[Marxism] Q

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032020/coronavirus-harvard-doctor-climate-change-public-health

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[Marxism] Comment on "Polio, COVID-19, and socialism"

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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From long-time commenter Farans Kolosar:

I contracted polio during the summer of 1952 shortly before I was 
supposed to enter kindergarten. The actual illness was frightening and 
painful, but the terror it inspired was almost worse. I remember that, 
as I was lying on the examining table, feverish and aching, in the 
process of being diagnosed, the table suddenly began to buck and roll 
like a ship in a heavy sea and I felt I was about to be hurled onto the 
floor. Whether this was the effect of the disease or the perhaps 
clumsily performed spinal tap necessary to diagnose it, I’m not sure it, 
but added to the fear. I recall being wheeled on a gurney down what 
seemed an interminable corridor lined with iron lungs, each with a 
small, peaked-faced child’s head protruding from one end. A bit later, 
during what I suppose was the climax of the disease, I recall feeling my 
whole body on fire with pain as the virus raced up and down the nerve 
pathways. For a day or two I couldn’t sleep or find a comfortable 
position in which to rest,


The disease itself passed rather quickly, but it was only after it was 
past that the extent of the damage could be assessed. Some patients were 
paralyzed but recovered later; others remained paralyzed for the rest of 
their lives; many died. Nerves damaged or destroyed by the virus could 
no longer innervate muscles and those muscles atrophied.


I was, as they invariably say, lucky: at the end of the day, I had a 
fair bit of atrophy to the muscles of my right leg, and possibly a bit 
of nervous system damage affecting physical coordination and tasks like 
handwriting, but was otherwise unscathed. At present my right leg is an 
inch shorter than the left leg and the foot is dropped and twisted 
slightly to one side, but even now, in my seventies, I seldom limp and 
as a rule suffer only occasional loss of balance. The leg is nonetheless 
useful, although it is sinfully easy to get me off balance, which kept 
me from learning how to fight “like a man” growing up. For the most part 
the damage isn’t obvious unless I’m wearing short pants, and even then 
not everyone notices. In my younger days I was even able to run a 
little, though organized athletics were out of the question because I 
was so bad at them.


Out next-door neighbors in the more-or-less Winesburg, Ohio I grew up in 
were less fortunate: there were two boys, the younger of whom was my 
good friend for a while. The older brother had been in early adolescence 
when striken and was paralyzed from the waist down. He lived in a 
wheelchair and had to be hoisted in and out of bed with a sort of crane. 
Themother, who worked as a waitress in a local tavern, raised the two 
boys alone. I remember their rented apartment as being as bare of 
furnishings as the set of The Honeymooners. The place was scrupulously 
clean and had no odor apart from a faint smell of Dial soap. They were 
brave, strong people.


When Salk and Sabin produced their vaccines, the public health 
authorities made sure all the schoolchildren were vaccinated. I would 
get my picture in the local paper as the brave little sufferer who got 
the vaccinations in spite of not really needing them just to show others 
how safe and easy it was.


Just now I was reading a news item asserting that Trump is trying to get 
an exclusive US patent on a German coronavirus candidate vaccine. Nobody 
seems to think there’s anything strange about this bit of international 
thuggery. What a long, sorry road we’ve come down since the days of Salk 
and Sabin. There’s a retreat from socially necessary governance across 
the board unlike anything we’ve seen before–the inevitable product of 
years of neoliberalism, not just the sickening malice and ineptitude of 
Trump.


Stay safe comrades. It’s a bungle out there.

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Dennis on Enyeart, 'Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic's Fight for Democracy'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
Date: Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 7:27 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Dennis on Enyeart, 'Death to Fascism:
Louis Adamic's Fight for Democracy'
To: 
Cc: H-Net Staff 


John P. Enyeart.  Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic's Fight for
Democracy.  Working Class in American History Series. Urbana
University of Illinois Press, 2019.  xii + 216 pp.  $25.00 (paper),
ISBN 978-0-252-08432-4; $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04250-8.

Reviewed by Michael Dennis (Acadia University)
Published on H-Socialisms (March, 2020)
Commissioned by Gary Roth

Louis Adamic, Fascism, and Democracy

Remembered primarily as an exponent of cultural pluralism in the
left-wing press of the 1930s, writer Louis Adamic was in fact a
radical antifascist who championed a bold vision of economic and
racial democracy, while it was fashionable in the interwar years and
during the period of growing Cold War conformity that followed VE
Day. So contends historian John Enyeart in a persuasive and
perceptive study of a neglected mid-twentieth-century left
intellectual.

Enyeart's is a work of engaged revisionism that seeks to revive and
rehabilitate the memory of this popular front intellectual. The
author is determined to rescue the Yugoslav émigré from the kind of
sentimental liberal tolerance that prevailed among the American
intelligentsia of the era as well as from the accusations of
communist fellow-traveling that dogged him in the last years of his
life and continues to warp at least some scholarly treatments of him
today. Carried on the massive waves of immigration that brought
millions of southeast Europeans to America in the early twentieth
century, Adamic lived the life of a prototypical immigrant, working a
variety of unskilled jobs, studying English at night, navigating
periodic unemployment, and developing the literary skills that would
transform him into a distinctive American voice of dissent. In
response to an offer by the US government to accelerate the
immigration process by serving in the armed forces, Adamic joined the
US Army in 1917. By this time, the young Slovene was already a
voracious reader, one who compulsively sought out public libraries to
fuel his need to understand modern America. Discharged from the army
in 1923, the autodidactic and literary impulses continued. Landing in
Los Angeles, he became a close acquaintance of Carey McWiliams, the
lawyer-journalist who would eventually edit the _Nation_, as well as
other luminaries in the local literary scene. These experiences
fueled his desire to write.

His efforts began to pay off when H. L. Mencken's _The Mercury_ and
other literary journals began to publish his short stories and
essays. Benefiting from the indispensable editorial assistance of his
wife, Stella Sanders, whom he married in 1931, Adamic developed his
voice as a modernist writer, imbibing Sigmund Freud, Feodor
Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche, but also the social realism of
American writers Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos
Passos. It was in Los Angeles that Adamic began, through his
journalistic output, to shape a coherent image of his new country.
The image was not pretty: a country of deluded religious zealots
(radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson) and misguided idealists who
foolishly dared to challenge the political and economic status quo
(as detailed in his 1936 short story, "The Crusader"), and a venal
and materialistic society fixated on a delusional success myth that
left most, as Enyeart writes, "existing in a perpetual state of
alienation and despair." If ever Adamic was wide-eyed about America,
he now found himself disillusioned by "the depths of immigrants'
misery, capitalism's supremacy, democracy's failure, and the limits
of radicalism" (p. 25). Capitalism was too entrenched to imagine any
meaningful challenge to it. It was more a tragic, cynical sensibility
than a righteous indignation that he channeled in his most popular
book, the 1931 _Dynamite_, a history of how violence became the
method and the consequence for labor radicals and social dissidents
alike who imagined they could square the American promise with the
American reality.

Out of this stew of modernist reading, indignant social commentary,
and immigrant disaffection, Adamic began to fashion a critique of the
imagined American identity. By the early 1930s, he had honed an
attack on the myth of the American melting pot that harkened back to
Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen. It was a critique that resonated
among an immigrant readership who felt similarly alienated.
Anglo-Saxon dominance and the concomitant demand for 

[Marxism] Seattle hospital overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/scott_mintzer/status/1239290403838480385

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[Marxism] Why America Will Never Get Medicare for All

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, March 15, 2020
Why America Will Never Get Medicare for All
By Eduardo Porter

Mr. Porter is an economics reporter for The Times.

The weirdest thing about the Democratic primary is how un-American it 
sounds.


For all their differences, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden — the last men 
standing — both call for a robust expansion of government programs. Mr. 
Sanders wants “Medicare for all”; Mr. Biden wants a “public option” to 
compete against private insurance. Both call for a vast increase in 
Section 8 housing vouchers. Mr. Sanders wants to build 10 million 
affordable housing units.


So far, the debate around these ideas has focused on the fiscal and 
political obstacles (Mitch McConnell, ahem). But there’s a bigger 
problem. Americans have repeatedly rejected expansions of the social 
safety net because it inevitably collides with one of the most powerful 
forces shaping the American experience: uncompromising racism.


Racism has forever been a forbidding obstacle to the development of a 
welfare state, at least of the sort that Europe enjoys and many 
Americans aspire to. By standing in the way of solidarity, it has 
produced an exceptional country that accepts without flinching the most 
extreme wealth alongside deprivation that has no place in the 
industrialized world.


Why does the United States suffer the highest poverty rate among wealthy 
nations? Why does it have the highest teen pregnancy rate? Why are so 
many Americans addled by opioids? We blame globalization and technology. 
But these forces affect everybody — the French and the Canadians and the 
Japanese as much as us.


The United States alone has crumpled because it showed no interest in 
building the safeguards erected in other advanced countries to protect 
those on the wrong side of these changes. Why? Because we couldn’t be 
moved to build a safety net that cut across our divisions of ethnicity 
and race.


Take a look back through modern American history. There are few greater 
heroes to liberals than Franklin Roosevelt, the first architect of 
America’s welfare state. His New Deal to combat the Great Depression 
proposed the government as guarantor of the well-being of the governed.


On Roosevelt’s watch, workers gained the first national minimum wage, 
unemployment insurance and the right to form unions, strike and engage 
in collective bargaining. Older Americans got Social Security pensions.


But in order to win support of Southern Democrats, Roosevelt ensured 
that major parts of the New Deal excluded nonwhites. The Federal Housing 
Administration, to take one New Deal creation, is celebrated for 
expanding homeownership, but it also refused to back loans in 
predominantly black neighborhoods, or for black people period.


New Deal labor codes allowed businesses to offer whites a first crack at 
jobs and authorized lower pay scales for blacks. In their first 
incarnation, Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act excluded 
domestic and farm jobs, which employed two out of three black workers.


In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson hoped to expand the New Deal to cover 
nonwhite Americans. He had some successes — not least civil rights 
legislation and the war on poverty. But he also fatally undermined the 
fragile political consensus between Southern and liberal Democrats that 
had defined the New Deal consensus.


Medicare and Medicaid, which became law in 1965, were the last major 
programs inspired by the New Deal. Since then, America has turned 
against welfare in favor of another, different tool of social 
management: prison. The same year Medicare and Medicaid passed, Johnson 
declared a war on crime; his successor, Richard Nixon, made crime 
fighting a central plank in his platform. In 1971 he declared a 
corollary war on drugs.


Race was at the heart of Nixon’s vision. “You have to face the fact that 
the whole problem is really the blacks,” he declared in 1969, according 
to notes in the diary of his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. “The key is 
to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”


By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was slashing government spending and 
asserting that taxpayers were being defrauded by undeserving black 
“welfare queens.” In 1996 Bill Clinton, who began his presidency with a 
bold promise to deliver universal health insurance, instead ended 
“welfare as we know it,” replacing Aid to Families With Dependent 
Children, the federal government’s primary social-welfare program, with 
a block grant to states, which could withhold aid as they saw fit.


In the 1960s, the American government was roughly the same size as that 
of other rich nations: In 1965, 

[Marxism] Will the coronavirus socialize our thinking?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Washington Post, March 15, 2020
Will the coronavirus socialize our thinking?
By E.J. Dionne Jr.

A pandemic makes all of us a little bit more socialist.

That’s because a virus does not respond to market incentives. It 
threatens absolutely everyone and is by definition a collective threat, 
as the term “community spread” reminds us. Containing it requires all of 
us to focus on the common good and respond to calls to altruism.


Those who can survive the coronavirus, especially the young, are thus 
asked to take genuinely inconvenient steps, less to protect themselves 
than to mitigate the damage it could do to others, especially the old.


Understanding and defeating an epidemic requires a government that can 
effectively organize easy testing for millions — which is exactly what 
we haven’t been able to do so far. But this means counting on competent, 
forward-looking agencies. Advocates of small government cheer “cutting 
bureaucracies” until we discover we need the bureaucracies that were 
“streamlined.”


The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has 
affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.


Thus has President Trump come under criticism for eliminating two teams 
set up to plan for, and deal with, health crises. His nasty word salad 
responding to the thoroughly appropriate inquiry about this from PBS’s 
Yamiche Alcindor at his Friday news conference shows how vulnerable he 
must feel. As Laurie Garrett noted on Foreign Policy magazine’s website 
in January, Trump ordered the National Security Council’s “entire global 
health security unit shut down” in May 2018. It was set up by President 
Barack Obama after the Ebola crisis. This followed the dissolution of a 
center at the Department of Homeland Security charged with monitoring 
epidemics.


People who feel they might have coronavirus have a responsibility to get 
tested, right? But guess what? Those tests cost money. Rep. Katie Porter 
(D-Calif.) did a whiteboard exercise at a congressional hearing last 
week when questioning Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention, and Robert Kadlec, the assistant 
secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and 
Human Services.


First, she used her board to show that when emergency room costs were 
included, the price of a battery of tests would come to $1,331. Then, 
she got Redfield to acknowledge that he would like, in his words, “All 
of America” to be tested. Finally, she pressed him to “commit to the 
CDC, right now, using [its] existing authority, to pay for diagnostic 
testing, free to every American, regardless of insurance.”


He was forced to give in to her logic. “I think you’re an excellent 
questioner,” he said, “so my answer is yes.”


There you have it: In at least the one sphere of coronavirus testing, 
sheer common sense got a Trump administration official to agree to a 
smidgen of socialized medicine. Free testing was part of the “Families 
First” bill the House passed early Saturday morning that also includes 
initial other steps toward socially responsible policies, including 
family and medical leave coverage and enhanced unemployment insurance. 
If it’s in everyone’s interest for everyone to get tests, it’s also in 
everyone’s interest for the government to finance them.


Another way to contain the virus and the deaths it can cause is for sick 
people to get the care they need. Broad health insurance coverage and an 
excellent public health system are vital to this end. You don’t have to 
agree with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Medicare-for-all to 
acknowledge he had a point Thursday when he said: “Our country is at a 
severe disadvantage compared to every other major country on earth 
because we do not guarantee health care to all people as a right.”


No, I don’t expect this emergency to get members of the Business 
Roundtable to start singing “Solidarity Forever.” But you would like to 
hope it would encourage a bit of rethinking among those who regularly 
hate on government bureaucrats, denounce experts as useless elitists, 
claim the market can solve every problem, and lament what a terrible 
imposition it is when workers’ rights and benefits are imposed on our 
“job creators.”


Might they now acknowledge that some problems can only be dealt with 
collectively through public action? In their book “The Cost of Rights,” 
the scholars Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein spoke a truth we are 
too quick to deny: that “government is still the most effective 
instrument available by which a politically organized society can pursue 
its common objectives, including the 

Re: [Marxism] Kevin Coogan

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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I like first piece though it had no real relation to try the corporate NY
Times project.

The Democratic Review is interesting enough and available online, but it
had absolutely nothing to do with the history of political radicalism.
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Re: [Marxism] Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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The SDF was reportedly receiving aid worth $300 million per year from the US 
(now cut to $200 million).  This was in the context of the war against ISIS.

By comparison, the Turkish military budget is $19 billion.

Even if US allies like Saudi Arabia make up for the cut to direct US aid, the 
resources of the SDF will still be tiny compared to those of Turkey, which has 
the military aircraft, tanks, drones, etc.

When Turkey invaded Afrin, the US did nothing to stop the invasion.  The US was 
only interested in suppressing ISIS, not helping the SDF against Turkey.

Last year Turkey invaded a strip of land in northeastern Syria.  Currently the 
Turkish army is focusing on Idlib, but if the ceasefire there holds I expect a 
stepped up invasion of the northeast.

Chris Slee

From: Marxism  on behalf of RKOB via 
Marxism 
Sent: Sunday, 15 March 2020 9:47:37 PM
To: Chris Slee 
Cc: RKOB 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG

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So does this mean you deny the support of the dictatorships of Saudi
Arabia, Egypt and UAE for the YPG?

We have already demonstarted this support in other articles. This is
simply undenyable!

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/shameful-alliance-of-saudi-monarchy-and-ypg-in-syria/

And if 200 or 300 millions US-Dollar from the Pentagon for the YPG/SDF
every year (!) is insignificant, I wonder what is significant! And these
are only the official figures from the U.S. army!

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/syria-how-much-does-the-pentagon-pay-for-the-ypg/



Am 14.03.2020 um 22:34 schrieb Chris Slee:
> Michael Probsting quotes an article in Middle East Eye, which in turn
> quotes an article in al-Araby al-Jadeed (the New Arab), which in turn
> quotes "unnamed Egyptian sources" talking about "major military
> assistance" to the SDF from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
>
> According to Wikipedia, al-Araby al-Jadeed is owned by Fadaat Media
> Ltd, a Qatar-based company.  Given Qatar's close links with Turkey, I
> would expect a Qatar-based company to be supportive of Turkey, and
> hence hostile to the SDF.
>
> Hence I don't regard this report as reliable.
>
> Whatever small amount of assistance the SDF has got from the US and
> its allies is insignificant compared to the strength of the invading
> Turkish army, which has both NATO-supplied and locally manufactured
> weapons.
>
> Chris Slee
> 
> *From:* Marxism  on behalf of
> RKOB via Marxism 
> *Sent:* Saturday, 14 March 2020 11:42:02 PM
> *To:* Chris Slee 
> *Cc:* RKOB 
> *Subject:* [Marxism] Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG
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>
> Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG
>
> Arab dictatorships increase their support for the foot soldiers of U.S.
> imperialism in Syria
>
> By Michael Pröbsting, 14 March 2020
>
> https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/characteristic-supporters-of-the-kurdish-ypg/
>
> --
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> )
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> Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314
>
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Kevin Coogan

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Looking now at the second article that Kevin sent me, which is a 
fascinating study of the Democratic Review, a magazine that supported 
slavery:


In a country where in 1840 some 78% of all white males voted in the 
election – a statistic utterly unthinkable in Europe – Democratic 
Review’s embrace of political radicalism led it to champion the radical 
Loco-Focos wing of the Democratic Party with its populism, embrace of 
the annexation of both Texas and the Oregon Territories, opposition to 
any federal bank, the rejection of capital punishment, and active 
support (both covert and overt) for European revolutionaries. At the 
same time, Democratic Review embraced the expansion of slavery and 
published pseudo-ethnographical racist articles such as “Transactions of 
the American Ethnological Society” and “Origins and Characteristics of 
the American Aborigines.”




He described the Democratic Review as an "obscure" magazine. I only wish 
I had been able to discuss my reading of the magazine under the 
editorial direction of poet William Cullen Bryant, who was an early 
supporter of the abolition of slavery. My interest in the magazine was 
focused on Bryant's attitude toward American Indians, which was 
contradictory as I pointed out here:


https://louisproyect.org/2019/05/08/thomas-cole-william-cullen-bryant-and-the-american-indian/

Most people, including professors, by the time they reach 70 lose their 
intellectual drive. Kevin was burning bright up until a couple of weeks 
before he died. My blog is diminished by his passing. His comments were 
in a class by themselves.


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[Marxism] Idlib: Syrian Protestors Stop Russian-Turkish Joint Patrol on the M4 Highway

[RKOB via Marxism]

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Idlib: Syrian Protestors Stop Russian-Turkish Joint Patrol on the M4 Highway

On the 10^th anniversary of the Syrian Revolution, people demonstrate 
their determination to continue the liberation struggle against the 
Russian-Iranian-Assadist occupiers!


Statement, 15 March 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/idlib-syrian-protestors-stop-russian-turkish-joint-patrol-on-m4-highway/

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Re: [Marxism] COVID-19: the medium is the message - The Lancet

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 3/15/20 1:16 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30600-0/fulltext 



A comrade had trouble with this link, so here's the whole thing:

In a world of polarising distrust and trade tensions, the spread of 
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), both within nations and 
internationally, is aided and abetted by misinformation that 
circumnavigates the planet in microseconds. Such misinformation is not 
all malevolent, although its impact can be devastating. The only bastion 
of defence against rising public panic, financial market hysteria, and 
unintended misunderstandings of the science and epidemiology of severe 
acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is agile, 
accurate, worldwide-available counter-information that takes the high 
moral ground and conveys a consistently science-driven narrative. Some 
have sought to limit misinformation about COVID-19 on social media by 
pressuring corporations, such as Facebook, Weibo, and Twitter, to censor 
bad actors—an approach that has not stopped conspiracy theorists, 
trolls, and liars.


If financial markets are jittery about the flow of information and 
disruption to production and supply chains with the global spread of 
COVID-19 and governments are seeking to avoid panic among their 
populaces, they need to invest in bastions of truth—or, at least, in 
those that attempt to identify information based on scientific 
principles. The “truth” can, and should, change as investigations and 
data analysis of COVID-19 proceed, but its bottom line ought to 
consistently reflect empiricism, a solid dose of scepticism and 
scrutiny, and absolute conviction in timely dissemination of life-saving 
research and analysis. And those bastions must resist attempts to sway 
their messaging to reflect institutional or political interests.

• View related content for this article

Despite numerous pleas, starting in January, 2020, to donors from WHO 
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for US$675 million for the 
agency's response to COVID-19 and assistance to poor countries in 
handling their outbreaks, only $54·5 million (including $37 million in 
financing on March 3, 2020, from the US Government) was in WHO coffers 
before stock markets worldwide tumbled and financial panic went viral. 
That's appalling. On March 3, the World Bank Group announced the quick 
release of $12 billion to support COVID-19 responses in resource-scarce 
nations. And the International Monetary Fund Managing Director 
Kristalina Georgieva, forecasting a dramatic slow down in global 
economic growth due to the epidemic, announced the creation of $50 
billion worth of funds to support low-income and emerging market 
countries in the response to COVID-19.


Inside the USA, meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention (CDC) has seen its overall budget plummet from about $11·5 
billion in fiscal year (FY) 2018 to $7·7 billion in FY 2020. For FY 
2021, Robert Redfield, the CDC's Director appointed by US President 
Donald Trump, is seeking a further cut to $7 billion, and the White 
House proposes reducing CDC funding to levels below $6·7 billion. The 
Redfield FY 2021 budget reduction would be partly achieved by reductions 
in spending on programmes for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases, 
global health, and public health preparedness and response—the three 
areas most closely tied to the COVID-19 epidemic.


However, there is even less funding for professional communications 
staffing at WHO, the various Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 
in Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia, or their counterpart offices 
nested in local departments of public health. If the media isn't getting 
the message, in all likelihood the messengers have insufficient 
resources for delivery.


The current global COVID-19 epidemic features mechanisms of delivery of 
scientific information that are frankly unprecedented, adding to 
pressure for proper interpretation by the media and public. Scientific 
and medical publications are expediting research and analysis through 
peer review, while preprint services are publishing unreviewed work. 
Some researchers are engaging in open online venues, debating the 
calculus of crucial epidemic COVID-19 features, such as its basic 
reproduction number (R0), case fatality rates, age and gender 
distributions of severe and deceased cases, or the accuracy of case 
reporting, itself. Those debates have fuelled media reporting, even when 
the evidence is still uncertain and research is ongoing.
The difficulty in sifting fact from inaccurate information is 

[Marxism] Kevin Coogan

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I have begun work on an homage to this comrade who died recently. The 
last communications I got from him were about my CounterPunch article 
about Project 1619 that got into the divisions between the Victoria 
Woodhull and Friedrich Sorge wings of the First International. Drawing 
from Timothy Messer-Kruse, who told me that he has his own article for 
CounterPunch on this stuff in the works, I pointed out that Sorge's 
views on race were pretty awful.


He told me that he had worked on a book about Karl Marx and racism that 
only remained a work in progress. He sent me 3 chapters that I will be 
posting as part of the memorial. This is the start of chapter one:



GETTING PAST THE “N” WORD: MARX AND RACISM

“The Jewish Nigger Lassalle, who fortunately departs at the end of this 
week, has luckily again lost 5,000 taler in a fraudulent speculation. 
The fellow would rather throw his money into the muck then lend it to a 
‘friend,’ even if the interest and capital were guaranteed.”


- Marx to Engels, 30 July 1862.

“Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would 
be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the 
map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of 
modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you 
will have wiped America off the map of nations.”


– Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

Some years ago a friend commented on the problem of talking with a 
Christian fundamentalist. She noted that no matter what the initial 
subject of the conversation was, say the weather or traffic, sooner or 
later as the conversation evolved it was almost certain that the name 
“Jesus” was going to be mentioned with testimony about what how he was 
really a great guy.


A similar fate all too often awaits readers of books written by devout 
Marxists.  No matter what the ostensible subject under discussion with 
regard to Marx’s view of this or that, time and time again the reader 
will discover just how great Karl Marx really was. In fact it is 
virtually impossible to read any tome produced in (for example) either 
the former East Germany or the Soviet Union that came to any other 
conclusion. Needless to say, neither the Russians nor the East Germans 
failed to see any irony in the fact that any author who tried to argue 
otherwise would never see a word of his argument in print even as both 
states assured the readers that they embodied Marx’s democratic heritage 
unlike their capitalist scoundrel rivals in the West.


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[Marxism] COVID-19: the medium is the message - The Lancet

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https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30600-0/fulltext

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[Marxism] Radical Lives: On New Biographies of Rose Pastor Stokes and Dorothy Day - Los Angeles Review of Books

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/radical-lives-on-new-biographies-of-rose-pastor-stokes-and-dorothy-day/

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[Marxism] Chile: Notes from a Revolt | The New York Review of Books | Daily

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By Ariel Dorfman

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/13/chile-notes-from-a-revolt/

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[Marxism] Germany and US wrestle over coronavirus vaccine: report | News | DW | 15.03.2020

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In marked contrast to Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-and-us-wrestle-over-coronavirus-vaccine-report/a-52777990

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[Marxism] It was the virus that did it | Michael Roberts Blog

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COVID-19 was the tipping point.  One analogy is to imagine a sandpile 
building up to a peak; then grains of sand start to slip off; and then 
comes a certain point with one more sand particle added, the whole 
sandpile falls over. If you are a post-Keynesian you might prefer 
calling this a ‘Minsky moment’, after Hyman Minsky, who argued that 
capitalism appears to be stable until it isn’t, because stability breeds 
instability.  A Marxist would say, yes there is instability but that 
instability turns into an avalanche periodically because of the 
underlying contradictions in the capitalist mode of production for profit.


https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/it-was-the-virus-that-did-it/

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Re: [Marxism] Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG

[RKOB via Marxism]

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So does this mean you deny the support of the dictatorships of Saudi 
Arabia, Egypt and UAE for the YPG?


We have already demonstarted this support in other articles. This is 
simply undenyable!


https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/shameful-alliance-of-saudi-monarchy-and-ypg-in-syria/

And if 200 or 300 millions US-Dollar from the Pentagon for the YPG/SDF 
every year (!) is insignificant, I wonder what is significant! And these 
are only the official figures from the U.S. army!


https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/syria-how-much-does-the-pentagon-pay-for-the-ypg/



Am 14.03.2020 um 22:34 schrieb Chris Slee:
Michael Probsting quotes an article in Middle East Eye, which in turn 
quotes an article in al-Araby al-Jadeed (the New Arab), which in turn 
quotes "unnamed Egyptian sources" talking about "major military 
assistance" to the SDF from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.


According to Wikipedia, al-Araby al-Jadeed is owned by Fadaat Media 
Ltd, a Qatar-based company.  Given Qatar's close links with Turkey, I 
would expect a Qatar-based company to be supportive of Turkey, and 
hence hostile to the SDF.


Hence I don't regard this report as reliable.

Whatever small amount of assistance the SDF has got from the US and 
its allies is insignificant compared to the strength of the invading 
Turkish army, which has both NATO-supplied and locally manufactured 
weapons.


Chris Slee

*From:* Marxism  on behalf of 
RKOB via Marxism 

*Sent:* Saturday, 14 March 2020 11:42:02 PM
*To:* Chris Slee 
*Cc:* RKOB 
*Subject:* [Marxism] Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG
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Characteristic Supporters of the Kurdish YPG

Arab dictatorships increase their support for the foot soldiers of U.S.
imperialism in Syria

By Michael Pröbsting, 14 March 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/characteristic-supporters-of-the-kurdish-ypg/

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