[Marxism] On the outcome of the DSA convention

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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On the daily radio show I co-host, I said that as a delegate I found the 
convention incredibly exhilarating although at times frustrating -- and, 
ironically, for the same reason It was just incredible seeing this 
completely new generation of fighters grappling with how to advance a 
movement now looked to by literally tens of millions of people in this 
country. But this freshness also showed in so much time consumed by 
procedural wrangling, instead of political discussion. Yet the way the 
DSA is today, that was inevitable.


Full:http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/08/on-results-of-dsa-convention.html

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[Marxism] [UCE] Why I refused to sign the "Transparency Pledge" offered for NPC candidates

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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The pledge commits signers to ensuring that "all text is translated into 
spanish within a reasonable timeframe." That's bunk: it is not going to 
happen


Language justice for Spanish-dominant people is an extremely important, 
serious matter And it is not a question of translation, but of 
creating spaces where Latinx people --and especially immigrants and the 
sons and daughters of immigrants -- feel at home.


I can't possibly express my disappointment that concern about the Latino 
community has been expressed this way, through patronizing tokenization, 
nor how much I resent having to write something like this once again.


Full:
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-i-didnt-sign-transparency-pledge-of.html

[Just to remind people, "Joaquín Bustelo" is a pen name I used for many 
years and have continued to use on this list for people who may not know 
me as José G. Pérez]


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[Marxism] WhY I am running for the DSA National Political Committee

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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The two resolutions I wrote or co-wrote (on orienting to Latinx 
communities and making immigration a national priority for the DSA) have 
been approved in a pre-convention poll of delegates as two of the dozen 
proposals (out of 120 or 130) in a "consent agenda" that would simply be 
ratified as a block at the beginning of the convention.


But still, getting them implemented will not be easy, one of the main 
reasons I am running.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-i-am-running-for-dsas-npc.html

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[Marxism] A debate on "Open Borders" prior to the DSA convention

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I argue that presenting open borders as a demand, rather than as an 
aspiration, is a mistake.


It is wrong to demand that countries that are the targets of imperialism 
adopt "open borders" because abolition of their border controls and 
defenses would facilitate attacks against them, primarily from the 
United States. Yet viewed solely as a demand on the U.S. government, it 
not only would  be impractical but also lead to victimization of 
refugees and other immigrants in Europe who likely would be expelled and 
deported to the United States. And in the fight for immigrant and 
refugee rights, it would take the focus away from the fight for 
legalization of the undocumented and accepting Central American refugees.


Full: http://bit.ly/Openborders

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[Marxism] Why is the DSA so white?

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Another post about the DSA:

It is mostly not our "fault" because of what we do or don't do. /It is 
much worse than that./ We are much more a reflection of our white 
supremacist, patriarchal, and class-exploitative society than we think.


Full: 
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/05/why-is-dsa-so-white-does-working-for.html



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[Marxism] Resolution on orienting to the Latinx community

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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This is  a companion resolution to the one on immigrant rights I shared 
on this list a couple of days ago. It is far from comprehensive, and its 
central point is the creation of a Spanish-language DSA website.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/05/for-dsa-convention-resolution-on_3.html

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Re: [Marxism] Happy anniversary

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Thank you, Louis. I know there have been agreements and disagreements 
here, but on one thing there can no possible dissent: the service you 
provide in keeping this space open is invaluable.


On 5/1/2019 8:23 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

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The Marxism list was launched on May 1, 1998 and still going strong.
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[Marxism] A resolution on immigrant rights for the DSA convention

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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This resolution seems to have widespread support. It mandates that 
immigrant and refugee rights become a top priority for the *national* 
organization, as it already is for many Locals. The purpose of the 
resolution is precisely to get that National Office and Leadership to 
support and coordinate these local efforts. I wrote it in collaboration 
with a number of other comrades.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/05/for-dsa-convention-resolution-on.html

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[Marxism] Black and Latino "identity politics" are working class politics

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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This is another post that relates to debates in the DSA and goes against 
the tradition that I and a lot of the people on this list used to share. 
I don't post these here to provoke people or to act as a troll, but 
because I think it is important to discuss out these issues especially 
with those that have had the same political background as I do and thus 
share a good number of positions, ways we look at the world, etc.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/04/black-and-latino-identity-politics-are.html

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Re: [Marxism] DSA’s Left and Right Both Miss the Point: We Need to Build the Left and the Working-Class Together

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I think this article on the DSA's "fierce internal debate," like the New 
Republic piece on the DSA's "Race Problem" that preceded and seems to 
have provoked it, have a very serious problem, namely, how do you 
explain an organization that has grown from somewhere in the 
neighborhood of 6,000 members three years ago to one with almost 60,000 
now?


The answer is that today's DSA is the product and an outgrowth of a much 
broader new socialist movement that is emerging in the United States. It 
is not the only expression. The first sign of this new explicitly 
socialist generation (beyond Occupy Wall Street's rough but 
class-conscious "we are the 99%")  were precisely the Philly Socialists, 
in the summer of 2012, to which the comrade who wrote the 
regenerationmag.org article belongs.


So I think it is more accurate to say that the DSA *has been grown* by 
outside forces than the more neutral "it grew" and to say that it 
*recruited* tens of thousands of members by its own activity and efforts 
is false. I've written about this on my blog several times, most 
recently in the post "The question facing the Democratic Socialists of 
America: What Are We?" https://bit.ly/2FNZZu0M


In Atlanta, we have around 800 members, 90% new, a lot of the pre-2016 
members in their 70s and glad to hand over the reins to a new 
generation, among whom at most a handful have organizing experience. And 
we are far from building relationships with and actively engaging even a 
fifth of our members ... and remember these are overwhelmingly people 
who reached out and joined through their own initiative.


Talking about a "fierce debate" in the DSA with left wings and right 
wings, entryists and horizontalists, can be misleading because there 
aren't even any forums for this debate, just postings and proclamations 
in various online spaces, some of which are never even mentioned on the 
group's national discussion boards, which involve probably less than 1% 
of the membership and a few percent of the activists.


The national leadership, which is dominated by people from a caucus that 
used to be called "momentum" simply does not lead. As far as I can tell 
it makes no attempt to involve much of anyone beyond itself and a tiny 
circle in its decisions nor to convince much of anyone once they have 
been made.  This provoked a tremendous cluster-fuck around the Bernie 
endorsement because it was married to an approach to the presidential 
campaign that many in the DSA consider sectarian and was never discussed 
at all beyond 10 or 15 folks in the upper reaches of the organization.


That strategy is here: https://bit.ly/2IdfjTM. A pretty savage critique 
from the San Francisco chapter is https://bit.ly/2F8l8Pg, combining both 
a critique of a national endorsement before our convention as well as of 
the campaign plan. My own critique, strictly of the politics of the 
National Political Committee's approach, is here: 
https://bit.ly/2YRpNyb. As is typical of the NPC and its members, 
there's been no political argument for its approach mostly an insistence 
that it is necessary under campaign laws and further explanations of 
legalities.


How could such a grouping wind up dominating the only national 
leadership body? The pre-2016 DSA had never had disputes or caucuses, 
being a staid social-democratic organization.  The 2017 DSA was 
transformed by an influx of new people and at its convention small 
organized factions played an outsized role.


Momentum re-organized as the Spring Caucus in January and blew up in 
March, splitting into its main components, one based in the East Bay 
DSA, the other in Philly. Its official documents presented it as 
relentlessly workerist, economist, and class reductionist, so much so 
that by contrast groups like Progressive Labor and International 
Socialists from the 1960s and 1970s almost seem like staunch defenders 
of Malcolm X.


But there is also the North Star caucus (no relation to the late Peter 
Camejo), which is the continuation of the Harrington outlook that 
dominated the DSA until recently. There is a libertarian quasi-anarchist 
caucus, and there had been a more r-r-r-evolutionary than thou Communist 
Caucus, but I'm not sure it still exists. There is a thing called 
"Build" which is not a caucus, it says, but promotes a political 
approach and will certainly have some of its leading people as 
candidates for the incoming leadership.


One of the most prominent caucuses, called Refoundation, dissolved last 
year, and recently a new caucus emerged called Socialist Majority (full 
disclosure: I am a member and one of the signers of its initial 
statement). It 

[Marxism] On the now-dissolved [DSA] Spring Caucus: Latinos, the DSA and intersectionality

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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The (IMHO) workerist, economist and class-reductionist Spring Caucus of 
the DSA (the current formerly known as Momentum which maintains the 
socialistcall.com website has dissolved due to "significant and 
unresolvable disagreements over how to relate to other DSA tendencies, 
how best to relate to anti-oppression mobilizations and demands, and the 
nature and role of our caucus in DSA."


Full is here: 
https://socialistcall.com/2019/03/17/setbacks-and-new-beginnings/


I wrote a rather extensive critique of their politics on the national 
question in the United States as it related to Latinos and undocumented 
immigrants.


*  *  *

This post was written looking forward to the DSA convention. Although 
finished, I had not made it public, unsure as to whether it would 
further complicate an unfortunate situation where some caucuses had been 
formed prematurely, leading others to also form caucuses in response. 
Now with the just-announced dissolution of the Spring Caucus, the 
situation has changed.


I joined one of the counter-caucuses to Spring, the Socialist Majority 
caucus. And a related reason for not posting this article is that 
Socialist Majority had decided that, as a group, it would limit itself  
to presenting our own vision for the DSA as a multi-tendency 
organization, and not a critique of other viewpoints.


"The Call" announces the dissolution of the Spring Caucus
So it had not discussed a lot of the ideas presented in this article, 
and, frankly, I would have been against the caucus or the DSA adopting 
them as such; at this stage of its development, the DSA should remain 
open and inclusive of many currents, including those of comrades who 
disagree with me, such as the authors of the two documents I criticize 
below.


*  *  *

the full post is here:

On the now-dissolved Spring Caucus: Latinos, the DSA and 
intersectionality: 
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/03/on-now-dissolved-spring-caucus-latinos.html.


Joaquín


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[Marxism] For Bernie, but against a DSA 'independent expenditure campaign'

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I am pretty sure that Louis (and more than a few others) are going to 
like this one even less than the last ones.


https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/03/for-bernie-but-against-dsa-independent.html

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Re: [Marxism] Bernie, AOC and the Chartist movement of British workers in the 1800s

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I thank my friend Louis for recognizing that I have been consistent, 
albeit not in the way he means.


I can't remember how many times I've said for many, many years that what 
one does in relation to "bourgeois-democratic electoral farces" is a 
tactical question. I've evolved, however.


I'm sure that I never said before the last couple of years what I now 
believe: that the Democratic Party has become one very important arena 
of a movement by working people to constitute ourselves as an 
independent political force. I never said it because I would have 
rejected it automatically without a second thought, as I think Louis 
does (and most comrades on this list, especially those who shared at 
least part of my political journey since the end of the 1960s).


I say it now not because it is something I've ever expected or 
advocated, but because I think it is an accurate description of reality. 
That reality emerged during the first months of Bernie's primary 
campaign against Clinton, when what was clearly intended to be a 
symbolic challenge to raise important issues was transformed into a very 
real fight by this motion among working people.


Whether it is a mistake, something that can never work in a million 
years and will wind up being a trap are things I've thought long and 
hard about. But I really and truly believe that is what is going on 
--working people groping their way towards cohering as a "class for 
itself"-- and even if this way of doing it is 1,000% wrong, the role of 
Marxists is not to denounce the contradiction but to work in and through 
it to a resolution.


I think Engels's comments on the Henry George campaign in the 1880s are 
applicable here. I wrote a couple of posts explaining how and why I 
think that a few months ago and they are here:


Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar: what Engels would have said about it
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-superstar-what.html

The Democratic Socialists, the Democratic Party, and the tactic of 
critical support

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-democratic-socialists-democratic.html

*  *  *
Louis also sent a second response quoting something I wrote 11 year ago 
saying I expected Obama to deliver on immigration reform, as he was 
promising during the campaign, but how much he would deliver was up in 
the air. Clearly, I was wrong. I think Louis's post is mean to show I'm 
not sure what on what is going on around Bernie and AOC today.


I now think that the ruling class has adopted the de jure status of the 
undocumented as a sort of untouchable *caste* as an enduring part of 
neoliberal American capitalism. I wish I could say I've figured this all 
out but I haven't. But the main reason I've drawn that conclusion is 
that, *on the ground* the Bush, Obama and Trump policy towards the 
undocumented use essentially the same methods seeking to create the same 
effect, as I explain in more detail here:


Trump's real program: not deporting immigrants, but keeping them 'illegal'
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/11/trumps-real-program-not-deporting.html

And, BTW, this all started under Clinton.

I think there is a need for a lot more thought an analysis about what is 
going on, in terms of the structure of U.S. society and its working class.


On 3/4/2019 7:41 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
If nothing else, Joaquin is consistent. From 2008: 

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[Marxism] Bernie, AOC and the Chartist movement of British workers in the 1800s

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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"There is a debate among many socialists, including in the Democratic 
Socialists of America, about this approach of running on the Democratic 
Party ballot lines and caucusing not just with the more progressive 
democrats but even with the traditional neoliberal hacks like Nancy 
Pelosi. Some turn their back on using Democrat ballot lines while others 
insist that is OK provided we proclaim that the Democratic Party cannot 
be reformed or refuse to have anything to do with the traditional 
democrats on the ticket.


"But I think this system of alliances is dictated by the logic of the 
situation in Congress and most of all by the fact that most working 
people do not yet understand the difference between a Bernie Sanders or 
Ocasio-Cortez and a Pelosi or Schumer."


Full:

*Bernie, AOC and the Chartist movement of British workers in the 1800s*
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/03/bernie-aoc-and-chartist-movement-of.html

*  *  *

I've also reposted a couple of articles from long ago, because they will 
have some relevance to a critique I am working on of the 
Momentum/Socialist Call/Spring Caucus grouping in the DSA. They were 
both published in full on this list when I first wrote them.


*From the archives: notes on the development of a Latino identity (2005)*
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-archives-notes-on-development-of.html

*The Latino Immigrant Rights Movement and the Revolutionary Left (2006)*
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-latino-immigrant-rights-movement.html



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[Marxism] In response to liberal recrimination for not voting

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I am fucking sick a tired of hearing congresscritters and other members 
of our political class, and their news media acolytes, attack the people 
for exercising their democratic right to give elections the finger


https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/11/people-not-voting-is-fault-of-system.html

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[Marxism] Apart from histrionics, is Trump's policy towards the undocumented really different?

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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President Trump's real, on-the-ground policy on "illegals" is exactly 
the same as every other president going back decades: not to get rid of 
the undocumented, but to keep them "illegal," bereft of rights so they 
can't defend themselves and can be easily ripped off and super-exploited.



Full:

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/11/trumps-real-program-not-deporting.html

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Re: [Marxism] Voter suppression: Another tactic in Trump's drive for one-man rule

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Bustelo was never a Gaddaffi supporter. I was an opponent of the 
intervention.


As for Assad, I have no idea what is going on in Syria, I don't follow 
it. From what little I hear, mostly on NPR and Democracy Now, it sounds 
like a complete clusterfuck.


But I've been a war correspondent and for that reason I know so much of 
what is reported under those circumstances is bullshit, and not just 
intentional propaganda but just because shit happens in war, and it is 
really hard to untangle in real time what happened, and often you 
can't.  That means it would be a huge drain of time and effort to try to 
follow what is going on there, because you'd have to be checking and 
cross checking, and for someone who has never been within two thousand 
miles of the place, doesn't speak the language,  doesn't know the 
culture, has only the vaguest notions of the history, and is not at all 
current on what the different states in the region or otherwise involved 
are doing or why, it seems like a fool's errand.


Also, I have no idea what anti-imperialist analysis I'm supposed to have 
that I got from the Cuban and Venezuelan press. I don't follow either, 
and in fact, I couldn't even tell you the name of a pro-government 
newspaper in Venezuela. I'll take your word for it that the Venezuelan 
government's people present an anti-imperialist  analysis, because 
--honestly-- I would not have automatically assumed that to be the case.


It may seem strange that I would not follow Cuba or Venezuela or Syria 
or much else, but try to understand what I do: I produce and co-host a 
daily, live two-hour news, analysis and call-in radio show in Spanish on 
what is now an internet-only station, radio información. And then I do 
an hour show of political music on Fridays.


Our audience is overwhelmingly immigrants from Latin America who came 
here as adults, the big majority of them undocumented although a number 
have managed to get legal status. The majority is Mexican; there are 
also large numbers from Central American countries (save Costa Rica) and 
a scattering from other places.


I have to follow pretty much everything going on in the United States 
and Mexico. as much as I can of Central America, and whatever is hot in 
Latin America, like the way Macri has managed to bankrupt Argentina is 
just a couple of years.  So don't ask me about Assad or whatever Maduro 
may be saying. Things I know about are the fight over the new Mexico 
City International Airport, the disappearance of the 43 students in 
Iguala, Peña Nieto's "white house," and then Medicaid expansion in 
Georgia, voter suppression, Trump and the wall and all things Trump 
(much as I hate and resent it).


The reason I post so little nowadays is that I stopped doing it when I 
got sick a decade ago. It takes a long time to recover from an illness 
like that (throat cancer) and the treatment. Before I was fully 
recovered, and got back into posting here, I got restructured out of my 
job at CNN and so I was able to get very involved with the Latino 
community and the immigrant rights movement here, with Occupy while it 
lasted, and then in 2012 with Radio Información.


That's pretty much determined what I focus on and follow. I've taken a 
different path is all.


And when I look at this email list, there is usually very little that 
intersects with what I am doing or focused on. For example, I just did a 
quick search through Thunderbird of how many posts mentioning Syria 
there had been in the past week: 8. That's also the number of posts 
there have been about Mexico since July 1, when the election was held.


And it is not just this list. The same thing happened with Solidarity. I 
got involved with DSA because the Sanders campaign and subsequent 
developments (especially AOC's upset in the New York House primary) are 
a frequent subject of conversation in the show, as are issues of 
electoral strategy and tactics.


Louis, You are of course, free to be flippantly dismissive because you 
think I'm an Assadist or that I'm a Maduro or Putin fan boy. But I 
suspect that however important whatever it is that is going on in Syria 
turns out to be, and I realize it is a question of the entire region and 
not just one country and it is important, at least in an immediate sense 
what is going on in Mexico and at the border, and having a clear vision 
and understanding of it, is of more near-term relevance to those engaged 
in radical politics in  this country, and I would not exclude the 
possibility of that turning out to be true in the longer term also.


By the way, the ONLY time I can remember Syria coming up on our show is 
when a 

Re: [Marxism] Voter suppression: Another tactic in Trump's drive for one-man rule

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Given how willing you are to swallow all the bullshit propaganda about 
Russian "interference" in U.S. elections, I have to ask: do you also 
believe in the tooth fairy?


If you look at what the Russians have actually been accused of doing in 
the Mueller indictments, don't you think those involved would  already 
have been terminated with extreme prejudice by Putin? Do you really 
think his toleration for idiocy is limitless? Do you think his 
toleration for moronic cretinism is limitless?


READ the fucking indicments before you go around  repeating brain-dead 
American imperialist propaganda.


Joaquín


On 10/15/2018 5:35 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:


I don't deny that Russia tried to influence the US elections

Of course we should criticise Russia for trying to help the election of such a 
reactionary figure as Trump




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[Marxism] The New York City DSA's infantile, sectarian criticism of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

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From my blog:

The most troubling thing is that this statement reeks of factionalism, 
of people being lined up in some private little group built around an 
important “principle” like we must “name our enemy,” or that DSA members 
“who seek to speak on behalf of working people” must defend X, Y, or Z 
position. And it is a very transparent attempt to drive AOC out of the 
organization.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-new-york-city-dsas-infantile.html

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Re: [Marxism] Complicating the Narrative on Nicaragua | NACLA

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I think the best statement that has been made on Nicaragua, one that 
reflects so many contradictory elements and how much many of us of the 
older generations have invested there, was on the eve of July 19 by 
former Uruguayan president José Mujica in the Uruguayan Senate:


https://youtu.be/qn9ebYH4IeA

*  *  *

I feel ill. Because I know people as old as I am. Because I remember 
names of compañeros who gave their lives in Nicaragua fighting for  a 
dream. And I feel I have been asked to intercede with the Pope for him 
to do something, and I said no. And they've talked to me from one side 
and talked to me from the other. And I feel that something that was a 
dream has strayed and fallen into autocracy. And I think that those who 
yesterday were revolutionaries are no longer aware that in life, there 
are moments when you have to say I'm leaving.


*  *  *

I think _part_ of the statement was prompted by 93-year-old Nicaraguan 
poet Ernesto Cardenal, who in June sent an open letter to Mujica asking 
him to speak out in support of the protests.


But the pain and sense of loss in Mujica's statement should not stop us 
from seeing things as they are and calling them by their right name.


And this article is a shame-faced defense of the indefensible: an 
autocratic regime that has murdered hundreds of people.


Shame-faced because it presents the most vulgar apologetics as "context" 
that should be taken into account. Yet he somehow overlooks that Murillo 
and Ortega are much more likely to denounce the protests as a satanic 
rather than an imperialist plot.


Although Ortega continues to own the  "Sandinista" brand, I searched the 
web for statements about this crisis by leading Sandinista political and 
cultural figures from the 1980s,  mostly on video because I don't trust 
the reporting.


Apart from the first couple, Bayardo Arce, Doris Tijerino, all the 
prominent 1980s Sandinistas I found have called for Daniel to go.


Most striking are the repeated statements by his brother Humberto, as 
well as the emphatic denunciations by Henry Ruiz ("Modesto"), Luis 
Carrión, Jaime Wheelock, Víctor Hugo Tinoco (members of the National 
Directorate),  Dora María Téllez, Mónica Baltodano, and many others. 
Victor Tirado, also a commander of the revolution, "no longer has full 
control of his mental faculties" according to his son who denounced the 
way he was manipulated to appear next to Daniel at the July 19 rally, 
but five years ago in an interview Tirado has said he had no relations 
with Ortega and that the president should resign. Also writers and 
artists like the Mejía Godoy brothers, Norma Elena Gadea, Katia Cardenal 
(of Duo Guardabarranco), Pancasán, Sergio Ramírez (who was 
vice-president), Carlos Chamorro (editor of Barricada), Ernesto Cardenal 
(Minister of Culture), and Monica Baltodano.


Are they all agents of imperialism?

But even if everything that the article says is true, how does that 
justify the murder of hundreds of students?


And --of course!-- American imperialism is trying to take advantage of 
it. But who are its agents: students outraged by a murderous  autocratic 
regime or the imperialist interests, right wing parties and bosses that 
Ortega has been in bed with for more than a decade?


And of course now that they think they have a chance, they are trying to 
take advantage of the situation to oust him. Same thing as happened to 
Gaddafi. You can reach an accommodation with imperialism. But they do 
not forgive, and they do not forget.








https://nacla.org/news/2018/09/24/complicating-narrative-nicaragua
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Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Andrew Stewart:

You wrote an article on the "Racism of the DSA's Founders" centered on 
the views and actions of three non-founders, one of whom had been dead 
for ten years when the DSA was started, one of whom was a central leader 
of a rival group, one of whom was an adherent to the same political 
current as those two. It was a fabrication, a lying frame up.


Now you want to defend it on the basis that really the views of of the 
non-founder opponents of the (real) founders that you mention were not 
that dissimilar, like neither one supported Jesse Jackson in the 1984 
primaries. Really, is that your yardstick for measuring antiracist 
purity? I guess I'm a racist, too.


At any rate, you lied. You don't even have enough courage to admit it 
when you have been caught red-handed. And you find it "deeply 
satisfying" that you have been exposed as a fraud without a trace of 
intellectual honesty or personal integrity. Your "ego profits mightily" 
from being shown to be utterly shameless.


Glad to be of service.

Have a nice life.


On 9/10/2018 1:25 AM, Andrew Stewart wrote:
First, I have to admit that I find it deeply satisfying to see that I 
garnered such a reaction, it means I struck a nerve. Either way one 
looks at it, my ego profits mightily from this exercise. Way cool!





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Re: [Marxism] Was Joseph Hansen a GPU agent? A reply to WSWS.org | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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If Chris Hedges chooses to discredit himself even further, I say let him.


On 9/11/2018 2:27 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


After giving it some thought, I decided to have a look at the 
articles. Although many veterans of the left understand that the 
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is a toxic cult, many less 
knowledgeable—including Chris Hedges—give it respect that it does not 
deserve. 


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Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA’s Founders

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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On 9/7/2018 7:51 PM, Steven L. Robinson via Marxism wrote:


On the other hand, the legacy of Irving Howe - who is mentioned in the post 
that started this thread - is a real one, at least before the influx of new 
members. Even so,  whatever influence Howe's ideas - or those of Harrington, 
for that matter - might have on the 50,000 DSA members, would seem to be 
negligible.


I'm not sure "the legacy of Irving Howe" --the real one, whatever it may 
have been -- needs to be dealt with at all because, as you point out, 
90% of DSA's members have joined in the last two years and I doubt they 
have been influenced by the legacy of Irving Howe.


And although I, too, am a new member, I cannot claim political 
inexperience and especially not of currents and groups tangentially 
related to or descended from the Trotskyism in the United States.


Yet, when I saw the name of Irving Howe my reaction was: "Irving who? 
The guy who wrote World of our Fathers?"  So I'm not the one to judge him.


I had forgotten about him completely, and mind you, I remember covering 
some aspect of the change of the SP into SDUSA for the Militant because 
I was very proud of the headline, "Not socialist, not a party" and then 
talking to Peter Camejo about it and his idea to change our name to 
"Socialist Party" since it was now available (not sure he was totally 
serious about that, BTW, but he might have been --Camejo was like that).


So that was the first reason I didn't include him. The second reason is 
that the charges he lays against Howe are that he was a Zionist 
(perfectly true, I gather), that he was part of the cold-war 
anticommunist social democratic current years before DSA was founded, 
and that he never completely abandoned some of those views.


So? When the proof of the pudding is mainly Shanker's 1968 strike and 
something about Jack Newfield purging Cockburn from the Village Voice, 
it left me little to comment on, the Shanker thing having already been 
dealt with.


Also it is really hard to take up statements that seem so random. 
Consider this passage. After describing the 1968 conflict in New York 
and Shanker's reactionary role, he goes on:



*  *  *
“And so Shankerism, hammered out against a background of both middle 
class yearnings and ghetto rage,” writes Paul Buhle, “became the oddest 
possible American-style parody of ‘democratic socialism.’ The debates 
raged from New Politics and Dissent to the New York Times, with curious 
undertones which formal politics alone cannot fully encompass.”


In a 1984 essay by Howe titled “Reaganism: This Too Shall Pass” (could 
he have been more tone deaf?), we read “During the early 1960s, the 
country experienced a moment of good feeling. Sentiments of racial 
fraternity were in the air. By the late 1960s, blacks felt outraged. 
Searing conflicts broke out between black groups (a few committed to an 
extremism of imagery) and some of their allies of yesterday. The idea of 
‘going it alone’ took hold among black youth and intellectuals. 
Meanwhile, an ugly sentiment spread through white America.” Obviously 
playing in the background when those lines were composed were his 
memories of 1968.


Indeed, this is illustrative of the truly scandalous nature of DSA at 
its start. Rather than being beneficial as a counterforce to Reaganism 
and the Democratic embrace of neoliberal political economy, its founding 
leaders instead broke apart old community alliances that favored the 
Keynesian paradigm, such as between Blacks and Jews, which in turn 
created the opening for neoliberalism to go full-throttle with its 
pillage of the American welfare state.

*  *  *

 Let's unravel that if we can. The DSA's "truly scandalous nature ... 
at its start" in 1982 is proven  by the 1968 teacher's strike 14 years 
earlier led by someone who had nothing to do with the DSA, neither 
before it existed nor afterwards, and to boot was closely associated 
with a hostile political current. Howe's guilt, who in fact was in DSA, 
is shown by some very generic thing he wrote 16 years after the strike 
because "Obviously playing in the background when those lines were 
composed were his memories of 1968," which, given the context of this 
article, must have been about Oceanhill-Brownsville.


But I too, have memories of 1968.

That was the year of the Vietnamese Tet Offensive, the "clean for Gene" 
campaign and Johnson's surprising withdrawal from the presidential race 
as a result, Martin Luther King's assassination, the massive wave of 
Black urban rebellions that followed, the grape Boycott and César 
Chávez's fast, the SDS/SMC student strike against the war,  the Columbia 

[Marxism] The U.S. plot against Venezuela revealed by the NY Times and what it shows about the opposition

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I discount virtually all of the details provided by the NY Times, 
especially things like that the U.S. just took a one-time meeting to 
listen and so on. This was an  obvious planned, calculated official 
"leak," which what 99% of American "investigative reporting" consists of.


If Americans who have been seriously involved in plotting against Maduro 
talked to the Times without approval, we would soon be able to confirm 
it by the series of unfortunate mortal car crashes, accidental drownings 
and so on, that would by coincidence afflict some of the more obscure 
diplomatic officials abroad and government advisers in Washington.


But the thing that most struck me about the article, and that did very 
much sound credible, is that this confirms for the umpteenth time the 
character of the Venezuelan "opposition," all of which is always looking 
to Washington, with all the little factionlets competing against each 
other to see who gets first into the phone booth.


And they are a pack of cowards who thought nothing of provoking middle 
class college students to stage insanely provocative "peaceful" protests 
like marching on military bases and getting a bunch of them killed. But 
oh no, the distinguished leaders of the opposition couldn't put 
themselves on the line. They were too busy trying to convince Washington 
to send the marines. They thought surely, having tossed gasoline on the 
fire by setting up those protests last year, the Americans would 
intervene and the opposition needed to be there to kiss Trump's rump in 
case the emperor came calling.


Joaquín


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[Marxism] NYTimes "Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan Officers"

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Because the NYTimes is paywalled, I'm sending the whole article


>>Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan 
Officers<<


The Trump administration held secret meetings with rebellious military 
officers from Venezuela over the last year to discuss their plans to 
overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, according to American officials and 
a former Venezuelan military commander who participated in the talks.


Establishing a clandestine channel with coup plotters in Venezuela was a 
big gamble for Washington, given its long history of covert intervention 
across Latin America. Many in the region still deeply resent the United 
States for backing previous rebellions, coups and plots in countries 
like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turning a blind eye to 
the abuses military regimes committed during the Cold War.


The White House, which declined to answer detailed questions about the 
talks, said in a statement that it was important to engage in “dialogue 
with all Venezuelans who demonstrate a desire for democracy” in order to 
“bring positive change to a country that has suffered so much under Maduro.”


But one of the Venezuelan military commanders involved in the secret 
talks was hardly an ideal figure to help restore democracy: He is on the 
American government’s own sanctions list of corrupt officials in Venezuela.


He and other members of the Venezuelan security apparatus have been 
accused by Washington of a wide range of serious crimes, including 
torturing critics, jailing hundreds of political prisoners, wounding 
thousands of civilians, trafficking drugs and collaborating with the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which is considered a 
terrorist organization by the United States.


American officials eventually decided not to help the plotters, and the 
coup plans stalled. But the Trump administration’s willingness to meet 
several times with mutinous officers intent on toppling a president in 
the hemisphere could backfire politically.


Most Latin American leaders agree that Venezuela’s president, Mr. 
Maduro, is an increasingly authoritarian ruler who has effectively 
ruined his country’s economy, leading to extreme shortages of food and 
medicine. The collapse has set off an exodus of desperate Venezuelans 
who are spilling over borders, overwhelming their neighbors.


Even so, Mr. Maduro has long justified his grip on Venezuela by claiming 
that Washington imperialists are actively trying to depose him, and the 
secret talks could provide him with ammunition to chip away at the 
region’s nearly united stance against him.


“This is going to land like a bomb” in the region, said Mari Carmen 
Aponte, who served as the top diplomat overseeing Latin American affairs 
in the final months of the Obama administration.


Beyond the coup plot, Mr. Maduro’s government has already fended off 
several small-scale attacks, including salvos from a helicopter last 
year and exploding drones as he gave a speech in August. The attacks 
have added to the sense that the president is vulnerable.


Venezuelan military officials sought direct access to the American 
government during Barack Obama’s presidency, only to be rebuffed, 
officials said.


Then in August of last year, President Trump declared that the United 
States had a “military option” for Venezuela — a declaration that drew 
condemnation from American allies in the region but encouraged 
rebellious Venezuelan military officers to reach out to Washington once 
again.


“It was the commander in chief saying this now,” the former Venezuelan 
commander on the sanctions list said in an interview, speaking on 
condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals by the Venezuelan 
government. “I’m not going to doubt it when this was the messenger.”


In a series of covert meetings abroad, which began last fall and 
continued this year, the military officers told the American government 
that they represented a few hundred members of the armed forces who had 
soured on Mr. Maduro’s authoritarianism.


The officers asked the United States to supply them with encrypted 
radios, citing the need to communicate securely, as they developed a 
plan to install a transitional government to run the country until 
elections could be held.


American officials did not provide material support, and the plans 
unraveled after a recent crackdown that led to the arrest of dozens of 
the plotters.


Relations between the United States and Venezuela have been strained for 
years. The two have not exchanged ambassadors since 2010. After Mr. 
Trump took office, his administration increased sanctions against top 

Re: [Marxism] Nicaraguan Contradictions

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On 9/5/2018 11:23 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:


I think socialists really need to reflect on the direction the colonial
revolution has taken over the years, because Ortega is not some lone
exception

How has the colonial revolution degenerated so much? Isn't what we're
seeing visible proof of the theory of permanent revolution? After all, the
leadership of none of these revolutions linked the colonial revolution with
the overthrow of capitalism itself.

I don't think the Nicaraguan revolution "degenerated" at all. It was 
defeated, destroyed. Crushed. Drowned in blood and I believe that had 
been consummated before the election of Mrs Chamorro.


In the year 2000 I wrote a very long post on this list going over my 
experiences in Nicaragua where I lived for several years. About a year 
ago I put it on my blog and it is here: 
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/from-archives-how-1980s-sandinista.html


Rereading it now, there are a couple of things I remember saying in 
other posts from that time. Mainly that there simply was no basis in 
Nicaragua for what they were trying to do economically and socially, 
though I'm not sure I put it that baldly. The policy of pressured 
collectivization ("forced" would be an exaggeration) was a conscious 
choice with the idea that this would smooth their transition to a 
planned economy, and that the social programs and economic benefits 
would help them sell it. Wheelock seemed to be totally committed to it.


This affected not just the worker-peasant alliance but the 
"worker-worker alliance." A lot of workers viewed themselves as 
displaced small farmers and what they wanted was land and to be left 
alone on their little homestead.


I'll repeat what I said in my post from 18 years ago: in four years I 
was in Nicaragua I never met a single peasant who had gotten  land to 
work on his own account from the revolution. On the contrary, I saw the 
FSLN oppose movements by agricultural workers to break up cotton estates 
and distribute them for their families to work individually. And I was 
on  the lookout because Mike Baumann and Jane Harris, who preceded me 
and my companion as Militant correspondents there, made a point of 
telling me that had been their experience.


In 1986 or 1987 the government did make a show of handing out land 
titles but to people who had long worked their parcels on the 
agricultural frontier and to people on state farms (technically turning 
them into cooperatives, a distinction  without a difference).  It did 
not change things internally, it was mostly paper. Although I do think 
it is true that it showed the FSLN leadership had realized the problem 
with the agrarian reform, and was beginning to change course.


As for the rest of their economic and social programs, they required a 
lot of resources from  abroad that was increasingly withheld. The one 
resource they did have was Cuba, but it could offer mostly personnel, 
and Nicaragua had decided to forgo the aid of Cuban civilians (like 
teachers and doctors) after the Grenada invasion. In part the reason was 
that they could not be armed, but with the war spreading, they were 
sitting ducks.


But of course that hit programs in the countryside especially hard 
because the Cubans were willing to go places the government  had a very 
hard time recruiting Nicas for.


So Nicaragua in a lot of ways got ahead of itself, and then was left 
twisting in the wind by the Soviets for the Americans to use as a 
punching bag. And I mean that quite literally. The Nicas had sent people 
to Eastern Europe to train as fighter pilots and helicopter pilots. They 
even built a military airport. Only a handful of helicopters had made it 
before the Soviets cut them off.


In the CNN documentary series Cold War produced in the 90s there are 
interviews with former Soviet foreign ministry officials that confirmed 
this is exactly what took place.


Could the revolution have survived if they'd gotten timely military 
resources to defeat the contra war? Looking back at the 1990s, I doubt 
it. The United States would have strangled them economically. And there 
was a very grave economic problem: they had already embarked on the road 
outlined in the Communist Manifesto:


*  *  *

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working 
class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win 
the battle of democracy.


The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, 
all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of 
production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised 
as the ruling 

[Marxism] A dishonest sliming of DSA and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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[This is also on my blog now: 
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-dishonest-sliming-of-dsa-and.html]


On August 31, Counterpunch published a bizarre and dishonest 
racism-baiting attack on the Democratic Socialists of America by Andrew 
Stewart.


 “Grappling with the racism of the DSA’s Founders” has the peculiarity 
that three of the five “founders” of the DSA --described by Stewart as 
“its early leaders/thinkers”—in reality had nothing to do with the DSA. 
So much so that one of them –Max Shachtman—had been dead for a decade by 
the time DSA was founded in 1982.


The other two, Albert Shanker and Bayard Rustin, were close associates 
of Shachtman. Rustin was the head of the Socialist Party and its 
successor organization, Social Democrats USA. Shanker was president of 
the New York teacher’s union from 1964 to 1985 and a close friend of 
Shachtman’s, though as far as I know not actively involved in socialist 
groups like the SP during those years.


By the early 1970s these three were the political enemies of the figure 
most associated with the DSA’s founding, Michael Harrington.


Harrington and those three had all been part of the Socialist Party, a 
political current of anti-Stalinist socialists. Over time, the SP’s 
anti-Stalinism increasingly became plain right-wing anticommunism and 
even in domestic politics the group shed most vestiges of its socialist 
past, coming out against the antiwar movement and the Black movement.


But a small part of the SP led by Harrington resisted the drift to the 
right and instead began to move to the left under the impact of the 
antiwar and other protest movements of the 1960s, leading to a split in 
the early 1970s between the progressive minority that founded the 
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, one the organizations that 
eventually joined to found of the DSA, and the right wing majority 
which, to make clear that they were not socialist and not a party became 
“Social Democrats USA” in 1972.


Stewart lies by saying the three from the right wing were founders of 
DSA. They were not. The purpose of the lie is to then saddle DSA with 
political responsibility for Shachtman’s rabid anticommunism, Shanker’s 
reactionary teacher’s strike in New York in 1968 against Black and 
Latino control of the schools in their neighborhoods, and Bayard 
Rustin’s attacks on Black nationalism taking advantage of his 
well-deserved prestige as the key behind-the-scenes organizer of the 
1963 March on Washington.


And if you insist that DSA is somehow responsible for the actions of 
those who years before the DSA existed were in the same group as Michael 
Harrington, then why not give DSA the credit for the 1963 “I have a 
dream" March of Washington, Shachtman’s leading role in resisting the 
rise of Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the things Shanker did to 
defend the legitimate interests of New York Teachers?


The reason, of course, in that this is an outrageous frame-up, the sort 
of thing I’d expect from Fox News or Inforwars, not a web site like 
Counterpunch.


Stewart also brings up Harrington’s opposition to the founding Port 
Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. But 
Harrington later reversed course and the DSA was founded by the fusion 
of DSOC with the New American Movement, a group descended precisely from 
the early SDS.


Stewart begins his Philippic by trying to shield himself from the 
obvious criticism that this construct of his is based on events from a 
half century ago, has nothing to do with the real world DSA of today by 
admitting as much:


*  *  *
OK, with a serious dose of honest humility and respect, I will admit 
readily that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership is 
doing some great stuff at the grassroots level  So this polemic will 
be relegated entirely to the founding generation of Democratic 
Socialists of America and its early leaders/thinkers.

*  *  *

But he continues by assailing the DSA’s electoral work with the 
paper-thin disguise of countering “a meta-narrative” supposedly being 
foisted by Jacobin and other outlets. According to Stewart, this story 
holds that after decades of failed efforts by everyone from the Greens 
to the SWP and the Communist Party, in its first try the DSA “has 
finally … brought socialism into the mainstream electoral realm,” and 
concluding  in ironic bold type:  “And with that, dear comrades, we 
shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!”


And, of course, of course, of course, he proceeds to deconstruct to his 
own fabrication:


*  *  *
I am compelled to recall the great quote of Amilcar Cabral, “Tell no 

Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA’s Founders

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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This is a lying slime job against the DSA, based on the idea that the 
DSA came into the world cursed by the mark of Cain due to Original Sin: 
it was founded by the likes of Max Shachtman and Albert Shanker.


Shactman's accomplishment is especially impressive since he died in 1972 
and the DSA wasn't founded until a decade later, in 1982.


I've written a response to this and a hatchet job he did on Alexandria 
Ocasio Cortez.  I sent it to Counterpunch but I've got to check whether 
they've posted it, if not I'll just send it here.


Joaquín


On 8/31/2018 1:15 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/31/grappling-with-the-racism-of-the-dsas-founders/ 





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Re: [Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar -- and what Engels would have said about her

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On 8/24/2018 3:04 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

Can't figure out why Corey Robin and Bhaskar Sunkara keep promoting 
socialism, at least as they see it, in the Washington Post and the NY 
Times. You'd assume that the Daily News, read by subway workers et al 
(at least those that still read newspapers), would be a more suitable 
location. I guess they are trying to reach other academics, or in 
Bhaskar's case, businessmen.
No one outside New York reads the Daily News. And my observation in 
Atlanta is that people joining DSA (here, almost 200 so far this year) 
are millennials with a college degree and a low-level clerical or 
service industry job. The more serious ones with a few bucks to spare 
subscribe to the New York Times digital edition, just as many 
politically serious boomers read the NYT when we were their age (if we 
could get our hands on it outside New York).


So for example the chair of our chapter led a Jacobin reading group and 
was driving Uber to try to survive (I think he recently got a more 
regular job). And if I remember right, he follows the NYT.

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[Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar -- and what Engels would have said about her

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-superstar.html

That's from my blog. And before you go apeshit, read it closely enough 
to understand that my point is that it is not about her, it is about us.


Honestly, I don't write this stuff to be provocative but I know many 
comrades profoundly disagree.


So what follows is an attempt to explain the main elements of my 
thinking about the course I have chosen, with special emphasis on how I 
believe it is fully in keeping with the way Marx and Engels approached 
these sorts of questions.


The core of my analysis is that Bernie's campaign, the DSA's growth, 
Ocasio's victory, etc., are all expressions of a movement in the working 
class, not a movement in the sense of a protest campaign but in the 
sense of a change or development in mass consciousness. This started 
with Occupy and was evidenced by its slogan we are the 99%, which tens 
of millions of people immediatelly identified with.


Both the Sanders and Ocasio campaigns were extremely aggressive and loud 
in identifying with the working class and emphasizing it through things 
like the contributions policy.


I know some comrades think that all this is a fake and a fraud, there is 
just an illusion of class identity. From my point of view that is really 
irrelevant in addressing the question of tactics. I think the clearest 
explanation of the right tactics is Engels's famous letter to Sorge 
about the Henry George candidacy for mayor of New York. 
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/letters/86_11_29.htm]


But you might object, what good is Engels's advise if we're dealing with 
a complete counterfeit? Well, here is how his letter starts: "The Henry 
George boom has of course brought to light a colossal mass of fraud and 
I am glad I was not there."  He says it was not just a fraud but a 
colossal one so revolting that he was glad to be thousands of miles away.


So did he proclaim it a catastrophic setback for the class? Actually, 
quite the opposite. The next sentence after the one I just quoted says 
"But despite it all it has been an epoch-making day."


Not just a relative advance considering the nefarious circumstances but 
"epoch making." A "colossal mass of fraud" that was a world historic 
advance for the working class.


The next couple of sentences are the famous ones about how "the Germans" 
in the United States treat Marxism as a dogma instead of a guide to 
action. And then he presents the following approach to tactics. At the 
heart of it is how to deal with the *contradiction* between workers 
realizing they need to come together as a political force but beginning 
to do so around "a colossal mass of fraud."


* * *

   The first great step of importance for every country newly entering
   into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an
   independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a
   distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more
   rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing.
   That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly
   deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are
   inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have
   time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the
   opportunity when they have /their own movement--no matter in what
   form so long as it is only their own movement/--in which they are
   driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting
   themselves.

* * *

Comrades will object that in no way can the Sanders campaign or Ocasio's 
be equated with Henry George's, there are no ongoing institutions, no 
mechanisms for discussion and decision making etc. But I think here it 
is very important to not project  our understanding of "party" to what 
Marx and Engels were talking about in the 1840s when they first laid out 
their views.


If you re-read the Communist Manifesto which is where the whole concept 
of the centrality of the party in the worker's movement is first 
thoroughly dealt with, you will see there are references to concrete, 
existing parties in the last chapter. They mention two parties as 
worker's parties: the Chartists and the U.S. Agrarian Reformers. That 
last one is a somewhat mystifying reference because it is not exactly 
clear who they're referring to or what information they had that led 
them to call it a working class party.


But the Chartists Marx and Engels did know very well, and that was not a 
"party" as we would use the word today but a movement around a petition 
called the "People's Charter." There were 

Re: [Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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On 8/20/2018 12:08 AM, John Reimann wrote:
thank you, Joaquin Bustelo, for that information on the origin of the 
slogan. However, your general history confirms my belief. As you say, 
the adoption of the slogan by DSA came about in part through the role 
of the national office of DSA. And that office would resist to the end 
any campaign that was not acceptable to the "progressive" wing of the 
Democratic Party.


Let me get this straight.

The DSA National Office capitulates to the Democrats. Yet it adopts 
Abolish ICE *before* any of the Democrats.


But!!! Some Democrats, pressured by the mijente campaign and recognizing 
that ICE --at least under this name-- is toast after kidnapping children 
at the border, say "Abolish ICE."


Which proves just how capitulationist the DSA N.O. is: they 
*pre-capitulated* to the Democrats by adopting a demand of the 
intransigent wing of the immigrant rights movement even BEFORE some 
Democrats felt compelled to at least pretend to support it.


But wait a minute!!!

I think that by adopting the demand of the immigrant rights movement the 
DSA is trying to discredit the Immigrant Rights Movement because the 
DSA, by pre-capitulating in adopting this demand, is trying to make it 
seem like the Latino immigrant rights movement is ALSO pre-capitulating 
because it's the same demand as the DSA is supporting, when in fact the 
demand is absolutely righteous and the DSA National Office has a 
fiendishly clever plan to oppose it by supporting it.


Gotta go. Alex Jones is calling about me appearing on his show on 
account of how the DSA, by fiendishly opposing the demand by supporting 
it, is actually supporting the demand by opposing it, since everyone 
knows how treacherous and capitulationist the DSA is, so because they're 
trying to fool people into believing they oppose the demand by 
supporting it, what they're really trying to do is to support the 
demand, by getting people to think they're opposing it because they're 
supporting it.


There is a historical precedent: https://youtu.be/xWGAdzn5_KU?t=50s

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Re: [Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?

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On 8/15/2018 11:58 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:


Now, a wing of the Democrats is accepting the "abolish ICE" slogan, so DSA
has taken up that slogan.


"Abolish ICE" does not come from "a wing of the Democrats." It comes 
from Mijente, which is composed of the leading people in the left wing 
of the immigrant rights movement nationwide and came together especially 
the around the "Not One More" protests against Deporter-In-Chief Barack 
Obama.


The "Abolish ICE" campaign was actually started in Spanish and had a 
more aggressive name: "Chinga la migra," which means "Fuck la migra" 
[the immigration cops]. I personally wasn't a big fan of the slogan 
although I understand perfectly where it is coming from.


ICE has been carrying out increasingly provocative actions, like 
kidnapping children and taking them from their parents at the border, 
arresting people to deport them when they have been called by US 
Citizenship and Immigration Services to bring proof of their marriage to 
a U.S. citizen so they can obtain legal status, arresting people in 
courthouses when they are the victims in domestic violence cases.


Ten days ago ICE hit a tiny town of 3,700 people called O'Neill in an 
isolated area of Nebraska, sending dozens of agents who arrested the 
bulk of the workers at the two main employers in town, a tomato growing 
hothouse and potato packing plant, more than 100 all told.  In this case 
they also arrested management people for hiring the undocumented. I 
think that basically the town has been nuked. And it was the county seat.


Just last week  a father was pulled over taking children to school, 
arrested and driven away. Another: a husband taking his pregnant wife to 
the hospital to deliver their baby.


That's why "Fuck la migra." The rage is such that I fully expect that 
one of these days some ICE agents will get themselves killed or provoke 
a riot. So the campaign in Spanish has chinga la migra as its slogan, in 
English, abolish ICE.


DSA did not adopt the "Abolish ICE" slogan to curry favor with 
Democrats. It did so as a result of the collaboration of DSA chapters 
and the National Office with the left wing of the immigrant rights 
movement. In fact, we had a national online session three or four weeks 
ago where the presenters were mostly not DSA people, but from Mijente, 
Southerners On New Ground (SONG), Cosecha, as well as, if I remember 
right, folks who explained about precautions and preparations in 
carrying out direct actions against the immigration cops. Although maybe 
that was at the second session, because we had two.


And, yes, a handful of Democrat Congresscritters are saying "Abolish 
ICE," arguing that the agency has become discredited and ineffective, 
but the demands of the left wing of the immigrant rights movement in 
this campaign are three: Abolish ICE, Decriminalize immigration, Dump 
Sessions.



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[Marxism] What's behind the explosive growth of the DSA?

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2018/08/behind-dsas-explosive-growth-rebirth-of.html

   ... a group with 4,000 members is double the size of one with 2,000
   members, and one with 8,000 four times as large. But a group with
   48,000 members is not just 24 times larger: it is a/qualitatively
   different/phenomenon

   This is a social and political phenomenon, not just individual
   decisions. A new mass socialist movement is emerging in this
   country, and that is a clear sign of increasing class consciousness
   among working people

*  *  *

That's from the first part of the post; the part that's going to make 
some people here go ballistic is what I say about relating to the 
Democratic Party later on.


Joaquín

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Re: [Marxism] Access to a *WSJ* article

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 Blue States, Red Diapers, White Hair

Barton Swaim
May 25, 2018 3:31 p.m. ET
20 COMMENTS 



*The story of*2016, if there was a story other than Donald Trump, was 
that vast numbers of the nation’s youth fell for a white-haired 
unrepentant socialist. So does the Bernie Sanders insurgency portend the 
long-delayed emergence of socialism in America? Maybe, although it’s 
fair to point out that Sen. Sanders considers himself a democratic 
socialist. Social democracies—of the kind that exist in Scandinavia, for 
instance—have nationalized large parts of their countries’ economies, 
but not all. They recognize the need for a robust market economy to pay 
for generous welfare states. That, rather than doctrinaire socialism, is 
what Mr. Sanders’s young supporters want—or think they want.


But surely Mr. Sanders’s appeal goes beyond ideology. Other politicians 
with views akin to his have run for president— Ralph Nader, say—but 
failed generate a nationwide movement of 20-somethings. Two new books 
try to explain his appeal, but it’s worth first considering the 
senator’s own 2017 work,*“Our Revolution” (St. Martin’s, 450 pages, 
$27)*. The book skips quickly through the author’s early life in 
Brooklyn, his protest candidacies for the antiwar Liberty Union Party in 
the 1970s, his mayoralty of Burlington, Vt., in the 1980s, and his time 
in the U.S. House (1991-2007) and Senate (since 2007). It dwells mostly 
on his 2016 presidential run and his political vision: a $15 minimum 
wage, fully subsidized higher education, a nationalized health system 
and so on. Mr. Sanders sometimes lapses into campaign-biography 
rigmarole—listing accomplishments, lamenting disasters that happened 
because his advice wasn’t heeded—but his writing, much like his talk, is 
clear and direct.


There is in my view a fatal contradiction at the heart of Mr. Sanders’s 
worldview: He holds democratic self-rule to be sacred and inviolable, 
but he’s prepared to transfer enormous power to a coercive and 
impersonal government that cares little for the people’s will. Near the 
beginning of the book Mr. Sanders recalls the “profound lesson about 
democracy and self-rule” he learned as a boy on the streets of Brooklyn. 
“Nobody supervised us. Nobody coached us. Nobody refereed our games. We 
were on our own. Everything was organized and determined by the kids 
themselves. The group worked out our disagreements, made all the 
decisions, and learned to live with them.” Not knowing the author of the 
passage, one might assume him to be a libertarian.


The latter half of “Our Revolution” is packed with strident and 
statistic-laden contentions for the author’s social democratic politics. 
Heather Gautney’s analysis of the 2016 campaign,*“Crashing the Party” 
(Verso, 180 pages, $16.95)*, is similarly dense, although even her 
account captures Mr. Sanders’s refreshing plainspokenness. Ms. Gautney 
is a sociologist at Fordham University, but in 2011 she took a temporary 
position in Mr. Sanders’s office. Later, she worked as a volunteer 
researcher for his presidential campaign. “ ‘Are you a good writer?’ the 
senator asked at her first interview. ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said 
sheepishly, ‘I got a piece published in the/Washington Post/.’ ‘Yeah,’ 
he said bluntly, ‘everyone thinks they’re a good writer.’ . . . ‘Okay, 
okay. You’re hired.’ ”


Ms. Gautney’s analysis of present-day America, like Mr. Sanders’s, is 
unsparingly bleak. The U.S., she thinks, is a place where corporations 
asset-strip public institutions, where the rich manipulate elections and 
where the poor have little hope. Conservatism, the thing responsible for 
this state of affairs, she regards with frigid disdain. “In the 
Reagan-Thatcher worldview,” she observes, “society was just a sum of 
self-interested individuals, and class inequality a fact of human nature.”


Ms. Gautney’s most salient point, though, deserves attention on the 
left. The Democratic Party’s increasing fixation on identity politics 
has rendered the party of the working class almost tone deaf to the 
economic concerns of the country’s wage-earners and poor. Like her 
fellow progressive Mark Lilla, Ms. Gautney blames conservatism for this 
unhappy predicament rather than the left’s obsession with 
self-expression, but the practical relevance is the same. “Bernie’s 
political framework,” she writes, “involves combining the programs of 
civil and economic rights by way of social wage policies aimed at 
empowering working people of all races, genders, sexualities, and 
nationalities—instead of replicating 

[Marxism] The Constituent Assembly: Venezuelan Thermidor?

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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At the outset, I should explain that for many years I did not try to 
follow the Venezuelan Revolution closely, but in the last couple of 
years I have been increasingly forced to do so.


That because I am the producer and co-host of the program "Hablemos con 
Teodoro." It is a daily 2-hour Spanish-language news, analysis and 
call-in show. Our station is Radio Información, a progressive and now 
internet-only service organized by people from the immigrant rights 
movement (see the footnote for too much information about us).


For some time I have been disturbed by the seeming direction of the 
Venezuelan process under President Nicolás Maduro. Obviously Venezuela 
faces imperialist hostility and subversion as well as the revanchism of 
traditional ruling class figures and families (Capriles, etc.) who 
dominate the "opposition" and quite obviously look to imperialist 
backing to fulfill their dreams of a return to yesterday's Venezuela.


After becoming president in 2013, Maduro had at least formally abided by 
Chavez's Bolivarian Constitution for a couple of years, but since last 
year, after losing (and very badly) the National Assembly elections at 
the end of 2005, his government has defied constitutional provisions by 
refusing to accept the authority of the resulting legislature, refusing 
to hold a recall referendum on his mandate, packing the national 
Electoral Commission, etc.


(But note that the opposition and its National Assembly majority are 
also partly to blame. It was quick to abandon the ground of defending 
the Chavista constitution --especially the recall referendum--, turning 
instead to will of the wisp nostrums like that Maduro by his actions had 
abandoned the presidency.)


This spring, the Maduro administration adopted an all-but-explicit 
anti-constitutional course, with the Supreme Court proclaiming itself, 
formally, on its own initiative, the national legislature. It was 
quickly forced to abandon the usurpation by very widespread 
denunciations including from within the government, given voice above 
all by the Attorney General.


However this was quickly followed by Maduro calling a Constituent Assembly.

Contrary to what the constitution seems to require, and the precedent 
set by Chávez, the people did not have a chance to vote on whether or 
not to establish this body. The election rules set by the government 
departed from tradition and normal representative, bourgeois-democratic 
norms, especially one person, one vote.


Government candidates ran without opposition. Even so, the company that 
operated the voting machines announced a discrepancy of at least one 
million votes between machine readings and official results claiming a 
turnout of seven million, close to or a little more than 50% of those 
registered.


Once elected, in its first sessions last week, the Assembly proclaimed 
itself the Supreme governmental  body and decreed the 
extra-constitutional removal of the Attorney General and the lone 
opposition member of the electoral council. It announced that all bodies 
and officials were subject to its decisions on functions and 
composition. And to underline its authority, Maduro formally placed his 
position as president in the hands of the Assembly, which then in what 
it called a legitimate exercise of its paramount authority, ratified him 
in his post.


This is clearly a dictatorship, using that word not as a vulgar insult 
against a government one doesn't like, but a *regime* where the 
authorities are not restrained or bound by any previously existing 
norms. And *regime* is used here not in the common "objective" 
journalist sense of "a government we don't like but won't honestly and 
simply say so" but a form of government beyond any one administration. 
(So, for example, there was no change in regime between Bush and Obama 
or Obama and Trump.)


Why do I use these terms? Because what happened in Venezuela last week 
registers a formal, qualitative change in the country's governmental 
regime: from the one established under the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution 
to a dictatorship of the Constituent Assembly.


In my view, this is unquestionable even if you consider the assembly to 
have been quite properly established in a democratic or revolutionary 
way. In other words, there can be such a thing as a "revolutionary" or 
"democratic" dictatorship. Although I do not see where that is the case 
here.


The fact that Maduro surrendered his authority to the assembly as a 
president elected by a popular vote and is now president thanks to 
authority newly invested in him by the assembly (even if phrased as 
"ratification" in the office) 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Trump approval rebounds to 45%, surges among Hispanics, union homes, men

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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On 8/11/2017 1:15 PM, Erik Toren via Marxism wrote:


Hispanic is a big category. I wonder which subgroup of Hispanics has
surged.

Erik


Public opinion surveys claiming things about Latinos generally would not 
be worth the paper they're printed on if someone printed them. But the 
entire field of public opinion polling is in crisis, for the techniques 
that worked in the 20th Century no longer do. Most of all, people aren't 
cooperating with surveys


But apart from that, Zogby surveys are systematically biased (in a 
statistical sense) due to their design. It is a self-selected population 
skewed towards heavier internet and especially email usage.


Zogby says they're surveying "Likely voters". Likely voters in what 
election? You may say, well, the next one is November 2018 but that is 
wrong. My county board of elections had 12 elections scheduled for the 
current year, one a month. In reality, from among the self-selected 
participants, Zogby is deciding who merits being counted and whose 
answers should be discarded as coming from a member of the great unwashed.


The traditional screens for "likely voter" include questions like do you 
know where your voting place is? Who is running in this election? When 
did you register to vote? Those really only become significant when the 
election is very close.


Zogby did not detail its methodology for this survey, but we know they 
survey by email invitation. A greater proportion of Latinos are Internet 
users but a higher percentage (than among the general population) have 
access mostly or exclusively through smartphone, so they use email less.


Although "Hispanic" is now the largest racial/ethnic minority (that the 
government counts), surveys rarely break out numbers for Latinos, even 
though they do so for Blacks. That's because they have so few Latinos 
that actually respond. The response rate among Latinos is lower than for 
anglos and Blacks even in bilingual phone surveys.


But the truth is the OVERALL response rate is now so low for the 
population as a whole as to call into question the validity of polling, 
period. That's why the largest and most prestigious polling 
organization, Gallup, has stopped doing election polls.


When I first became involved in the field at CNN in 1990, the response 
rate for phone polls was close to 50%. For the last few years it has 
been under 10%, according to Pew. For email-invitation surveys, the 
response rate is even lower.


Zogby says they had 1300 people in their new poll. They do these 
presidential approval surveys frequently and in July they had 856 and in 
June, 1031 and at the end of April 876. This raises the obvious 
question: did the methodology change? Were different numbers of 
invitations to participate sent out? Or did the response rate vary 
wildly, so that half again as many people responded now as three or four 
weeks ago? If so, THAT is probably a more significant data point worth 
exploring than what they think of Trump.


But we don't know because Zogby only says they send out "thousands" of 
emails. Nor do they publish a detailed, question-by-question breakdown 
of results like reputable pollsters do.


And then consider the Latino sub-sample. If they actually got the same 
percentage as among the 2016 voters (10%) that would have been 130 of 
the 1300 total respondents. But my experience tells me it was about 
2/3rds that number, let's say 90. The MoE with that sample is more than 
10%, which means the numbers this survey gives for Latinos are 
meaningless. Even at 130 they're junk (MoE=8.7%). And the previous 
surveys that the new Hispanic number is being compared to was 856, so 
there was no way you could have gotten meaningful percents out of that 
poll.


BTW under representation of a huge problem because it is not just 
Latinos. Experience shows polling respondents systematically under 
represent young people, minorities, and people without a college 
education. So you take your raw results, and then you look at the 
demographics you SHOULD have had, based on, for example, census bureau 
numbers, and weigh the results accordingly. So if you should have had 
120 Blacks but actually only had 100 Blacks respondents, you give a 
"weight" of 1.2 to each Black respondent.


But when it comes to "likely" voters, you define what the target 
universe looks like, how many Blacks, how many high school graduates. 
So, are the demographics those of the 2016 presidential or the 2014 
off-year electorate? If we're talking about the 2020 electorate, who is 
the Democrat? Clinton gives you one electorate, Bernie, a very different 
one.


(This was the big reason Gallup 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The “Panera strategy” didn’t work for Ossoff. It won’t work for Dems nationally.

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The article gets it wrong. It was much, much worse.

This idea that Ossoff ran as a "moderate"  Democrat but "emphatically" 
anti-Trump is bullshit.


At first (in the first round) he ran on a (not too emphatic) anti-Trump 
theme. But by the end of that round, and especially in the six weeks 
before the second round, he mostly waged an unflinching battle for 
motherhood and apple pie.


Ossoff ran partly on a Republican platform of things like cutting 
"wasteful spending" in Washington instead of taxing the corporations and 
he rich, and partly on a Kumbaya program of "kiss kiss hug hug why can't 
we all get along."


Sure, his website says all kinds of bullshit, but the actual campaign he 
ran was "I'm a nicer, gentler, kinder sort-of-Republican and I am 
really, *really*, REALLY white."


He came out against medicare for all, and further capitulating to the 
Republican party line by stressing he was for fixing and changing 
Obamacare -- with no details. In other words, confirming that it was 
broken (which is true) but letting the Republicans define what is wrong, 
why, and what to do about it.


In one debate, facing a question at point-blank range, he came out for a 
"living wage" without defining what that was but saying it should be 
indexed to the cost of living, which means it should be lower in Georgia 
than up north.


In that debate his Republican opponent said flatly she was not just 
against a minimum wage increase, but against a living wage. From the 
East Cobb Patch:


* * *

"This is an example of the fundamental difference between a liberal and 
a conservative: I do not support a livable wage. What I support is 
making sure that we have an economy that is robust with low taxes and 
less regulation." She went on to say that small businesses would be 
"dramatically hurt" by higher wages.


* * *

An AP story anticipated withering fire from the Democrats on this issue: 
"But her choice of words — 'I do not support a livable wage' — could 
become fodder against her before the June 20 special election in 
Georgia's 6th Congressional District. And it certainly could become 
grist as Democrats nationally continue their efforts to frame Trump and 
Republicans as foes of the working class."


This, BTW, was classic Handel, which explains why she lost races for 
governor and the U.S. Senate and was made to walk the plank at the Susan 
G. Komen foundation for trying to defund Planned Parenthood.


She *could* have said that she was for a living wage but the way to get 
there was not through more government intervention but instead cutting 
regulations and so on.


But no!!! She practically chopped off her own head and held it up to 
show there are no brains in it.


That was two weeks before election day. How many Democrat ads used her 
statement? How many speeches did Ossoff give denouncing what every 
political pundit from right to left considered an astonishing blunder?


No ads, no speeches, not even a fucking leaflet. This is a big part of 
why he lost: he let the Republicans define the issues in the campaign 
even though he had WAY more money than they did. This wasn't Panera it 
was Wonder Bread.


Thanks to his campaign, everyone in Georgia who follows politics has 
learned the meaning of the word "anodyne." Do an internet search for 
"Ossoff anodyne." Google came up with 1,800 hits, Yahoo with more than 
3,000.


Harry Truman warned more than sixty years ago that this was a losing 
strategy for the Democrats: "The people don't want a phony Democrat. If 
it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in 
Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every 
time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony 
Democrat."


More specifically, demographically, Ossoff lost because he could not get 
out the  "minority" vote: mostly Black, but also some Latino and Asian. 
He got the old ladies from nursing homes and Baptist churches, but he 
could not get the younger people. Here is what one young Black wrote, as 
quoted at observer.com:


“Jon Ossoff came to my mosque Friday. He didn’t try to win our vote, he 
just had a professional camera crew taking pics of him with hijabs,” one 
Twitter user complained before the election. He said Ossoff didn’t 
bother discussing issues important to the Muslim community in his 
district: “Jon Ossoff basically told us 2 things. 1. Vote for me because 
‘Trump’ 2. Have your phones already out for pics, we only have 5 minutes 
left.”


Ossoff did not want a lot of interaction with Black people and 
especially not in a mosque that might appear on the evening news and 
scare off racist "swing" voters.

[Marxism] Press Freedom in Mexico: record numbers of homicides, no coverage

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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From my blog:

This is what happens when you have six journalists murdered so far this 
year, and more than 100 in this century, and hundreds of other attacks 
on the media, in addition to the spying that the New York Timesrevealed 
 on 
Monday. And a grand total of three of these crimes have been 
solved.*/Three./*


*/Full:/*

https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/06/press-freedom-in-mexico-record-number.html

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[Marxism] CNN bans not 'respectful' dissent, just the contempt Trump deserves

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CNN is still fighting hard to become America's Pravda. I don't think 
they'll ever wake up to the fact that Trump already has Breitbart and 
the Daily Stormer.


Full:

https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/06/cnn-bans-not-respectful-dissent-just.html

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[Marxism] Kathy Griffin? I'm with her

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From my blog:

CNN cut ties with Kathy Griffin because she disrespected The President.

But I'm with her because you can't disrespect someone who is beneath 
contempt.


Full:

https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/05/condemn-kathy-griffin-no-way.html

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[Marxism] Scientology and political cults

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Powerful new Leah Remini documentary about Scientology aired tonight on 
the A network
This documentary I assume is going to be repeated several times in the 
next few days, for those who have access to the channel.
Those of us who have been involved in political cults should really 
watch her series "Scientology and the Aftermath" to gain a different and 
broader perspective and deeper understanding, even if we think our 
political cults were only 10% as bad as Scientology or were not cults 
but just had a few deformities in that direction.
One thing that struck me especially: the U.S. Socialist Workers Party in 
the 70s and first half of the 80s that I belonged to was also a cult 
around doctrine and the organization built to defend and promote that 
doctrine, and not so much around a leader, though there was some of 
that, too. That is the picture I get from these programs about Scientology.
And guarding all proportions, the SWP financially exploited (and still 
exploits, I assume) its adherents and its staff, which Remini has 
described about Scientology in her programs.
There are seven episodes from a few months ago, and those are available 
through bit torrent, as I assume this one will be in a day or two

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Mogannam-Syrias anti imperialist mask unveiling contradictions of the left.pdf

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Shouldn't this be pirated and placed on a public sever somewhere?

Information wants to be free, but people have to make it so. And people 
with access have to do it.


The folks that write the papers suffer no harm from having them more 
widely available, quite the contrary. They get no royalties, no 
residuals no nothing except perhaps a tiny handful of copies if they're 
lucky. Academic journals that hide articles behind paywalls are an 
expression of bourgeois imperialist privilege. The academic priesthood 
caste gets sucked into it as a rite of initiation. It needs to be SMASHED.


The researchers and writers don't suffer, the ones that suffer are these 
parasitic journal companies that no longer play any useful social 
function and should have a stake driven through their heart.


Make it a rule: if it's not been pirated or Creative Commons licensed 
it's a piece of shit and it's not worth reading, citing or responding to it.


Publishing in high-priced academic journals is imperialist oppression, 
capitalist exploitation and scabbing. It shout be treated --and fought-- 
as such.


Joaquín


On 5/25/2017 12:21 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

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On 5/25/17 10:37 AM, David McDonald via Marxism wrote:

I get a blank page that says no preview available.


It's behind a paywall. Contact me privately if you would like a copy.
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[Marxism] "Leninism" and Scientology [was: Reflections on the “party question”]

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OK, So out of 11,287,933 vanguard parties from 1917 to 2017, four --or 
was it five?-- actually led revolutions that expropriated the capitalists.


Unfortunately they turned into such complete catastrophes that working 
people acceded to return to capitalism.


I wish fucking soi-dissant Marxists would take off a year or ten from 
braying about "the party" and actually read and study what Marx, Engels 
and Lenin (but not Trotsky, sorry, Trotsky was a Zinovievist just like 
Stalin circa 1925) actually said and thought about "the party."


Starting with this: When Marx and Engels originally wrote about the 
workers forming their own party, political parties as we know them had 
barely begun to emerge and they were NOTHING like what we mean by 
"party" (even a bourgeois "party"). Go read about the Chartists which 
Marx and Engels hailed as the first workers party and explain to me the 
difference between them and the Occupy Movement.


Marx and Engels were talking about the development of the worker's 
movement: a whole bunch of people who shared a similar disfavored 
position in civil society recognizing that reality and therefore saying, 
well let's change our status in society.


It was a self-and-other recognized SIDE to a dispute or conflict, which 
emerged organically in the course of the struggle, not something that 
could be --absolutely the worst abomination of all-- "built."


Talking about "the party question" as the Leninist left does is IDIOCY. 
There is no such question. It is CULTISM. The cult of the organization: 
"building" the party magically becomes an all-saving formula good 
everywhere for all eternity.


This overarching fetish of "the party" abstracted from all time, place 
and circumstance, is a religious hallucination, a distilled, ethereal 
essence that encompasses everything from guerrilla bands to invading 
armies to national movements and we dump them all into "the party" 
category on account of in all these countries there are political 
struggles and that means political sides and political outcomes and if 
we want our side to win it needs a political expression, "the party."


If you REALLY want to understand the ESSENCE of "the party question" as 
its been practiced in my experience, go look at Leah Remini's series on 
Scientology and the Aftermath.


Because this sort of "Leninism" is RELIGION not Marxism

On 5/16/2017 2:27 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote:

No party is perfect. Nonetheless, in the 20th century parties played a central 
role in every single liberation struggle and in the revolutions that broke most 
with capitalism. To be sure, these revolutions became ossified; they gave rise 
to bureaucratic regimes and then yielded way for the revival of capitalism. 
This had multiple causes that I can’t go into here.


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[Marxism] Wannacry was North Korean? Bullshit

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In Arthur Penn's classic 1970 movie/Little Big Man,/Allardyce 
Merriweather tries to teach Dustin Hoffman's title character the 
honorable profession of snake oil salesman:


   Listen to me, a two legged creature will believe anything, and the
   more preposterous the better: whales speak French at the bottom of
   the sea. The horses of Arabia have silver wings. Pygmies mate with
   elephants in darkest Africa. I have sold all those propositions.

Well, I've got one that's even better: North Korea was behind's last 
Friday's computer virus attack.


https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/05/bullshit-mountain-north-korea-created.html


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[Marxism] Bureaucrats, Democrats and the press cast Trump as the mole

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The question I forgot to ask: where is George Smiley when you really 
need him?


Ridiculous Trump scandal du jour:
he gave the Russkies state secrets


https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/05/ridiculous-trump-scandal-du-jour-he.html

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Comeytose in Washington

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I don't know that Comey was quite as important a figure in the 
resistance to Trump's changes to U.S. policy as Carl describes ... I 
tend to think not. But that was a part of it.


But mainly Trump fired him, I think, for exactly the reasons Trump said, 
showboating, grandstanding, and for being a loose cannon.


Of course those things precisely made Comey useful to opponents of 
Trump's policies, but this firing wasn't driven by some desperate need 
to thwart the investigation or the political opposition. On the 
investigation, I don't believe there was anything concrete to be 
thwarted, nothing to be covered up in relation to the elections.


That's different from Nixon. Behind the Saturday night massacre there 
were very specific, concrete things he was trying to hide.


No one has yet to articulate just *what*  is being investigated. 
Collusion between team Trump and team Putin. But collusion to do what? 
Stuff ballot boxes? Rig voting machines? Use RT's massive influence over 
Americans to get them to vote for Trump?


I don't think this is about a cover-up. Instead, and above all, Trump 
wants people in top government positions loyal to him, investigation or 
no investigation, it doesn't matter.  He is clearly a bonapartist 
figure, and he simply has to have it.


He made it explicit as hell in his "fuck you" letter to Comey. He said, 
I know you promised not to cross me by repeatedly saying I wasn't under 
investigation [basically, telling Comey that he, Trump, understood that 
thereby Comey had compromised himself and made himself vulnerable to 
Trump], but that's not good enough. Today Trump tripled underlined the 
message with his tweet about tapes.


The *WAY* Comey was fired was a very important part of the message. It 
was vindictive and as humiliating as could be to Comey. I joked on the 
radio show I do (www.radioinformacion.org) that Comey got to find out 
via CNN while giving a talk to FBI agents because Francis Ford Coppola 
wasn't available to direct the putting of the head of a decapitated 
horse in Comey's bed. And he got really lucky that they didn't have a 
fish handy to wrap in a bullet-proof vest.


That said, I think Mark is way off. On the overall political framework 
Carl is right, I believe. Trump came in projecting a significant shift 
in U.S. foreign policy. Whether the until-now dominant wing of the 
"national security state" or "political class" or "military industrial 
complex" or however you want to conceive of it has completely derailed 
or even convinced Trump to reverse course is another matter.


An additional factor in it all is that the Democrat nomenklatura needs 
the Russian plot and Comey sabotage to explain away Clinton's loss to Trump.


And --this is important-- she did lose. Factoring out California, 
Clinton lost in the rest of the country by a million votes. Take out New 
York also and her 48-state deficit was three million votes. Sure, if 
Comey hadn't back-stabbed her she would have squeaked through. But she 
should have won by a landslide.


But that aside, it has been obvious to me from the outset that 
Russiagate is largely a dispute about the direction of U.S. foreign 
policy. Trump came in wanting a sharper, more demanding stance towards 
"our" traditional allies because they are in fact "our" main 
competitors. And all the stuff a bout collusion and so on is just total 
bullshit. I've written a series of blog posts going over this so I won't 
repeat all the arguments here:


The Russian White House Coup ... and what Karl Marx has to do with it
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-russian-white-house-coup-and-what.html

The Russian election hack: bullshit
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-russian-election-hack-bullshit.html

Behind the Russia hysteria: a major dispute over foreign policy
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/behind-russia-hysteria-major-dispute.html

'No evidence' means that we didn't mean to wiretap Trump's people ...
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/no-evidence-means-that-we-didnt-mean-to.html

The NY Times channels Joe McCarthy
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-ny-times-channels-joe-mccarthy.html

Joaquín

On 5/12/2017 10:33 AM, Mark Lause via Marxism wrote:


There's absolutely no evidence for this . . . no more than for the idea
that it's all about who gets to control the captured UFOs . . . .

On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Carl G. Estabrook via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:



The White House fired Comey because he was the point-man in the campaign
of the US political establishment (Democrats-neocons-spooks etc.) to
prevent Trump from carrying out his 

[Marxism] The NY Times channels Joe McCarthy against Trump

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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The Times even tries the old trick of admitting it is all bullshit to 
discount the objection that it is all bullshit: "Mr. Trump and his 
associates can cry themselves hoarse that there is neither smoke nor 
fire here."


But of course, there is lots of smoke here: the smoke the editors of the 
New York Times are trying to blow up our ass.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-ny-times-channels-joe-mccarthy.html

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[Marxism] From the archives: TIME named Einstein 'Person of the Century' but refused to say that he was a socialist

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http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/05/from-archives-times-person-of-century.html

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[Marxism] Are four U.S. cities really among the most dangerous in the entire world?

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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From my blog: Data driven journalism is hot, but it can't replace 
common sense.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/04/univision-fake-news-about-insanely-high.html



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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

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On 4/5/2017 2:09 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism wrote

If experience matters at all, we should not encourage people to do what 
has never worked well for us to see if it might be different this time.


*  *  *

1. Trying to do and finally achieving what had never been done before 
... isn't that not entirely unknown in the history of the human race. 
The wheel and fire come to mind.


2. If experience should guide us, why waste our time with working class 
politics in the United States? Past experiences have not been happy ones.


OK, those are wise-ass answers. But I just wrote a reply to Fred that 
explains in painful detail my point of view: it is not *at all* about 
trying to reform the Democratic Party (which I believe is impossible) or 
splitting this layer away  (which i hope will be the end result) but 
about relating to the evolution of motion towards class consciousness 
among tens of millions of people. It is about the protagonists, not the 
goal.



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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

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On 4/5/2017 3:33 PM, Fred Murphy via Marxism wrote


Thought experiment: Let's say Sanders and Warren succeed beyond their
wildest dreams and either rout the neoliberal wing of the DP altogether or
break with the DP and successfully organize a new formation - in either
case, would it then be a working-class party? What else would have to
happen to make it so? While I see a lot of broadly reformist,
quasi-social-democratic ("progressive") programmatic points on the Our
Revolution website, I see nothing to indicate any aspiration to be a
working-class or social-democratic party.  And Google searches on "trade
unions" and "labor movement" on that site come up effectively empty.


* * *

I think this response to me is based on our experience in the U.S. 
Socialist Workers Party (that both Fred and I belonged to). The SWP had 
a schema that a working class party is either:


a) Programmatically proletarian, in other words, the SWP,
b) Based on the unions, or
c) One of the traditional currents in the workers movement, like 
Stalinism and Social Democracy.


Yet in the Communist Manifesto and other writings, Marx and Engels very 
clearly reference one party as the first worker's party, the English 
Chartists of the end of the 1830s and 1840s, even though it is on 
another planet from the criteria. And they were intimately familiar with 
it, especially Engels.


I'm going to go over this in a little bit of detail because I think many 
people haven't thought through that a workers party is not mainly an 
organization but a social phenomenon arising from a class movement.


The first thing to understand is that the Chartists weren't a 
centralized, structured political organization.


Then there's the program, which was strictly limited to electoralist 
bourgeois-democratic reforms, like universal male suffrage and 
parliamentary districts of equal population.


And the Chartist supporters included not just clubs organized by 
working-class activists but quite prominently also a wing of the middle 
class (bourgeois) radicals, including several members of parliament.


In what sense were the Chartists a "party" then?

First political parties were just being invented back then, and other 
meanings of "party" were all meshed together with it. In this context, 
it means, first and foremost, a side to a dispute (like a "party" in a 
lawsuit) and in this sense a self-and-other recognized "interest group," 
so to speak, not necessarily organization.


In this sense, Occupy was the embryo of a worker's party, a movement 
conscious of what it represented ("the 99%") fighting a recognized enemy 
("the 1%") that controlled the economy, the government and the media. 
And, yes, because of its origins with a bunch of weirdo anarchists and 
then everyone copying Wall Street, it was a very strange movement.


Marx and Engels called the chartists a worker's party for many reasons, 
including that the London Workingmen's Association played a key role in 
starting it, the composition of the couple of national assemblies they 
held, reflecting the composition of their base, the tactics they used or 
were associated with even if not officially "Chartist" actions 
(including mass petitions, rallies, marches and strikes), and that the 
central leaders and the newspaper they started spoke as representatives 
of the workers in defense of the interests of the working people.


Marx and Engels were very much for getting involved in this kind of thing.

In criticizing the attitude of the German Marxists in the United States 
in the 1880s in relation to the labor-sponsored Henry George candidacy 
for NY City mayor, Engels wrote:


   Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of
   evolution, and that process involves successive phases. To expect
   that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the
   theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the
   impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own
   theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in
   for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische
   starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical
   level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse
   suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views
   in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist
   Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement
   of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate,
   do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse
   confounded by forcing down people's throats 

[Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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This might cause a shitstorm here, but I'm going to send it anyways:

"Bernie has now projected "Our Revolution" as, in essence, the start of 
a different party even while operating in the Democrat framework by 
counterposing the idea of a working class party to a party of the 
liberal elite


"I think that Marxists need to recognize the movement towards something 
akin to a social-democratic party that the 'Our Revolution' faction of 
the Democratic Party represents, and figure out how to relate to it."


[For my part, I'm in despite the capitalist so-called nature of the 
Democratic Party, partly because I don't believe that things have a 
"nature" or "essence" or some other invisible dimension that makes them 
what they are.]


Full:

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/04/sanders-make-democrats-party-of-working.html

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Reconsidering the Rhetoric of Resistance

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I posted this to the North Star comments section of the post Louis 
shared with us.


This is at such a high level of abstraction that the author almost 
completely lost me, until I realized that at such a level, resistance is 
transformed into a perfect vacuum: it contains nothing, it says nothing, 
it implicates no commitment, it wards off no attack, for those the 
author makes central to his analysis are not, in fact, resisting a damn 
thing. They are disembodied essences with no skin in the game because 
they have no skin at all.


Let me suggest he come down to the ground of real cases and real 
conditions and the real people who are under attack. And I want to 
insist all the way to the ground, for in referring to "more traditional, 
humble sphere of grassroots organizing against war and capitalist 
mayhem," he provides a link that is, I guess, meant to represent this 
humble, grassroot organizing but in fact is to a grant-making foundation 
called "resist":


"Resist is a foundation that supports people's movements for justice and 
liberation. We redistribute resources back to frontline communities at 
the forefront of change while amplifying their stories of building a 
better world," is how it describes itself.


I have no idea who these folks are and indeed, I hope they are the most 
excellently righteous foundation ever. But that is not grassroots 
organizing. The grass roots continue to be the object of this 
"resistance," not its subject.


But the real resistance is on the ground, from and among those who are 
directly and personally involved in the war and really have no choice 
about it.


At least among the Latino immigrant community, the point of resistance 
is to defeat the attacks, and to resist means first of all to organize 
and to train the community in HOW to resist. Right now a central element 
is "know your rights"-type education and literature and pushing for 
so-called "sanctuary" policies, which in reality is about ending 
complicity with ICE that takes place through municipal and institutional 
voluntary cooperation with the immigration gestapo.


(And, BTW, this is not a new post-Obama strategy designed for the Trump 
era, but what various groups had already been doing for a couple of 
years in the #Not1more and #ICEFreeZone campaigns).


Although strategically defensive, the fight for sanctuary policies is 
offensive and viewed as anything but inoffensive by most liberal 
democrat politicians. For Latinos, "resist" doesn't mean putting on a 
T-shirt but actively fighting to blunt and turn back attacks on the 
community.


The author talks about "a resurgent left" and says: "Its own road to 
victory will not be paved by resistance—nor can it be backward-looking, 
attempting only to recover territory ceded to opponents in past struggles."


And here we see the problem with handling things in the outer reaches of 
stratospheric abstraction. We're not resisting to recover metaphorical 
territory "ceded to opponents in past struggles" over policy. We're 
resisting to stop the deportations going on now, not the three million 
carried out by Obama. "Politically" stopping deportations may seem like 
a battle lost long ago, but for the girl whose father was stopped and 
dragged away while driving her to school, it is not at all a repetition.


The conclusion waxes poetic and sounds quite combative. Rather than 
resisting, the fight "must be based on bold, iconoclastic visions for a 
human future that rewrite the political script in its entirety. To 
formulate, promulgate, and implement such a platform for action is to 
assume the offensive."


That's very pretty but as written a preposterous non-struggle position. 
I'm sure the author didn't mean to present what is in essence passive 
capitulation to the attacks going on right now, but that he has, in 
effect, done so is a direct consequence of handling matters so 
abstractly in categories like "resist" rather than coming down to the 
ground and engaging with the real battles that are going on.



On 3/30/2017 10:21 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


Amidst the near-ceaseless upheaval that has characterized the first 
two months of the Trump administration, the term “resistance” has 
acquired seemingly unprecedented currency within the American 
political lexicon. The rhetoric of resistance has migrated far and 
wide from its more traditional, humble sphere of grassroots organizing 
against war and capitalist mayhem, infiltrating even the conservative 
editorials printed in such powerful opinion-making organs as The New 
York Times.


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Lessons from the Youth Movement of the 1960s

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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[I posted this in the comments in North Star].

This is religion, not politics. It is idealism of the purest water.

The counterposition of "most Marxists" to the "New Left" and then the 
caricature of the New Left as personified  by certain "leaders" is a 
fabrication. The New Left wasn't a political current, organization or 
ideology. It was a movement and part of a broader social transformation 
that went well beyond politics.


"[R]evolution ... like any science must be studied. We cannot afford to 
ignore all the huge issues, the questions that raged through the 
revolutionary movements and the events that flowed from those 
questions," we are lectured. "As the youth movement of the 1960s shows, 
we fail to clarify and take a position on those issues at our own risk."


The alleged failure of the New Left to have Correct Ideas is supposedly 
what doomed it:


"[T]hey attempted to avoid really considering the main debates that had 
raged through those past movements" and, oh so much worse, "they failed 
to take a clear position on them."


"The result was that the New Left got disoriented and it disintegrated 
in just a few years."


The main reasons for the decline of the youth radicalization of the 
1960s didn't have to do with bad ideas. The notion that with correct 
tactics, strategies or ideas things would have turned out much 
differently is so voluntaristic that it blows my mind.


Much, much broader political forces and developments on a world scale 
were decisive, including a decline in revolutionary movements in the 
Third World as neo-colonialism consolidated; the defeat of important 
movements like the French May and the Czech spring; and the sino-soviet 
split and its skillful exploitation by Nixon and Kissinger with detente.


Not considering the "main debates" and failing to come to "clear 
position[s]" was not the problem. On the contrary, there was too much of 
that going on,.


Revolution is not not not "science" in the sense meant here. The idea 
that you can study it like physics, that there are laws of politics, 
even a rulebook of "lessons" that should be obeyed is doesn't come from 
Marx & Engels:


"Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from 
principles but from facts." (Engels, The Communists and Karl Heinzen, 1847)


And most especially, radicals from the 1960s should STOP trying to 
preach about the "working class." We really don't know much about it. 
From shortly after the end of WWII until the 2008 depression, there was 
no working class in the United States, not in any meaningful sense. It's 
not just that there was no working class movement worthy of the name; 
there was no mass class identity.


Of all the "identity politics" that people have debated, applauded or 
denounced, the one that NEVER came up was "working class identity 
politics" because there was no sense of coherence or identification as a 
class, no class for itself.


That began to change with Occupy's "We are the 99%," primitive, I guess, 
but clearly there.


A very strong class identification was also a central element in Bernie 
Sanders' campaign.


It is incumbent on us who were part of it to recognize that the Marxist 
groups of the Baby Boom generation were an unmitigated catastrophe. Not 
a single one understood that they were sects.


Any Marxist group in the United States in the second half of the 20th 
Century was doomed to a semi-sectarian existence, isolated from the 
class movement because there was no class movement.


But worse, we married that with the bureaucratic fiction of the 
"Leninist Party" and especially (but not only) in the case of the Trots, 
with defense of the sacred dogma, the correct program.


That is the very essence of being a sect: a group whose borders are 
defined by dogma (or, if you prefer, "ideas").


It is the opposite of a party, which is the (more or less) organized 
expression of (in this case) the working class movement in the political 
arena. Note that I say, "more or less" -- when M wrote the Manifesto, 
political parties as we think of them were barely starting to develop.


Finally, marry the cult of the organization with a sacred dogma that, in 
the last analysis, can only be kept pure by a Pope (as the Catholic 
Church has always understood) and you get the sorry list from Hugo 
Oehler to Jack Barnes, Bob Avakian and countless other Lenins of our times.



On 3/27/2017 10:24 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

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[Marxism] Trump's bullshit offensive against sanctuary cities

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-trump-war-on-sanctuary-cities-so.html

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[Marxism] Fidel and I, and a nation unforgiven

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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What I wrote when Fidel died. I just transferred it to my blog, thought 
I'd share it here.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/fidel-and-i-and-nation-unforgiven.html

*  *  *

FIDEL AND I, AND A NATION UNFORGIVEN

Over the past few days many people have asked me what I thought of 
Fidel's death. I've done a few press interviews, and to my surprise, I 
found it difficult to formulate an answer, and I think I've finally 
figured out why.


I was a 7-year-old Cuban kid from a millionaire family who had no clue 
everything in his life would be upended by the Cuban Revolution in 1959.


And I was an increasingly rebellious Cuban exile adolescent in Florida 
in the late 1960s who did not recoil when he realized he was being 
increasingly attracted to the ideals of Fidel and Che.


I did not realize then, I could not possibly have known, that these 
circumstances would shape the rest of my life.
Yet they have, and they should not have. That is my reaction to the news 
about Fidel.


Decades ago, the Cuban revolution --and with it the figure of Fidel 
Castro-- should have receded from politics into history. It took 20 
years, give or take, for the United States to accept the reality of the 
other great revolutions of the 20th Century, the Russian, the Chinese 
and Vietnamese. The old disputes were negotiated and settled: "borrón y 
cuenta nueva," we Cubans say, wipe the slate clean and start over.


But it never happened with Cuba.

Donald Trump will become the twelfth American head of state to preside 
over the economic blockade Eisenhower initiated as part of the 
preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion.


Yet the great majority of those that fought at the Bay of Pigs are now 
dead. Those of us who have even the vaguest childhood memories of those 
days are now on Medicare. Isn't it time to let go?


It was time to move on decades ago. But we can't. The blockade --the 
economic war against Cuba-- still goes on. The forcible, violent 
occupation of part of Cuba's national territory still goes on. And the 
insistence of the Americans that they --and not Cubans-- have the right 
to decide Cuba's fate goes on.


What Fidel did was to head the fight for the Cuban people's right to 
self-determination. That, not socialism, not being pals of the Russians, 
not helping to wipe South African apartheid from the face of the earth, 
was his greatest crime.


And that crime could not have been anything but the collective crime of 
the Cuban Nation. So even a death certificate with his name on it cannot 
expiate it. And even with his body in ashes he remains in the fight.


Fidel hasn't died because the Americans won't let him. Even now, the 
United States will not accept that they could not break him, or the 
Cuban people. And until they do accept it, Fidel will remain part of the 
fight.


Even in death, he remains unforgiven. The battle he fought, that he 
dedicated his life to, remains unresolved. His people, the Cuban people, 
remain undefeated.


Some day I will reflect on Fidel's death, perhaps in mourning of his 
passing or in celebration of his life. But that day will come when the 
battle he still leads is won.







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[Marxism] Julian Assange -- the most important journalist of the 21st Century (blog post)

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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"Journalism means publishing what someone does not want to be known; 
everything else is advertising. Its function is to bring to light what 
has been hidden, to offer testimony, to offend."


Those words from Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky reminds us that 
very little journalism is being done in the world today ...


(full)

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/julian-assange-most-important.html

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[Marxism] Of course they wiretapped Trump & his aides

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Two things tell us that Trump's people were wiretapped.

 * Thing one:/Everyone/is being wiretapped by the NSA.
 * Thing two: There was an FBI investigation of Trump and his aides.

full: 
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/of-course-they-wiretapped-trump-and-his.html




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[Marxism] The policy dispute behind the Russia hysteria against Trump

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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"Trump believes it is time to abandon the 'leader of the free world' 
stance and take on more sharply American allies, especially Germany and 
the European Union it dominates."


full: 
http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/behind-russia-hysteria-major-dispute.html


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[Marxism] The Russian election hack: bullshit

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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A review of some aspects of this cock-and-bull story.

*  *  *
This whole scenario makes no sense.

The FBI and DNC don't take seriously the Russian incursion, which goes 
on for months.


We're told these are hyper-sophisticated secret attacks but the Podesta 
email trick is so pedestrian you can look it up in the dictionary. And 
apparently it was not even exploited to plant software in Podesta's 
machine (or that of his aides), only to harvest emails from Google's 
servers.


The Russians supposedly were both fiendishly clever and completely 
clueless. They realized how damaging the revelation of real documents 
and emails would be ... but didn't do it when it would have been most 
damaging, during the primaries.  When they release it, they do it 
through Wikileaks, where it will have the least impact, instead of 
doling giving it to the New York Times and other news organization.


There is one word that best describes this story: bullshit.

*  *  *

Full:

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-russian-election-hack-bullshit.html

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Trump Administration Prepares to Execute “Vicious” Executive Order on Deportations

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Actually, this isn't coming, it has already been going on.

And we should be clear that it began under the most rabidly racist, 
viciously anti-immigrant president in U.S. history, Barack Obama, who 
carried out nearly three million deportations in his 8 years in office 
and slammed the door on refugees --mostly women and children-- fleeing 
the violence, terror and misery that the U.S. war on drugs has created 
in central America and Mexico.


But what about the wall, you say? Read Trump's Executive Order:

1) Wall means fence or any other sort of physical barrier

2) Trump is not proposing any new barrier.

3) He asks Congress for money to complete the barrier provided for in 
the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 
and expanded by the 2006 Secure Fence Act.


Lest we forget, that was President Clinton's Illegal Immigration Reform 
and Immigrant Responsibility Act.


And the Secure Fence Act was the one supported by the majority of 
Democrats in Congress including Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, 
Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer and Chuck Schumer. Ted Kennedy missed the floor 
vote but did vote for the fence in committee.


So credit where credit is due: don't call it Trump's wall, call it the 
Clinton-Clinton-Obama-Kennedy-Biden-Boxer-Schumer-Trump Wall, except 
it's really a fence.


Trump wants to convince everyone his administration will be even more 
savagely anti-immigrant than Obama's. But if he succeeds, it will be 
only because the Democrats spent the last quarter century paving the way.


But at least with Trump nobody is going to be blowing smoke up our ass 
about how he's really our friend.


And to get to a President that at least as a candidate proposed a 
completely different approach than the escalating repression we've had  
since Bill Clinton took office you have to go back here:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5CEX4O0Ab4=youtu.be=2m03s

Think about why so many people have suddenly developed severe amnesia 
when it comes to remembering that its been open season against 
immigrants for years now, and who they're going to tell us is going to 
save us from Trump's persecution.


Joaquín


On 2/11/2017 8:03 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


https://theintercept.com/2017/02/09/trump-administration-prepares-to-execute-vicious-executive-order-on-deportations/ 





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[Marxism] Pay attention to Mexico & Centram, even if it has to be instead [was: Syria 10; Spics 0]

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

 defeated the one big Gaddafi 
stronghold in the east was accompanied by a big crowd of people and that 
civilians first besieged the compound not the tanks under the command of 
the minister of the interior; that the pro-rebellion military folks were 
accepted and acted as part of the popular rising, not people just 
carrying out a coup; and that there was a monster overjoyed celebration 
in Benghazi Sunday morning after the defeat of the Gaddafi stronghold 
the previous evening (the mass rebellion had started Thursday night 
although there had been attacks on Gaddafi targets --police stations and 
so on-- for a couple of days).


*  *  *

That took hundreds and hundreds of hours of obsessive digging before I 
was satisfied that I had the best picture I could get from here and that 
I knew the main things that were unclear.


So the main way I related to Libya was not "taking a position" but 
trying to figure out what had actually happened and then writing things 
to counter the propaganda that was being used to promote the imperialist 
intervention. I was not for Gaddafi against the rebels; I was against 
the imperialist intervention. It is not my fault that especially the 
"respectable" opposition and the wing of the regime that joined the 
rebels decided to push for, welcomed, and relied on direct imperialist 
military intervention.


At any rate, I only followed Libya closely for a few more weeks and I 
don't think I wrote anything beyond an initial article or two with those 
conclusions. My focus soon shifted to the immigrants rights fight. Syria 
I never followed at all.


I didn't write, or at least not much, about the fight against 
anti-immigrant laws or Occupy. Instead I did videos. Here are a couple:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpm-l70M65o [7/2/11 demonstration; there 
are subtitles in English]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U22s3wyfvxs [Kimlee's brother was 
murdered by police two years earlier; that set off the evolution she 
describes, but she only told me later, when we had become very good 
friends].


My choice of Syria for my earlier post last summer to contrast with 
interest in Latinos was political but not in the sense of being for one 
side or the other there. It was chosen because it seemed to me (and 
still does) that the Syrian conflict has generated a disproportionate 
degree of attention from sectors of the left and polemics that are very 
harsh and heated.


My own experience has convinced me that the U.S. left, and especially 
older cadre who have a lifetime of political activity, should focus much 
more of their energy on the United States and Mesoamerica and the 
intersection of thsese two in the Latino population than on issues 
beyond the Americas.  Now because of Trump this has become intimately 
intertwined with the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East.


I think we should focus way more on that and way less on some other 
subjects if that is what it takes.


We need to be conscious that the bourgeois imperialist news media has 
been saying to focus on the Middle East and Eastern Europe for years, 
and not on the collapsing social in Mesoamérica.


Those of us in our 60s and older are likely to be more affected because 
it fits into how we learned to think about politics. We grew up and 
lived much of our political lives in the world of the Cold War which is 
very different from today's world. And especially, among those of us who 
came of age during the Vietnam War, an overarching conflict that was the 
central issue in world politics AND the central issue in the purely 
national domestic politics of the United States for around a decade.


But Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and a lot of Mexico are now either 
failed states or narco-states. This has provoked a huge flow of refugees 
towards the U.S. border, perhaps double the one from two years ago, but 
Mexico is intercepting most central americans and sending them back.


Trump and the media call them "illegals" or "undocumented" in the sense 
of an economic migration like a decade ago but it is not true. The 
majority do not try to cross, evade capture and make their way north. 
The Central Americans especially come to the border crossings and ask 
the authorities for asylum, for protection from persecution. Those who 
do cross at other places often seek out the border patrol to turn 
themselves in and ask for asylum, which is a procedure protected under 
international refugee conventions. Of course they are also pushed by the 
economy but it is a very different phenomenon now.


The hugely insufficient response by the left to this refugee crisis in 
particular and the whole complex of social and political issues involved 
is what motivated my original post and this one.


Joaquín

On 8/6/2016 7:14 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
I suppose that you are a supporter of Bashar al-Assad has nothing to  > do with this demagogic intervention. > > On 8/5/16 10:42 PM, 

Re: [Marxism] The U.S. hasn't won a war in 70 years and Trump's buildup can't fix that

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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John, I take up Grenada and Kuwait in my piece: I did not ignore them.

It seems to me you're complaining that I did not write a different 
article. I addressed major, direct U.S. military interventions. I did 
not take up coups nor surrogate wars nor how deadly U.S. weapons are, 
nor how evil imperialism is. I did not mean for my headline to be read 
as expansively as you do.


I am addressing a very specific but important point: why direct American 
military interventions do not work. CIA-type stuff is different. The CIA 
is --or at least was-- very conscious of the political dimension of even 
its most militaristic operations. It could be very wrong and about the 
politics, like in the Bay of Pigs, but it has not ignored them.


Joaquín

On 1/28/2017 11:44 PM, John Obrien via Marxism wrote:

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To state that the U. S. has not won a military victory in 70 years - is just 
false.


I am surprised that more people on this list have not mentioned that there was a

number of military efforts since 1945 that the U. S. government was successful 
in.

These range from Grenada to Serbia and from Kuwait to the Congo.  And often

through surrogate forces from Columbia to Sudan and Dominican Republic to

Israel.


And to not recognize this deadly military monster that is often involved in

coups and counter revolutions through many ways, is not recognizing reality.

The U.S. military is very armed and dangerous with AI robotics to chemical and

biological weapons to nuclear weapons to eliminate all life on this planet. Just

what are U. S. military forces doing in more than half the nations of this 
planet?

They aided England in defeating the IRA in Ireland to removing Ghaddafi in 
Libya.


And some have written on this list to encourage this military death machine to

further invade and occupy Syria.  Seems so strange at times to understand how

people do not understand and recognize U. S. imperialism and its military's role

and terror on this list?






Subject: [Marxism] The U.S. hasn't won a war in 70 years and Trump's buildup 
can't fix that



Why do so many Americans think that we have inferior armed forces?
Because we can't seem to win a war, and we've been in plenty.
The United States has not won a decisive victory in any military
conflict it has been directly involved in since we nuked Japan in 1945.

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-us-hasnt-won-war-in-70-years-and.html


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[Marxism] Syria on the brain [was: The U.S. hasn't won a war in 70 years and Trump's buildup can't fix that]

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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What is this bizarro Syria obsession some people on this list have?

I wrote a blog post about U.S. interventions abroad generally. It barely 
mentioned Syria in passing in one place or two.


The part that Dennis Brasky quotes says that when the U.S. sticks its 
nose in, it has an impact in the internal politics of the country and 
region, creating or aggravating conflicts that typically lead to more 
war and the failure of the United States to achieve its objectives.


The idea is that because the United States is blind to all that and 
takes a narrow, military approach, it is doomed to more failures like 
the ones from the last 70 years.


Dennis Brasky somehow succeeds in convincing himself that because I used 
the word "destabilizes," it means I deny anything else significant 
politically was going on in the country, and that U.S. destabilization 
was the only thing going on, whereas my point was precisely and exactly 
the opposite.


Read the paragraph that I wrote: "The problem is that the United States 
does not realize that when it goes into a country like Iraq or 
destabilizes Syria, it is creating or qualitatively escalating internal 
conflicts within those countries and in the region that soon manifest as 
civil wars (Libya) or as a combination of a civil war and a war against 
foreign occupation (Vietnam, Iraq)."


Brasky is so Syria obsessed that, because some people say U.S. 
destabilization is the only thing that happened or the important or 
decisive thing, then because I, too, use the word "destabilizes" I must 
hold that same position. Even though the word appears in a blog post 
that says absolutely nothing of the sort.


I'll write more about my real position on Syria and matters I view as 
related in another post.


On 1/28/2017 9:24 PM, Dennis Brasky via Marxism wrote:

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 So, the US "destabilized" Syria? The Syrian people had no legitimate
grievances against the Assad Dynasty such as neoliberal privatization,
cutting back on social spending, corruption - and a brutal dictatorship?
This is typical of Left Orientalist thinking - the Syrian people have no
agency - they are mere pawns - "proxies" - of outside powers. It's sad to
see this on the Marxism list.


"The problem is that the United States does not realize that when it goes
into a country like Iraq or destabilizes Syria, it is creating or
qualitatively escalating internal conflicts within those countries..."

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-us-hasnt-won-wa
r-in-70-years-and.html




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[Marxism] The U.S. hasn't won a war in 70 years and Trump's buildup can't fix that

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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Why do so many Americans think that we have inferior armed forces?
Because we can't seem to win a war, and we've been in plenty.
The United States has not won a decisive victory in any military 
conflict it has been directly involved in since we nuked Japan in 1945.


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-us-hasnt-won-war-in-70-years-and.html

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Re: [Marxism] Mexico's humiliation

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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I didn't quite get this article you sent the link to.

"For the past twenty days, Mexico has been living in a state of social 
unrest: Trump’s election stirred our spirit," it says.


But from the moment he announced a year and a half ago, Trump provoked a 
very sharp reaction. Just look at the sdozens of canciones and corridos 
on youtube about him. Even pitiyanqui sugarwater salesman Vicente Fox 
was moved to say, "We're not going to pay for your fucking wall."


México has been in a "state of social unrest" since, well, forever and 
certainly since Calderón sent the army to wage --and lose--  the war on 
drugs.


But there was a qualitative change with Ayotzinapa, it just tore the 
country's heart out. I heard it on the radio show I co-host every day, 
and we're all the way in Atlanta.


Brozo, in his last show last June, went over what they'd been covering 
for six years and listen to the part about ayotzinapa It starts a little 
before so you get the context):


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGSpu-gt-Nk=youtu.be=5m33s

So this article seems sort of detached from that whole context.


On 1/27/2017 4:28 PM, Fred Murphy via Marxism wrote:

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http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/01/the-day-mexico-denied-trumpism/


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[Marxism] Phil Ochs: music for the Trump era

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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From my blog:

Have spent much of the past week listening obsessively to political 
songs from a half century ago, when I was a teenager. Especially Phil Ochs.


If you've never heard of him, but have this image of Bob Dylan as the 
righteous artist-activist who backed every just cause and went to every 
rally, the person that was really like that was Phil Ochs.


*  *  *

Anyways, I hadn't really focused on how much I'd been listening to Phil 
Ochs since Friday until I saw this blog post on the Washington Post, of 
all places. The writer refers to the earlier, more political work, 
whereas I think for some people may also relate to his later work, which 
I've always called in my own mind "music to commit suicide by."


http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/phil-ochs-music-for-trump-era.html


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[Marxism] Syria 10; Spics 0

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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So, like, I decided to drop in on one of my old haunts, the Marxism 
List. Lots of posts about Syria, so I decided to do a little research 
with the CTRL-F key combo.


Posts containing the word Syria since Aug. 1: 10

Posts containing the word Latino or Hispanic or Mexican or undocumented: 
1, but actually that was the one I just sent so it doesn't really count 
because I sent it precisely because as far as this list is concerned, it 
looked like we'd met the same fate as Columbus's fourth ship: not only 
had we fallen off the edge, but everyone pretended we never even existed.


So make it:

Syria 10
Spics 0

And you can go back in the list archives and your count for Syria will 
keep rising, and your count for beaners won't.


Except for that one excerpt from an article about how dare a greaser 
spic like Lin Manuel Miranda not just play Alexander Hamilton, but 
conceive and write the whole damn musical about the man.


Maybe I'll write something more about that, generally on the theme of, 
scratch a liberal and find a pig. But for now I'm done.


Joaquín


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Re: [Marxism] Triangulating the 2016 campaign

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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On 8/5/2016 7:05 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote:
*As to Blacks finding a home with Hillary, despite her dismissive, 
instrumental treatment of that captive base, Glen Ford of the Black 
Spectator seems to have it right, that so long as the white-paste 
racist Republican Party remains a chilling threat to Blacks they, 
meaning mainly older Blacks, with more to lose than younger Blacks, 
are left with no practical choice other than the Democrats; but that 
if the Republican Party were to split, Blacks are the natural 
constituency for a radical movement.


This is just as or more true of the Latino community, but it isn't just 
older Latinos, it is all of us and mosty of all the young adults.

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