[Marxism] China vs. USA, Swift vs. Digital Wallets

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Worth watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfKfSUqn_GY=youtu.be
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[Marxism] President Franklin Delano Cuomo?

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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"How does the sound of “President Franklin Delano Cuomo” grab you? Like it
or not, Cuomo is already in effect running against Trump. Every day he’s on
national TV, giving a fact-based approach to the greatest crisis the US has
faced for at least 50 years, if not more. As is inevitable, he is being
compared to Trump."
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/05/14/president-franklin-delano-cuomo/

-- 
*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] Glenn Greenwald on Chomsky & Voting for Lesser Evil

[Glenn Kissack via Marxism]

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Apologies if someone has already posted this. Greenwald makes many sensible 
points in this interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSSnaGCXanA
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[Marxism] Movement for a People’s Party formation announced

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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The Black Agenda Report has an article on the effort to organize a new 
movement for a people's party https: 
//www.blackagendareport.com/leftists-jump-corporate-democratic-ship-leaving-sanders-behind.


   Nearly three-quarters of the 10,000-strong Los Angeles chapter of
   Our Revolution, the mass
   organization birthed during Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid,
   voted to leave the Democratic Party and join the Movement for a
   People’s Party, also founded
   by operatives from Sanders’ 2016 campaign. In effect, Sanders’ most
   committed supporters have refused to once again be sheep-dogged by
   their mentor into the cemetery where U.S. social movements go to die.

Press release: 
https://peoplesparty.org/our-revolution-los-angeles-joins-the-movement-for-a-peoples-party/


Note that, from what I've read of their platform, the organizers are not 
explicitly advocating that people not vote for the Democratic candidate; 
they could have but it's probably unnecessarily divisive. They inveigh 
instead, trenchantly and in some detail, against the current party 
duopoly and the present electoral process.


They invite all movements and individuals with beliefs similar to those 
in their declared platform to join them.


They could move beyond (or with a section of) the DSA, seemingly 
embroiled as it is in its impasse over electoral support.


This is a follow-on that has been looked for since 2016, as Sanders has 
again endorsed the Democratic Party choice, just as he has always said 
he would. He has a different agenda from his constituents from here on 
out, which has always been implicitly tied to his role in the Congress 
and his reelection by his diverse constituents in a money-driven 
Senatorial campaign. So bye bye Bernie.


The move to organize outside the two parties begins now not after the 
election, with a committed base with nowhere else to go but move ahead 
of the irredeemably corporate, effectively dead two-party system.


This is well and good, of course, and maybe a necessary way-station, but 
moving beyond the rigged electoral system to participatory democracy, 
and the new system that entails, remains the priority.



*Our Revolution Los Angeles and the Movement for a People’s Party*
*
**https://peoplesparty.org/*

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Slavery]: Strauch on Boles, 'Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty' and Riley, 'Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America'

[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: May 13, 2020 at 5:00:02 PM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Slavery]:  Strauch on Boles, 'Jefferson: Architect 
> of American Liberty' and Riley, 'Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: 
> Political Life in Jeffersonian America'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> John B. Boles.  Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty.  New York  
> Basic Books, 2017.  640 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-09468-4.
> 
> Padraig Riley.  Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life 
> in Jeffersonian America.  Philadelphia  University of Pennsylvania 
> Press, 2016.  328 pp.  $47.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4749-7.
> 
> Reviewed by Tara Strauch (Centre College)
> Published on H-Slavery (May, 2020)
> Commissioned by David M. Prior
> 
> Despite the vast scholarship on Jefferson and Jeffersonian ideology, 
> historians struggle to understand Jefferson while often assuming that 
> his political followers and challengers had less complicated ideas 
> about race and slavery. In that sense, John Boles's _Jefferson: 
> Architect of American Liberty_ and Padraig Riley's _Slavery and the 
> Democratic Conscience; Political Life in Jeffersonian America _make 
> an interesting comparison. For both Riley and Boles, Jefferson had a 
> cohesive idea of liberty built around his personal beliefs about 
> slavery. Boles's biography of Jefferson examines him as a stateman 
> devoted to creating a government based on that idea of liberty while 
> Riley's monograph follows Jefferson's political vision compared to 
> those of his followers. 
> 
> Both authors believe that antebellum white Americans knew slavery to 
> be absolutely immoral. Boles assumes that Jefferson wanted to end 
> slavery; he states that in his younger years Jefferson "dared not 
> attack the institution [of slavery] head on" but that he continually 
> thought about legislation that would move Virginia and the nation 
> toward abolition (p. 28). Riley assumes that white northern 
> Jeffersonians accepted slavery as a moral wrong and thus "present a 
> very different intellectual problem from that posed by a slaveholder 
> who believed in universal human freedom yet could not free his 
> slaves" (p. 2). In their political calculations, however, federal 
> happiness was more important than arguments about slavery. Riley's 
> conclusion sits uneasily next to Boles's biography. "In many 
> respects," Riley observes, "the outcome of Jeffersonian democracy, 
> whether one deems it logical or not, was an egalitarian community of 
> white men who protected their own interests by accommodating slavery; 
> doing so required, as southerners made clear, an investment in white 
> supremacy" (p. 251). The Jefferson Boles describes would have been 
> both saddened and unsurprised by this conclusion. 
> 
> Boles's biography is well written and constructed; this biography is 
> largely about Jefferson's public life and Jefferson's political 
> contributions are central to the narrative. At times, it is not even 
> Jefferson himself but his legal writing that takes center stage. 
> Boles's analysis of Jefferson's prose is informative and points to 
> Jefferson's crucial role in the creation of the American republic. 
> Jefferson's early years are described in a concise but interesting 
> manner that emphasizes his tenuous hold on Virginian aristocracy. As 
> he is drawn into the politics of the British colonies, we see 
> Jefferson balancing his desire to shape Virginia along with his 
> desire to participate in the new political life of the Continental 
> Congress. 
> 
> Even as Jefferson moves to France, Boles describes him as having a 
> clear and consistent vision of what the American government could and 
> should become. Like other biographers, Boles credits Jefferson's time 
> in France with sharpening his love of country and republican 
> government. His stay in France also further cements his deep-seated 
> fear of monarchy. After his return to America and his installation in 
> Washington's cabinet, Boles turns to the complicated personal 
> politics of the federal government in the 1790s. Here, Jefferson 
> appears as a skilled and accomplished politician whose egalitarian 
> vision of America is constantly challenged by high Federalists and 
> partisan politics. 
> 
> Boles credits John Adams's fraught presidency with creating 
> Jefferson's views on that office and sees Jefferson's own terms, at 
> 

[Marxism] The Death of the Central Bank Myth

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Foreign Policy, MAY 13, 2020, 2:57 PM
The Death of the Central Bank Myth
For decades, monetary policy has been treated as technical, not 
political. The pandemic has ended that illusion forever.

BY ADAM TOOZE

In Europe, a ruling by the German Constitutional Court that the European 
Central Bank (ECB) failed to adequately justify a program of asset 
purchases it began in 2015 is convulsing the political and financial 
scene. Some suggest it could lead to the unraveling of the euro. It may 
be difficult at first glance to understand why. Yes, the purchases were 
huge—more than 2 trillion euros of government debt. But they were made 
years ago. And the points made by the court are arcane. So how could a 
matter like this assume such importance?


The legal clash in Europe matters not only because the ECB is the 
second-most important central bank in the world and not only because 
global financial stability hinges on the stability of the eurozone. It 
also brings to the surface what ought to be a basic question of modern 
government: What is the proper role of central banks? What is the 
political basis for their actions? Who, if anyone, should oversee 
central banks?


As the COVID-19 financial shock has reaffirmed, central banks are the 
first responders of economic policy. They hold the reins of the global 
economy. But unlike national Treasuries that act from above by way of 
taxing and government spending, the central banks are in the market. 
Whereas the Treasuries have budgets limited by parliamentary or 
congressional vote, the firepower of the central bank is essentially 
limitless. Money created by central banks only shows up on their balance 
sheets, not in the debt of the state. Central banks don’t need to raise 
taxes or find buyers of their debt. This gives them huge power.


How this power is wielded and under what regime of justification defines 
the limits of economic policy. The paradigm of modern central banking 
that is being debated in the spartan court room in the German town of 
Karlsruhe was set half a century ago amid the turbulence of inflation 
and political instability of the 1970s. In recent years, it has come 
under increasing stress. The role of central banks has massively expanded.


In much of the world, notably in the United States, this has engendered 
remarkably little public debate. Though the litigation in Germany is in 
many ways obscure, it has the merit of putting a spotlight on this 
fundamental question of modern governance. Faced with the hubris of the 
German court, it may be tempting to retreat into a defense of the status 
quo. That would be a mistake. Though it is flawed in many ways, the 
court’s judgment does expose a real gap between the reality of 
21st-century central banking and the conventional understanding of its 
mission inherited from the 20th century. What we need is a new monetary 
constitution.


The proud badge worn by modern central bankers is that of independence. 
But what does that mean? As the idea emerged in the 20th century, 
central bank independence meant above all freedom from direction by the 
short-term concerns of politicians. Instead, central bankers would be 
allowed to set monetary policy as they saw fit, usually with a view not 
only to bringing down inflation but to permanently installing a regime 
of confidence in monetary stability—what economists call anchoring price 
expectations.


The analogy, ironically, was to judges who, in performing the difficult 
duty of dispensing justice, were given independence from the executive 
and legislative branches in the classic tripartite division. With 
money’s value unhooked from gold after the collapse of the Bretton Woods 
system in the early 1970s, independent central banks became the 
guardians of the collective good of price stability.


The basic idea was that there was a trade-off between inflation and 
unemployment. Left to their own devices, voters and politicians would 
opt for low unemployment at the price of higher inflation. But, as the 
experience of the 1970s showed, that choice was shortsighted. Inflation 
would not remain steady. It would progressively accelerate so that what 
at first looked like a reasonable trade-off would soon deteriorate into 
dangerous instability and increasing economic dislocation. Financial 
markets would react by dumping assets. The foreign value of the currency 
would plunge leading to a spiral of crisis.


Under the looming shadow of this disaster scenario, the idea of central 
bank independence emerged. The bank was to act as a countermajoritarian 
institution. It was charged with doing whatever it took to achieve just 

[Marxism] Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism? - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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God, how does someone with such a high profile as a Marxist like Jodi 
Dean end up writing such a confused mess. Oh, I know she learned that 
from Slavoj Zizek.


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/

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Re: [Marxism] Many disappointed fans of Bernie Sanders would prefer a quixotic display of principle.

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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At the risk of reviving the admonitions of some members of the list to keep
my "liberal" politics off of a Marxist discussion list, I would like to
take this opportunity to comment on the desire of the NY Times to lean on
the authority of (prominent?) leftists to rally support for Biden among the
Sandernistas and DSAers and others on the left.

The ruling class (at least that sector represented by the NY Times) is
truly afraid of Trump --- they are wedded to the democratic forms of the
US's version of capitalism and they are afraid that Trump and Trumpism will
destroy it irrevocably   If Trump wins and enshrines a voter
suppression regime that makes the Democratic Party a permanent rump party
(even if the Dems don;t lose the House immediately), the democratic forms
that have always "canalized" discontent into a very narrow path will no
longer be available.   They fear a total collapse of the system of
"democratic capitalism" that dominated the US since the end of the
Depression.

Without a viable Democratic Party as the "loyal [to capitalism] opposition"
who knows where the discontented masses will go 

The uncertainty is too much for that wing of the ruling class to bear ---
hence the NY Times effort to corral as much of the left as possible into
Biden's camp ---

Obviously based on the previous admonition, I won't give my version of my
opinion

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 6:48 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> (Mitchell Abidor, who did French translations for the Marxist Internet
> Archives, castigates DSA and Jacobin for not endorsing Biden. Talk about
> cognitive dissonance. Funny that he earned a slot in the NY Times op-ed
> page. The liberal bourgeoisie must be worried about Joe Biden being such
> a foul candidate that they hope the Jacobin left can be pressured into
> backing him. I strongly suspect that by July, you'll see lots of
> articles about the need to stop Trump without specifically calling for a
> Biden vote. I can just see Bhaskar Sunkara and Meagan Day poring over
> copies of the Daily World from 1968 for tips on how to write them.)
>
> NY Times Op-Ed, May 13, 2020
> These Young Socialists Think They Have Courage. They Don’t.
> Many disappointed fans of Bernie Sanders would prefer a quixotic display
> of principle.
> By Mitchell Abidor
>
> Mr. Abidor is the editor and translator of “Down With the Law: Anarchist
> Individualist Writings From Early Twentieth-Century France.”
>
> The progressive magazine The Nation published an open letter last month
> in which former members of the radical 1960s organization Students for a
> Democratic Society pleaded with a younger generation of leftists to
> support Joe Biden for president. The letter, titled “To the New New Left
>  From the Old New Left,” warned that the re-election of President Trump
> would jeopardize “the very existence of American democracy.”
>
> The signatories expressed fear that some supporters of Bernie Sanders,
> including members of the Democratic Socialists of America, would “refuse
> to support” Mr. Biden because they consider him “a representative of
> Wall Street Capital” — and therefore, in essential respects, not
> fundamentally better than Mr. Trump.
>
> The letter was fair and sensible in its reasoning and right-minded in
> its conclusion. Given that the difference of a few thousand votes in
> states such as Michigan and Wisconsin might allow Mr. Trump to win a
> second term, a quixotic display of socialist principle in the 2020
> election could have disastrous repercussions for the nation and the world.
>
> Unfortunately, the letter’s fears were well-founded. The Democratic
> Socialists of America had already declined to back Mr. Biden. It has
> been joined in that refusal by Jacobin magazine, an influential
> publication among young leftists.
>
> Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin’s editor, announced on Twitter that he would
> vote for the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins. The magazine has
> since published several articles on the question of supporting Mr.
> Biden, including one that criticized the former members of Students for
> a Democratic Society for “haranguing young socialists,” insisted that
> building a democratic socialist movement “is the only real hope for the
> planet’s future,” pointed to the violation of rights under 

[Marxism] Many disappointed fans of Bernie Sanders would prefer a quixotic display of principle.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Mitchell Abidor, who did French translations for the Marxist Internet 
Archives, castigates DSA and Jacobin for not endorsing Biden. Talk about 
cognitive dissonance. Funny that he earned a slot in the NY Times op-ed 
page. The liberal bourgeoisie must be worried about Joe Biden being such 
a foul candidate that they hope the Jacobin left can be pressured into 
backing him. I strongly suspect that by July, you'll see lots of 
articles about the need to stop Trump without specifically calling for a 
Biden vote. I can just see Bhaskar Sunkara and Meagan Day poring over 
copies of the Daily World from 1968 for tips on how to write them.)


NY Times Op-Ed, May 13, 2020
These Young Socialists Think They Have Courage. They Don’t.
Many disappointed fans of Bernie Sanders would prefer a quixotic display 
of principle.

By Mitchell Abidor

Mr. Abidor is the editor and translator of “Down With the Law: Anarchist 
Individualist Writings From Early Twentieth-Century France.”


The progressive magazine The Nation published an open letter last month 
in which former members of the radical 1960s organization Students for a 
Democratic Society pleaded with a younger generation of leftists to 
support Joe Biden for president. The letter, titled “To the New New Left 
From the Old New Left,” warned that the re-election of President Trump 
would jeopardize “the very existence of American democracy.”


The signatories expressed fear that some supporters of Bernie Sanders, 
including members of the Democratic Socialists of America, would “refuse 
to support” Mr. Biden because they consider him “a representative of 
Wall Street Capital” — and therefore, in essential respects, not 
fundamentally better than Mr. Trump.


The letter was fair and sensible in its reasoning and right-minded in 
its conclusion. Given that the difference of a few thousand votes in 
states such as Michigan and Wisconsin might allow Mr. Trump to win a 
second term, a quixotic display of socialist principle in the 2020 
election could have disastrous repercussions for the nation and the world.


Unfortunately, the letter’s fears were well-founded. The Democratic 
Socialists of America had already declined to back Mr. Biden. It has 
been joined in that refusal by Jacobin magazine, an influential 
publication among young leftists.


Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin’s editor, announced on Twitter that he would 
vote for the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins. The magazine has 
since published several articles on the question of supporting Mr. 
Biden, including one that criticized the former members of Students for 
a Democratic Society for “haranguing young socialists,” insisted that 
building a democratic socialist movement “is the only real hope for the 
planet’s future,” pointed to the violation of rights under “Republican 
and Democratic presidencies alike” and downplayed the threat that Mr. 
Trump poses (“if he had both the will and the capacity to crush his 
opponents in the style of Hitler, Franco, or Mussolini, he would have 
done so by now”).


To followers of leftist politics, the argument was all too familiar: The 
two major parties are merely the right and left wings of the capitalist 
system. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.


It is worth noting that this was also the position of most members of 
the New Left during the 1968 presidential election. Back then, radical 
young leftists either refused to vote or supported the candidates of the 
Peace and Freedom Party, the Freedom and Peace Party, and even the 
Yippies — the Youth International Party — who encouraged people to vote 
for a pig named Pigasus. Anyone or anything was preferable to Richard 
Nixon except of course the Democratic Party’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey.


This is not the only historical echo in today’s dispute about support 
for Mr. Biden. In the early 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society, 
too, found itself in a generational standoff. At that point, the group 
was the youth branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, which had 
an older membership and was social democratic, trade unionist and 
anti-Communist. It didn’t take long for tensions to mount between the 
two organizations.


In October 1963 members of S.D.S. met with the editors of Dissent 
magazine, most prominently Irving Howe, to see whether despite their 
differences the two generations of leftists could make common cause. The 
meeting did not go well. A major sticking point, then as now, was how to 
view liberal democracy. The members of S.D.S. argued against 
representative democracy in favor of what they called participatory 
democracy. To Mr. Howe their ideas “sounded too much like the 

[Marxism] Watch | Fairytales of Growth

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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FAIRYTALES OF GROWTH (2020)
47:27
A film on Climate Change, Degrowth and System Change.

The effects and risks of climate change are compelling young people the 
world round to call upon radical system change as the only solution to 
avoid a catastrophic collapse. This film studies the role economic 
growth has had in bringing about this crisis, and explores the 
alternatives to it, offering a vision of hope for the future and a 
better life for all within planetary boundaries.


Featuring Jason Hickel, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Wendy Harcourt, 
Giorgos Kallis, Marta Conde, Alnoor Ladha, Filka Sekulova, Federico 
Demaria, Rupert Read, Tokata Iron Eyes, Maria Marcet and Greta Thunberg.


https://www.fairytalesofgrowth.com/watch

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[Marxism] The making of the Radical Republicans.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Nation, May 5, 2020
On the Road to Emancipation
The making of the Radical Republicans.
By Eric Foner

BOOKS IN REVIEW
WHEN IT WAS GRAND: THE RADICAL REPUBLICAN HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
By LeeAnna Keith

There is an adage that historians write with (at least) one eye fixed on 
the present. So it is not surprising that scholars have lately been 
drawn to the 1850s, a time, much like our own, of intense social and 
political polarization. Kellie Carter Jackson’s recent study of black 
abolitionists, Force and Freedom, focuses on their increasingly vocal 
calls for slave rebellion. Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood 
relates how nearly every session of Congress from the mid-1830s to the 
outbreak of civil war in 1861 witnessed members exchanging punches or 
drawing knives and pistols. In The War Before the War, his study of the 
response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Andrew Delbanco suggests 
that armed conflict over slavery began years before the attack on Fort 
Sumter.


Today, political combat is mostly angry rhetoric, not violent deeds, 
even if our president galvanizes his supporters with thinly veiled 
invitations to take action against “enemies of the people.” But 
parallels certainly exist between the decade before the Civil War and 
our time. Then as now, states and localities declared themselves 
unwilling to cooperate with the federal government’s draconian policies 
for dealing with fugitives seeking to escape oppression (runaway slaves 
in the 1850s, migrants and refugees today). The current xenophobic 
claims that immigrants are responsible for illness, crime, and 
unemployment recall the Know-Nothing Party’s similar complaints about 
Roman Catholics fleeing the Irish famine. Today, as in the past, the 
Supreme Court has handed down decisions that reflect indifference or 
out-and-out hostility to the rights of black Americans—Dred Scott in 
1857, Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Today’s rallies calling for 
“reopening” the country, at which participants menacingly display their 
weapons, bring to mind the 1860 presidential election, when the 
Republican Party mobilized armed Wide Awake clubs, whose participants 
paraded through major cities dressed in quasimilitary uniforms. And as 
Richard Kreitner discusses in his forthcoming Break It Up, secessionist 
movements are today proliferating in many parts of the country.


LeeAnna Keith’s new book, When It Was Grand, also returns to the 
mid–19th century, this time to consider the history of Radical 
Republicanism. In doing so, it adds to our understanding of how a rising 
tide of violence in the 1850s served as a harbinger of the Civil War, a 
conflict that culminated in the most radical act in American history: 
the uncompensated abolition of slavery. The author of The Colfax 
Massacre, a highly praised study of the bloodiest act of carnage against 
African Americans during Reconstruction, Keith makes an important 
contribution by placing Radicals at the center of these transformative 
events.


Contemporaries regularly referred to the Radical Republicans as a 
distinct group in the spectrum of Civil War–era politics. While by the 
1850s most Northerners opposed the westward expansion of slavery, the 
Radicals went further, insisting that antislavery action should take 
precedence over all other political questions and vehemently opposing 
any talk of compromise with the South. When the Civil War began, they 
proclaimed that the Union would not emerge victorious without 
emancipating and arming the slaves. By the time it ended, they helped 
put equal civil and political rights for black Americans on the national 
agenda and then took the lead in enshrining them in laws and the 
Constitution during Reconstruction.


Scholarly assessments of the Radicals have changed over time, reflecting 
the evolution of historical interpretation of their era and the changing 
face of American politics and race relations. Repelled by the mass 
slaughter of World War I and invested in reconciliation between white 
Northerners and Southerners, many historians in the 1920s and ’30s 
blamed the Radicals—sometimes called the Jacobins or Vindictives—for 
whipping up the sectional hostility that produced a “needless” conflict 
and for foisting black suffrage on the South during Reconstruction, 
supposedly leading to an orgy of corruption and misgovernment. To the 
followers of Charles Beard, who taught that political ideologies serve 
as masks for the interests of powerful economic groups, the Radicals 
were the shock troops of a new industrial order. In his influential 1941 
book Lincoln and the Radicals, the historian T. Harry Williams 

[Marxism] Their Money or Your Life – The Brooklyn Rail

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Paul Mattick Jr.

https://brooklynrail.org/2020/05/field-notes/Their-Money-or-Your-Life

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[Marxism] The Censorship of Inequality in the Covid-19 Era: How Corporate and Market-Based Metrics Rule the News, and Why it Matters - Censored Notebook

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.projectcensored.org/the-censorship-of-inequality-in-the-covid-19-era-how-corporate-and-market-based-metrics-rule-the-news-and-why-it-matters/

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[Marxism] Pandemic and Oil Crisis Could Make Second Arab Spring Return With a Vengeance

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international 
relations at SOAS University of London. His most recent books are 
Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (2013), The People Want (2013) and 
Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Spring Uprising (2016).


In this interview, Achcar discusses how Middle Eastern oil-exporting 
countries’ price war has impacted the world, the ongoing revolutionary 
actions that could result in a “Second Arab Spring” and how the U.S. 
left must revive the true meaning of internationalism. The following 
transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.


https://truthout.org/articles/pandemic-and-oil-crisis-could-make-second-arab-spring-return-with-a-vengeance/

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[Marxism] Jairus Banaji on D. D. Kosambi (from FB)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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D. D. Kosambi (1907–1966), Indian mathematician, statistician, and 
Marxist historian, who was fluent in several European languages and 
active intellectually in a wide range of fields from genetics to 
Sanskrit philology. (His [Sanskrit!] dedication of a 1948 philological 
work, “The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartrhari”, significantly omits the 
name of Stalin from its list of dedicatees; “To the sacred memory of the 
great and glorious pioneers of today’s society, Marx, Engels, Lenin”.) 
Kosambi was also an early critic of ‘diamat’ and the idea that all major 
societies passed through the same succession of modes of production, 
rejecting the notion that India ever knew slavery in the classical 
(Graeco-Roman) sense, and arguing that caste was India’s historically 
specific form of bondage so that India had a caste-based Asiatic mode 
for much of its history.


Kosambi was a sharp reviewer. He wrote a devastating review of 
Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism, and reviewing Dange’s India from 
Primitive Communism to Slavery (in 1949), he would say, ‘Dange’s very 
title is wrong, for his sources contain neither primitive communism nor 
slavery’, adding, ‘Marxism is not a substitute for thinking but a tool 
of analysis…’


More interestingly, he was an early modernist in his style of historical 
thinking, breaking with the minimalism that was widespread in the 
historiography of his time. He argued that Magadha, the kingdom (in 
Bihar) that preceded the Mauryan dynasty and that was ‘destined to grow 
into India’s first universal monarchy and empire’, ‘functioned on a 
powerful cash economy’ where ‘the demand upon currency must have been 
enormous’. About the silver coinage of the period, he wrote, ‘The 
weights are as accurately adjusted as for modern machine-minted coins, 
with very low tolerance. This type of coinage…implies highly developed 
commodity production’. About the Arthaśāstra he said in the same work 
(Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India, 1970) ‘The work remains 
unique in all Indian literature because of its complete freedom from 
cant and absence of specious reasoning’.


Kosambi believed that no real development of Marxist theory would be 
possible unless intellectuals were willing to be an organic part of the 
working class for at least part of their lives. Thus, “Marxism cannot, 
even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be 
reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor can it be treated as 
a standard technique such as work on an automatic lathe. The material, 
when it is present in human society, has endless variations; the 
observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he 
interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful 
application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the 
ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This 
cannot be learned from books alone. The one way to learn it is by 
constant contact with the major sections of the people. For an 
intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, 
to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a 
superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental ‘progressive’ 
visitor to the slums.”


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[Marxism] Whither the DSA? - The Bellows

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Democratic Socialists of America are at a crossroads.

For the past several months, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign 
served as the glue that kept the DSA together and the crutch it relied 
on for any sense of cohesion. Members of the largest democratic 
socialist organization in the country poured immense amounts of energy 
into the campaign with the hope that Bernie could win.


But now that we’re left with the Democrats’ uninspiring puppet Joe Biden 
to take on Trump—it’s unclear what happens next.


https://www.thebellows.org/the-dsa-after-bernie-at-a-crossroads/

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[Marxism] Virologist Luis Villarreal: “Leery” of COVID-19 Models, Vaccine Possible Year’s End - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/13/virologist-luis-villarreal-leery-of-covid-19-models-vaccine-possible-years-end/

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[Marxism] How Amazon Workers Are Organizing for the Long Haul | Labor Notes

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This is like CIO organizing in the 1930s.

https://labornotes.org/2020/05/how-amazon-workers-are-organizing-long-haul?

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[Marxism] Cybernetic Revolutionaries: A Discussion - COSMONAUT

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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For this installment of our series on Actually Existing Socialism we 
take a look at an attempt to solve the issues of central planning with a 
novel experiment unlike any other in history: Project Cybersyn in 
Salvador Allende’s Chile. In a discussion based on Eden Medina’s book 
Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Donald, Christian, and Rudy discuss the idea 
of Stafford Beer and their limitations, the difficulties of the 
democratic road to socialism, and if Cybersyn is totalitarian but in a 
good way. Outro music is “Litany for a computer and a child about to be 
born” by Angel Parra and Stafford Beer.


https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/05/13/cybernetic-revolutionaries-a-discussion/

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[Marxism] Deforestation and Monoculture Farming Spread COVID-19 and Other Diseases

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Very informative.

https://truthout.org/articles/deforestation-and-monoculture-farming-spread-covid-19-and-other-diseases/

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Re: [Marxism] Trotskyist Mythology on Germany 1923

[Dayne Goodwin via Marxism]

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Notes on the Conversations Between Trotsky and Walcher, 17–20 August 1933
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol5/no2/walcher.html#n15
 . . .
"On Point 3: Comrade Trotsky vigorously opposed the proposal to invite
the KPO(D), that is, its representatives, Brandler and Thalheimer, to
join the workers’ International. In his opinion, we should consider
the KPO(D) as a group ‘equivalent’ to the Stalinists; in reality, they
were Stalinist agents, whose sole activity consisted above all in
slandering the International Opposition and in defending Stalinism."
 . . .
"On the subject of 1923, Comrade Trotsky continued to affirm that at
that time, as a result of a bad policy, great objective possibilities
for revolutionary struggle had been botched up. But he did not in the
slightest think that the decisive fault had been committed in October
at the time of the Chemnitz Conference. [38] He recalled that from
1924 onwards he had compared the situation in 1923 to a rider who had
held his horse on too tight a rein in front of a high hurdle, and to
whom, consequently, there remained only two options: either to draw
back from the hurdle, or to try the leap anyway, which could only be
achieved after a great run up, and break his neck as a result. The
KPD, on account of the false policy of its Central Committee, and
doubtless also of the Executive Committee of the Communist
International, had been exactly in the position of this rider. He
stated with satisfaction that complete agreement could be recorded
between his point of view and that which had been developed by
Schwab." [Schwab = Walcher]
 . . .
"38. None of Trotsky’s criticism on this question had in fact ever
been directed against the decision to retreat in October 1923, but
rather against the previous policy of the KPD, which made this policy
necessary."

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 8:18 PM Aaron Kyereh-Mireku via Marxism
 wrote:
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>
> August Thalheimer correcting Trotskyist mythology on Germany 1923:
>
> http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/History/1923.html
>
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