ms. Warren at a
forum dedicated to Native American issues

in
Iowa. After being sharply criticized from the right and the left for
claiming Native American ancestry, Ms. Warren has apologized and taken down
a 2018 video from her campaign website in which she trumpeted the results
of a DNA test examining her heritage.

Ms. Haaland said that Ms. Warren helped raise money for her campaign last
year and that the two had met in the senator’s office and over tea in Ms.
Warren’s condominium this year.

“We’re friends, we text each other,” said the congresswoman, noting that
she and Ms. Warren were also working together on legislation to establish
universal child 

Re: [Marxism] Furr

[DW via Marxism]

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 I don't disagree at all with the criticism's most people have of Furr. I
know him personally. We meet about once a year in the Bay Area. What I
would ask Furr is the same thing he uses to convict the entire Bolshevik
Central Committee of: where is the evidence Tokarev was "coerced"? A fair
enough question.

Furr will make huge leaps of logic. For example, while it was revealed in
1981 or so that Trotsky lied before the Dewey Commission when asked about
having contacts in the USSR (for obvious reasons) in the *reveled*
communications via his son, Leon Sedov, there is zero damning him. In fact
it's more inquisitive by Trotsky about the positions of the many
Oppositionist groups that went through a revival in 1932. It's clear from
what I've read that Trotsky didn't really have clue about what was going on
in "his" underground. This 1932 reproachment by various Opposition groups
when found out about it by Stalin, is the source of Stalin's paranoia about
being overthrown. Keep in mind that this is years before Trotsky considered
the Bureaucracy "counter-revolutionary through and through and needed to be
overthrown" (1936/37).

At any rate Furr loves to say "and of course Trotsky was a liar
thefore...". A huh. Secondly, one of things that Broue admitted too was the
removal of a document he found when given permission to view the Trotsky
archives at Harvard. Without knowing whatsoever what the document was about
he concludes Trotsky guilty of malfeasance. It is very much a method of
Furr.

David Walters
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[Marxism] Book review: "Why did Chavismo fail?"

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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"What in the world is happening in Venezuela? Is it exhibit #1 of the
failure of socialism, as Trump would have people believe? Is it a case of a
proud people standing up behind a bold leader and being attacked by US
imperialism, as others claim? Or is it something else entirely, as the left
critics (both inside and outside the country) claim? A new book (in
Spanish), “Why did Chavismo fail? – a balance from the left opposition” by
Simón Porras Rodríguez and Miguel Sorans*, seeks to answer that question.

What follows is a summary of some of the main points the book makes and
some comments and questions of my own."

Basically, the authors present the case that the Chavez/Maduro regime is a
bonapartist one that at one time made deep concessions to the working class
but since then has followed the opposite course. They also present Guaido
as no alternative whatsoever.

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2019/08/26/book-review-why-did-chavismo-fail/

John Reimann

-- 
*“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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Re: [Marxism] Furr

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This is the kind of thing that troubles me about anything that Furr 
writes. In his "The “Official” Version of the Katyn Massacre 
Disproven?", the article that is focused on debunking the notion that 
Polish prisoners at Volodymyr Volyns’kiy were executed, he also has 
something to say about the Smolensk killings that, as I pointed out, 
produced 22 times more corpses than those found in the Ukraine mass grave.


He claims that a former NKVD agent named Tokarev was forced into 
testifying against Stalin in an investigation that was held in tandem 
with the release of the Katyn papers in 1990 even though he wasn't "at 
the Katyn Forest, the place where 4000+ bodies of Polish POWs were 
unearthed by the Germans in 1943, and none of them has anything to say 
about this, the most famous of the execution/burial sites subsumed under 
the rubric 'the Katyn Massacre.'"


He may have not been in the forest but he was an eyewitness to the 
executions in NKVD headquarters, from which the bodies were later 
transported to the forest. This is from "Katyn: a crime without 
punishment", edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, Wojciech 
Materski:


	NKVD documents do not show how the Ostashkov prisoners were killed, but 
an eyewitness was found half a century after the event who deposed 
testimony on this particular mass murder. In March 1991 the aged Tokarev 
(b. 1902) gave many details on the fate of the Ostashkov prisoners 
during his interrogation by Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Yablokov, a 
military prosecutor in the Soviet Main Military Prosecutor’s Office, who 
was in charge of the Soviet Katyn investigation from 1991 to 1994. 
Tokarev claimed that he was not personally involved in the killing 
because a special group of NKVD men came from Moscow to do the “work.” 
He stated that those in charge of the operation were GB Major V. M. 
Blokhin, head of the Komendatura [Command] of the AKhU 
[Administrative-Housekeeping Board of the NKVD]; Kom-brig [Brigade 
Commander] M. S. Krivenko, head of NKVD Convoy Troops; and Senior GB 
Major N. I. Sinegubov, head of Intelligence for the NKVD Main Transport 
Administration and its deputy chief.


	According to Tokarev, about thirty NKVD men, mostly drivers and some 
prison guards, took part in shooting the prisoners, always at night, 
after which they would retire to their special quarters and drink a lot 
of vodka. Blokhin was the chief executioner. His special uniform 
consisted of a leather cap, an apron, and gloves reaching above the elbows.


According to Furr, Tokarev was coerced into making this testimony, a 
funny thing to hear from someone who defended the integrity of the 
Moscow Trials.


In his article, he would lead the reader into believing that Tokarev 
didn't see bodies being dumped into mass graves. If he wasn't so dodgy, 
he could have instead tried to debunk his testimony about what he *did* 
see rather than dismiss him for being an expert witness to events he did 
not claim to see.


Typical Furr.





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[Marxism] A Legendary Gay Writer Reflects on the Past, Present, and Future

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.advocate.com/exclusives/2019/8/24/legendary-gay-writer-reflects-past-present-and-future
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Re: [Marxism] the tumultuous 1980s

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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Wonder if the guy referenced my book:  SURRENDER, HOW THE CLINTON
ADMINISTRATION COMPLETED THE REAGAN REVOLUTION (U. Mich P. 2000 pbk) --- it
gives a detailed economic history of the Reagan Revolution --- and shows
how it failed on its own terms!

(sorry for the shameless self promotion)

(the book should be available for free on line by now )

Major long run change beginning in about 1979  the DECLINE in
inequality stopped and was reversed --- inequality climbed all the way till
the 2008 financial crisis!

> 
> 
> 
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[Marxism] the tumultuous 1980s

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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 The de­cade of the 1980s was one of the most economically turbulent and
crisis laden in American history. Indeed, it was perhaps the most chaotic
in terms of the number of sectors adversely affected. The results of the
period led to more than two thousand bank failures, more than eight hundred
savings-and-loan failures, the junk-bond crisis, the commercial real estate
crisis, the Latin American debt crisis, and an energy-lending crisis
triggered by an oil price collapse. There was even an agricultural lending
crisis early in the decade. In each one of these, it was a rapid buildup in
private debt that brought the overcapacity and crisis. This decade saw the
largest wave of bank failures since the 1930s. And it saw the largest
percentage one-day stock market drop in U.S. history, on October 19, 1987,
a collapse parried only when the Federal Reserve flooded the market with
unprecedented levels of liquidity.

https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3919
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[Marxism] Polluting Farmers Should Pay

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Ed, August 26, 2019
Polluting Farmers Should Pay
By Catherine Kling

This year’s dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico — an area where decomposing 
algae consumes all oxygen in the water — logged in at nearly 7,000 
square miles, about the size of New Jersey. Researchers in the Great 
Lakes region predict that this year’s harmful algal bloom in Lake Erie 
will be twice last year’s size, and larger than the 2014 bloom that shut 
down the drinking water supply in Toledo, Ohio. Floridians and 
Chesapeake Bay residents regularly experience the green gunk and odor 
symptomatic of algal blooms. The Environmental Protection Agency reports 
that all 50 states now experience harmful algal blooms.


These blooms contain toxins that can make us sick after swimming or 
consuming tainted fish, kill pets and livestock, and raise treatment 
costs for drinking water. Algal blooms reduce recreational enjoyment 
from boating, fishing and swimming — resulting in less tourism and lower 
property values. The economic cost associated with the single shut down 
of Toledo’s drinking water system is estimated at $65 million.


The common thread? Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, commonly called 
nutrient pollution, the bulk of which comes from agricultural fertilizer 
and manure runoff. The solution seems clear: Those who cause the 
pollution should be required to pay for the cleanup, using regulations 
to ensure that farmers reduce nutrient pollution. State governments have 
the power to make this a reality.


Ranching, growing intensively fertilized grain crops, dairy farming and 
livestock production in the United States provides abundant food for the 
world. However, this success has also produced an explosive growth in 
toxic algae and phytoplankton from fertilizer and manure runoff. While 
urban runoff, fossil fuel use, and failing sewer systems contribute to 
the problem, there is scientific consensus that agricultural generated 
nutrients are dominant in many areas.


Surprising as it may seem, the 1972 Clean Water Act — whose stated goal 
is fishable and swimmable waters for all — has always exempted most 
agricultural pollutants from regulation. This nearly 50-year-old policy 
prevents the federal government from employing a polluter pays approach 
— a method that has proved successful in tackling industrial and 
municipal sources of water pollution, including raw sewage, toxic 
chemicals and industrial byproducts. Instead, the Clean Water Act relies 
on voluntary action from farmers. In effect, farmers are requested to 
change their behavior and voluntarily raise their own cost of 
production, even when their competitors do not, to fix a water quality 
problem that often occurs far downstream.


Farmers could do more, but competitive realities limit even those 
producers with the best intentions. Reducing fertilization can help, but 
even when carefully applied, some fertilizer inevitably leaves fields 
and accumulates in waters. Costlier changes — such as planting a cover 
crop in the fall to prevent nutrient loss over the winter, restoring 
wetlands and streams, planting vegetation at the edges of streams and 
managing drainage — would help. Currently the only option is for 
taxpayers to pay them to make these changes.


Last year, taxpayers spent five billion dollars to take land out of 
production and support conservation practices. This may sound like a 
lot, but five times that was spent on industrial and municipal pollution 
control, much of it paid for by the businesses and cities that generate 
pollution. Even at current levels of taxpayer support, the state of Iowa 
reports that additional conservation practices are needed on the bulk of 
its 25 million acres to solve its contribution to the Gulf dead zone.


What’s more, the E.P.A. reports that 150,000 miles of streams and nearly 
five million acres of lakes across the country remain impaired from 
nutrients. And while most Americans drink water from publicly filtered 
sources, nearly 14 percent drink water from private wells with no 
required monitoring or treatment requirements, making them vulnerable to 
nitrate pollution. Blue baby syndrome, for example, is a rare but 
well-known problem when infants ingest nitrates. Recent studies suggest 
that nitrates in drinking water are associated with increased risks of 
colorectal cancer, thyroid disease and birth defects.


Although the federal government cannot regulate agriculture under the 
Clean Water Act, states can. They are free to impose taxes, require 
permits and regulate in any way they see fit. A few have taken action. 
Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Vermont and Wisconsin ban the 

[Marxism] Uneven and Combined Development for the 21st Century: A Conference Tickets, Thu 5 Sep 2019 at 17:30 | Eventbrite

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/uneven-and-combined-development-for-the-21st-century-a-conference-tickets-65189629938
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[Marxism] Katyn

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According to one account I read, fifty of those involved in the executions were 
themselves shot because they were witnesses to what had happened.
I did not see a reference to this in the Wikipedia account.
ken h

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre 

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Re: [Marxism] Furr

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Furr contacted me privately to assure me that Timothy Snyder's book is
utterly fictional and that NONE of his charges against Stalin are true. I
wrote him back and asked about the underlying documents containing hundreds
of admissions by various Soviet officials, that the Katyn massacres were
organized by them and the whole thing approved by Stalin. These documents,
first translated in English in this book are not some sort of mea culpas
imagined after the fact but the actual paperwork that accompanied the
massacres as they were decided upon and unfolded. Michael Meerpol's hazy
recollection is accurate afaik.

I recognize that Louis considers Snyder suspect and perhaps he is but that
doesn't mean his book is bullshit through and through. I am not going to
buy and read either Furr or Cienciala because that's what review literature
is FOR. If Snyder, a bigshot professor at Yale, just idiotically quoted a
fabricated book of hundreds of documents released by the Russian
government, do you not think that someone in the academy would have noted
and commented, if only to make some waves?

The documentary book is Katyn, A Crime Without Punishment, Anna M.
Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., New Haven,
Yale University Press, 2007.
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Re: [Marxism] Furr

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On 8/26/19 10:28 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:

The USSR never admitted to anything about the Massacre. It has always
denied it.


Really? Did it deny it in 1990 when it released classified documents 
about Katyn?


I can't find any reference to that here:

The New York Times
April 14, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
By ESTHER B. FEIN, Special to The New York Times

Dateline: MOSCOW, April 13

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today gave President Wojciech Jaruzelski 
of Poland cartons of documents that the Soviet leader said ''indirectly 
but convincingly'' proved that the Soviet secret police killed thousands 
of Polish officers in Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940.


''It is not easy to speak of this tragedy, but it is necessary,'' Mr. 
Gorbachev said. The Soviet Government has for the first time officially 
and publicly accepted responsibility for this long-denied crime of the 
Stalinist era, a massacre in the thick pine and birch forests west of 
Smolensk.


In response, General Jaruzelski said, ''The Soviet statement about the 
crime of Katyn is, for our people, especially important and valuable 
from a moral point of view.''


''For us, this was an unusually painful question,'' said the general, 
who is in Moscow on a state visit. On Saturday, he is scheduled to visit 
the clearing in the Katyn woods where a monument to the Polish officers 
was put up last year.


A Lift for Jaruzelski

The truth of what happened in the forests of Katyn has been, as Mr. 
Gorbachev said today, one of the ''historical knots'' that has 
complicated Soviet-Polish relations, particularly in the last year, as 
Eastern European countries have emerged from long domination by the 
Soviet Union.


Mr. Gorbachev's admission of Soviet culpability in the killings during 
Mr. Jaruzelski's visit could serve as a lift for the Polish President, 
one of the last Communist leaders to survive the turmoil in Eastern 
Europe, as he struggles to hold his position against a challenge by more 
liberal forces.


Some 15,000 Polish officers and others disappeared after they were 
handed over to the Soviet secret police when Soviet forces occupied 
parts of Poland in April and May of 1940. The occupation came as part of 
a secret Soviet-Nazi agreement at the outset of World War II.


The bodies of about 4,500 of those officers were unearthed in 1943 by 
Nazi troops after the Nazis captured the region. The German troops and 
several international commissions blamed the Soviets for the massacre 
after examining documents found on the dead officers and the uniforms 
that they were wearing when they were herded into the forest and shot. 
The 10,500 Poles who were not buried at Katyn vanished without a trace.


Move Toward Admitting Guilt

The men whose bodies were found in the mass graves in Katyn had all been 
shot in the head. The hands of many of the men were tied behind their 
backs, and many were bound, gagged and blinded by greatcoats flung or 
bound around their heads.


Polish investigators traveled to the forest to examine the bodies at the 
behest of the Polish government-in-exile in London after the Germans 
discovered the bodies in 1943. The investigators concluded that the 
Soviet Union was reponsible, but Stalin blamed Hitler. Eventually, 
Stalin broke relations with the London exile government, a move that led 
to the establishment of a Communist Government in Poland.


The Soviet side persisted until this year in blaming the Nazis for the 
crime, saying the killings took place in 1941, when the territory was in 
German hands. The inscription in stone that marks the spot of the 
killings says the officers were victims of fascism, shot by Hitler's troops.


But it has been clear since last summer that Soviet officials were 
gradually moving toward admitting guilt for the killings, under pressure 
from journalists and historians who have uncovered incriminating 
evidence and from the Polish Government, whose previous Communist 
Government long conspired in blessing the official Soviet version of events.


Moscow's 'Profound Regret'

''After searching through the archives here and abroad, we came to the 
unmistakable conclusion that officers found at Katyn were shot and 
buried by Stalin's secret police,'' said Valentina S. Porsadnova, a 
member of the official Soviet-Polish commission set up two and a half 
years ago to resolve historical disputes between the counties. She said 
the commission's conclusions on Katyn were to be published soon.


The official statement outlining the new Soviet position on Katyn, which 
was reported today by the official press agency Tass, expressed the 
Soviet Union's ''profound regret 

Re: [Marxism] Furr

[DW via Marxism]

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[I've been hearing very informally from others that Furr's book is not half
bad on the massacre. I'll leave it at that. I have a copy and will
eventually read it as I did a few of his other volume that are more drek
like]

The USSR never admitted to anything about the Massacre. It has always
denied it. There is a split among the current crop of right wing
nationalists in Russian academia over Katyn. The contradictions are that
among these anti-communists is to praise Stalin or condemn him. Thus, the
anti-communist wing wanted to admit to Soviet responsibility for Katyn and
a more nationalist wing wanted to deny it and blame the Germans (the
official Soviet position). Obviously neither "wing" of anti-communist
academics can be trusted.

David Walters
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Re: [Marxism] The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 8/26/19 9:32 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote:


The betrayal at Munich of a potential alliance with the Soviets to 
protect Czechoslovakia on the other hand is accurate, I believe.


Written about 20 years ago:


http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/stalin_hitler.htm

Stalin-Hitler Pact

All Marxists can accept the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact as a 
legitimate principled measure taken to defend a socialist nation. The 
Nazi regime and Anglo-French imperialism were both reactionary and the 
Soviet people needed to maneuver to defend themselves as the 
vicissitudes of history unfolded. What is *not* principled is the 
political credibility that the Kremlin placed in the Hitler regime.


On Sept. 29, 1939, the USSR signed a German-Soviet Boundary and 
Friendship Pact that included secret protocols, among which was a 
stricture that each party pledged to suppress any agitation against the 
other and to keep each other informed of any outbreak. The result, 
according to Roy Medvedev in "Let History Judge", was a complete halt to 
antifascist propaganda in the USSR. Even worse, Soviet leaders began to 
depict Germany as a potential victim of Anglo-French aggression. Molotov 
declared in the fall of 1939:


"During the last few months such concepts as 'aggression' and 
'aggressor' have acquired a new concrete content, have taken on another 
meaning...Now...it is Germany that is striving for a quick end to the 
war, for peace, while England and France, who only yesterday were 
campaigning against aggression, are for continuation of the war and 
against concluding a peace. Roles, as you see, change...The ideology of 
Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be accepted or 
rejected--that is a matter of one's political views. But everyone can 
see that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force...Thus it is not only 
senseless, it is criminal to wage such a war as a war for 'the 
destruction of Hitlerism,' under the false flag of a struggle for 
democracy."


There was no need for Molotov to utter such foolish words. A 
nonaggression pact does not involve this sort of legitimization of a 
criminal regime as one resting on an "ideological system". Nazism rested 
on murder and torture. If Molotov could not speak the truth about this, 
he should have kept his mouth shut.


Stalin's foolish belief in the possibility of a peace with Hitler 
compromised military preparations as I alluded to in my last post. A few 
more words are in order with respect to the matter of Richard Sorge, 
Stalin's top agent in Japan. Mark Jones reports correctly that Sorge 
informed Stalin of an impending invasion by the Nazis. What he leaves 
out is Stalin's reaction to Sorge's urgent reports cabled to the Kremlin 
in May and June of 1941. Sorge had intelligence on the precise timing of 
Hitler's attack, the size of the army, the operational plans, and the 
directions of the main strikes.


Stalin's reaction?

He wrote on them. "For the archives". "To be filed" and forgot about them.

Stalin was foolish enough to believe that Hitler would never break his 
word. Any facts that departed from this ridiculous belief were 
disregarded. His public displays were in harmony with his beliefs. When 
Yosuke Matsuoka, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, left Moscow 
in April, 1941, Stalin and Molotov surprised everybody by seeing him off 
at the railway station. The German ambassador, who was there, reports 
that Stalin came over and hugged him. He said in a voice loud enough for 
everybody to hear, :"We must remain friends, and you must now do 
everything to that end."

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Re: [Marxism] The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality - CounterPunch.org

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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Lots of "half right" assertions  it's actually complicated to sort out
the propaganda from "decent history" ---

(the reference to the idea that Stalin was killing Polish officers who had
committed war crimes in 1921 --- and doing that "punishment" in 1941!! ---
is a "real beaut"!)

And the legalistic nit picking that since the Polish government had
disintegrated, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland was "not aggression"
is ridiculous 

The betrayal at Munich of a potential alliance with the Soviets to protect
Czechoslovakia on the other hand is accurate, I believe.

>
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[Marxism] (99+) (PDF) Ukrainian Capitalism and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry | Volodymyr Ishchenko - Academia.edu

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.academia.edu/40165681/Ukrainian_Capitalism_and_Inter-Imperialist_Rivalry
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[Marxism] Capital — built on slavery

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/48834/Capital+++built+on+slavery
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[Marxism] Iran imprisons environmentalists seeking to protect endangered Asiatic cheetah - The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/environmentalists-filmed-irans-vanishing-cheetahs-now-they-could-be-executed-for-spying/2019/08/25/551f2aa8-be9b-11e9-a8b0-7ed8a0d5dc5d_story.html
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[Marxism] The farmers who worry about our phone batteries - BBC News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Out of habit, Sara Plaza smiles when her photo is taken, but when she 
talks about what has happened to the land around her home, tears start 
to run down her face.


"There used to be beautiful lagoons down there, with hundreds of 
flamingos," she says. "When they opened their wing, you'd see their 
pretty pink and black feathers. Now it's all dry and the birds have gone."


Peine, the dusty village where she lives in northern Chile, sits on a 
hillside by the Salar de Atacama, an enormous 3,000 sq km (1,200 sq 
mile) salt flat in the driest desert on the planet.


https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49355817
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[Marxism] The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(How interesting that a "leftist" historian justifies Stalin's 
occupation of the eastern half of Poland based on realpolitik. This is 
identical, of course, to excuses made for Putin's intervention in Ukraine.)


The fact that the Soviet Union laid claim to a sphere of influence 
beyond its borders is sometimes described as evidence of sinister 
expansionist intentions; however, establishing spheres of influence, 
either unilaterally, bilaterally, or multilaterally, had long been a 
widely accepted practice among powers big and not so big, and was often 
intended to avoid conflict. The Monroe Doctrine, for example, which 
“asserted that the New World and the Old World were to remain distinctly 
separate spheres of influence” (Wikipedia), purported to forestall 
transatlantic new colonial ventures by European powers that might have 
brought them into conflict with the United States. Similarly, when 
Churchill visited Moscow in 1944 and offered to Stalin to carve up the 
Balkan Peninsula into spheres of influence, the intention was to avoid 
conflict between their respective countries after the end of the war 
against Nazi Germany.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/26/the-hitler-stalin-pact-of-august-23-1939-myth-and-reality/
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[Marxism] Was Simone de Beauvoir as feminist as we thought? | Books | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Seventy years after The Second Sex reinvented women’s liberation, her 
legacy has its contradictions – but it should not be overlooked


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/20/was-simone-de-beauvoir-as-feminist-as-we-thought
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Re: [Marxism] Furr

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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So let me get this straight as an outsider --- Russians did NOT "admit"
that Stalin murdered the Polish officers at Katyn?   I thought that was
settledPolish writers might be somewhat "objective" having bones to
pick with Russians AND Germans re over 200 years of history -- but perhaps
the anti-communism of the current Polish polity leans towards blaming
Stalin as a knee jerk reaction I agree that western "Cold Warriors" are
suspect --- it's really up to the new generation with access to sources
(always problematic in Russia, even today) to sort things out --- that's
why I thought that some Russian (officially?) "admitted" that Stalin did it
--- but memory is hazy in this old man 



> 
>  
> <82b78547-2eed-47a6-a705-5e314713a...@nyc.rr.com>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Re: [Marxism] NY Times: Sidney Rittenberg, Idealistic American Aide to Mao Who Evolved to Counsel Capitalists, Dies at 98

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Actually this particular biography has been widely critiqued, especially by
left anti-Maoists, for its sloppiness and fabrications. See in particular
"Was Mao Really a Monster?" edited by Lin Chun and Gregor Benton.
Everything written and edited by Benton is essential, both for his
documentation of Mao's crimes and for his gathering of Chinese Trotskyist
writings.

On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 9:57 PM John Reimann via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> " I recently read the biography of Mao "Mao, the unknown story" by Jung
> Chang. The author is the daughter of two of Mao's supporters who were later
> crushed by him... "
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Re: [Marxism] Furr

[Glauber Ataide via Marxism]

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Few comments about Furr really addressed the low-level details one should
expect in such a debate.

Too many emotional conclusions, but insufficient development leading to
them.

Probably we'll have to wait some years until someone diggers deeper than
Furr in these recently disclosed files and comes up with different
conclusions.



Andrew Stewart via Marxism  schrieb am So.,
25. Aug. 2019, 21:13:

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>
> Grover Furr and his quixotic quest to repudiate the entire indictment of
> Stalin is compromised rather unfortunately by his mixture of purported new
> insights with quite old Maoist “anti-revisionist” talking points that were
> tired and annoying in 1968. There is a serious need for a genuine analysis
> of the Soviet Union’s history that is not tethered to Trotskyist ideas
> (which I find to be simply unreasonable and altogether determinist) but
> Furr doesn’t deliver that, instead he charges at the windmills of
> “Khrushchevite revisionism” in a way that doesn’t even acknowledge how the
> economy under the different leaderships evolved over time. The reason why
> this is important (and why Furr fails) is because that is the primary
> reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Socialism Betrayed by Kenny
> and Keeran (published by International, the CPUSA label) makes a convincing
> case that the collapse was caused by the growth of the second economy, a
> black market that sprang up parallel to the command system that undermined
> the command system and eventually fostered a dual power standoff between
> the Soviet and capitalism in 1991. The genesis for this issue stems from
> two different wings of the Communist Party. Stalin’s centrism ended up
> being the left wing within the mainstream after the smothering of the Left
> Opposition. Bukharin was the right wing and wanted to continue the NEP
> rather than move towards forced collectivization and expropriation of the
> kulaks. Kenny and Keeran argue that Bukharin’s theories remained viable
> within the party long after he was killed and that first Khrushchev and
> later Gorbachev subsequently worked to reintroduce those policies under
> their tenures. Notably the recent major biography of Deng Xioaping argues
> that the same thing happened when Deng took power, he had studied in the
> Soviet Union when Bukharin was the major Comintern theoretician on economic
> matters. The difference between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
> maintenance of the Chinese Communist Party was essentially the policy on
> dissent in mass uprisings by workers as these policies began to create
> further hardship for them, Alexander Cockburn pointed this out in a few
> pieces from the period:
>
> https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/06/the-meaning-of-tiananmen-square/
>
> https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/radical-reality
>
>
> Best regards,
> Andrew Stewart
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> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 13:46:53 -0400
> From: Glenn Kissack 
> To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
>
> Subject: [Marxism] Furr
> Message-ID: <82b78547-2eed-47a6-a705-5e314713a...@nyc.rr.com>
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>
>
> > To start with, I am not going to spend $20 on anything written by Furr.
> I got bootlegged copies of Sunkara and Blumenthal's books to review for the
> same reason. I might consider that in Furr's case but Columbia does not
> have any of his books. Quelle surprise.
> >
>
> Louis: I understand your feelings. So just two final (I promise) questions
> about Grover Furr for the listserv:
>
> 1. Are any parts of his work valuable as a corrective to the anti-Soviet
> writings of people like Robert Conquest? As you wrote, Furr reads Russian
> and has worked with Russian historians in examining the Soviet archives. So
> has he made any valuable discoveries?
>
> 2. Have there been any scholarly refutations of his claims?
>
> People like J. Arch Getty (Origins of the Great Purges), Robert Thurston
> (Life and Terror in Stalin?s Russia, 1934-1941), and others who were able
> to look in the newly opened archives, were able to correct some of earlier
> false and exaggerated claims about the Stalin period. Is Furr continuing in
> this tradition?
>
> It?s amazing to me how much Furr written