[Marxism] South Africa case Re: Webinar this Saturday - : SHINING THE LIGHT ON CUBA'S MEDICAL SOLIDARITY

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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The headlines here in Joburg when the Cuban doctors came late last 
month, declared the 'cost' to be $24 million for 187 doctors (but the 
time they will be spending in SA isn't specified). Local doctors 
objected to not being consulted.


Here's a fairly balanced view: 
https://www.fin24.com/Opinion/mills-soko-much-ado-about-cuban-doctors-so-whats-behind-their-recruitment-20200430



On 5/7/2020 3:46 AM, Richard Fidler via Marxism wrote:

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This interview by an informed expert clarifies what is involved:

"For the emergency medical support, Cuba charges nothing. It depends on whether
host governments want to compensate the Cubans, but there is no price tag, as I
understand it. Likewise, for healthcare for what's called the Programa Integral
de Salud in poorer countries - sub-Sahara Africa is a good example - Cuba
charges nothing.

"However, for countries such as Qatar, where Cuba has got a hospital of 400
Cuban medical personnel, Cuba charges a lot of money. It charges less than what
the European and North American-trained doctors and nurses would charge, but it
does receive money from that. Estimates vary, but I would calculate about $6
billion goes into Cuban coffers as a result of Cuban medical services abroad.

"This money goes to maintain the Cuban medical system. So it is a form of
subsidizing the Cuban healthcare system, which I think makes eminent sense. For
the number of countries that pay for medical services, there is a sliding scale.
Some countries can afford to pay. Arab countries have a lot of petro-dollars
that they use. Angola, South Africa are fairly wealthy, they can pay. But if you
go to countries such as Gambia or Niger, you will see that  - if they do pay -
they will pay significantly less."




-Original Message-
From: Marxism [mailto:marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Chris
Slee via Marxism
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2020 7:38 PM
To: rfid...@ncf.ca
Cc: Chris Slee; Ken Hiebert
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Webinar this Saturday - : SHINING THE LIGHT ON CUBA'S
MEDICAL SOLIDARITY

My understanding is that the poorest countries don't have to pay anything, while
richer countries pay on a sliding scale.

Chris Slee


David Duport asks
Cuba still charges host countries for these medical missions, right?

I can't say that I know all the facts.  It would make sense if some countries
did pay.  The item below suggests otherwise.
 ken h

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




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Re: [Marxism] In the midst of an economic crisis, can 'degrowth' provide an answer? | Lola Seaton | Opinion | The Guardian

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 4/24/2020 7:11 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/24/economic-crisis-degrowth-green-new-deal 



Lola Seaton:

"Most degrowth advocates do not champion economic contraction as such, 
but argue for the necessity of adapting to the continuing, long-term 
global stagnation sometimes called “secular stagnation”. The fact that 
we can only think of slowing down our economies in terms of recession 
and austerity – with the associated cuts to public spending, growth in 
inequality and decline in real earnings – says much more about our 
political landscape than the economic facts."


But we're not in the secular stagnation zone now, we're in a full-on 
meltdown.


I have a different view of the problem here: degrowth cannot yet 
properly grapple with a capitalist crisis that entails massive 
devalorisation of overaccumulated capital - even though such 
devalorisation is logically within a degrowth typology.


My critique is generally accepted by some of the degrowth comrades (so 
they say), but frankly I don't see them taking the enormous gap that the 
current conditions of capitalist meltdown would allow.


Here's the abstract:

https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/towards_a_political_economy_of_degrowth/3-156-2c50d07e-66fe-4355-af91-d7966546dfea

Degrowth, devaluation and uneven development from North to South

By Patrick Bond
in E.Chertkovskaya, A.Paulsson and S.Barca (Eds), The End of Growth As 
We Know It: Contributions to the Political Economy of Degrowth. London: 
Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.


Abstract
In spite of its relevance to global justice, the degrowth movement has 
barely begun to address potentials within the Global South to translate 
social demands for basic-needs goods and services away from for-profit 
production and distribution – the core process behind capitalist growth 
– and instead into degrowth through decommodification. At the same time, 
ongoing episodes of capitalist crisis entail the destruction of 
widespread industrial overcapacity, known as ‘devaluation’ of 
overaccumulated capital, a factor neglected by degrowth advocates. These 
crises provide a superb opportunity for degrowth’s political and 
intellectual migration from North to South. In the world’s largest 
economy, China, the partial economic downturn now underway (in early 
2019) is based upon such devaluations: cuts in steel and coal capacity 
following a classical capitalist crisis of overaccumulation. If official 
propaganda includes a grain of truth, Chinese examples of managed 
internal degrowth are encouraging, in the sense that managers of a 
planned economy can impose devaluation on private and public sector 
firms, at the same time as improving environmental conditions. Likewise, 
the world’s most unequal country, South Africa, is also suffering a 
massive post-2015 devaluation of mineral commodities and the currency, 
but lacking China’s sophisticated demand management, the tendency is to 
remain tracked into a futile GDP growth logic. While backlogs of 
basic-needs infrastructure, goods and services have animated 
post-apartheid social movements to protest successfully for concessions, 
this has not yet occurred under the ideological banner of a 
decommodification-centred degrowth – though it could if devaluation and 
uneven development are replaced by eco-socialist planning.


(Let me know offlist if you want the chapter.)



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[Marxism] South African reverbs Re: MMT, Chartalism, and Keynesianism

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 4/21/2020 3:42 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

On 4/21/20 9:26 AM, MM wrote:


That’s why I recommended the interview with Fadhel — the application 
of MMT to the global South is *exactly* what he is focused on...


Yes, he addresses the question of how developing countries can gain 
monetary sovereignty in a podcast.


How about a video? Last November in Tunis, we had a conference on 
"Monetary Sovereignty in Africa" sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg 
Foundation, with unusual comradeliness between strands of heterodoxy 
that are typically in internecine competition.


(If competition is what you want, I would recommend the Michael Roberts 
and Doug Henwood critiques of MMT, which are offered with great 
attention to politics: 
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/modern-monetary-theory-part-1-chartalism-and-marx/ 
and 
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/modern-monetary-theory-isnt-helping .)


If you want to see the talks and slides from Tunis, they've just 
uploaded them: 
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%23MonetarySovereigntyAfrica


A leading marxist political economist, Prabhat Patnaik, offered a great 
keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d017id91fWk


And Fadhel's talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD6mUDRwZ7k

(My report from the South African front is here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kakjZF-kyb0=1496s )


Six months later, there's an excellent debate about MMT's relevance 
brewing here in SA because of the (hopefully-waning) ultra-neoliberalism 
in the Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, egged on by credit rating agencies. 
An emergency SARB purchase of $60 mn in Treasury securities on March 25 
- when no one else came to the auction and interest rates shot up from 9 
to 12% - may have opened up the possibility of up to $1 bn a month in 
future QE-style purchases.


The balance of forces will determine whether such MMT-lite fiscal 
stimulus can be pushed into healthcare financing (estimates from the 
government are $250 mn in new spending is required through September), 
food relief and income support, plus Green New Deal infrastructure - as 
the precariat starves and social dissent rises. The state is currently 
offering a fiscal stimulus of just 0.1% of GDP - which last year was 
$260 bn - compared to Britain's 15%. So the second largest union 
movement wants to see $40 bn in new emergency funding whereas a 
centre-left institute just called for $16 bn, and the 5th largest bank 
also asked for at least $5 bn more.


Now, unless a prescribed-assets requirement is put on the $50 bn in 
institutional investment funds within SA, or new foreign loans are 
announced, some major MMT-type central bank interventions to pay for the 
fiscal expansion (and also cover the new $10 bn hole in tax revenues) 
are probably on the cards, even though the SARB leader remains verbally 
opposed.


(He is also the head of the IMF's main policy committee - and studied in 
London at SOAS where marxist economists are thick on the ground - but 
along with the IMF Managing Director, Europeans and some emerging 
economy elites, he failed to get a global-Keynesian boost pushed through 
Special Drawing Rights issuance last Friday, thanks to Trump's 
stinginess and financial-geopolitical agenda; I think that's ok, it's 
far better to have more international financial delinking now, than IMF 
relegitimation, but others would disagree.)


I've just listened to Matias and Greg on RealNews - 
https://therealnews.com/stories/modern-monetary-theory-developing-countries 
- and the very detailed attention they give to hard currency and local 
currency is absolutely essential. SA's foreign debt is at least $185 bn 
(prior to the Feb-April 2020 melt - likely now its $200 bn). Repayment 
of not just interest but transnational corporate profits and dividends 
will be mighty hard in coming weeks, as the $55 bn in (Feb 2020) foreign 
reserves rapidly shrink.


There are repeated fears expressed that the IMF, World Bank or BRICS New 
Development Bank will come in and make even more of a mess than they 
have to date (prolific!). So exchange control tightening is of the 
essence, but global and local financiers - and yes, rich white folk 
aiming to get their wealth out of SA pronto - are profoundly opposed to 
this vital task, one Keynes advised was absolutely critical to gaining 
monetary, fiscal and credit-system sovereignty.


In our circumstances, here, it strikes me that MMT is a potential 
non-reformist reform, a stepping stone to survival, first to limit 
social misery, but also to debunk neoliberal dogmas. This is one of 
those areas where the Keynesian, post-Keynesian and 

Re: [Marxism] South Africa: A Step towards Dictatorship?

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Comrades, it's vital to get pass along solid information, and this 
simply can't be true. A similarly-worded fake alert along these lines 
was circulated in India a few days ago.


We still have democracy here, albeit 'low intensity,' and we can still 
say all sorts of critical things here. That's because we're mainly 
irrelevant.


Cheers,

Patrick

On 4/6/2020 12:41 PM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:

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I would like to draw the attention of readers to the following. 
Comrades from South Africa just informed me that the government forced 
social media groups to post following message:


"Mandate To All Residents. Tonight  12 ( midnight) onwards Disaster 
Management Act has been implemented across the country. According to 
this update, apart from the Govt department no other citizen is 
allowed to post any update or share any forward related to Coronavirus 
and it being punishable offence.
Group Admins are requested to post the above update and inform the 
groups."


This has gone viral as it suggests that the capitalist government of 
ANC and Stalinist CP plans to suppress that anyone except itself is 
allowed to talk about the COVID-19 issue. (Indeed one TV station 
already interpretated it that way.) All this takes place in the 
context of the reactionary lockdown which the government has imposed 
for 21 days. As soon as I know more I will update comrades.


In any case it demonstrates once more that COVID-19 is a perfect cover 
for global counterrevolutionary offensive.




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[Marxism] (Fwd) Just-in-time philosophy wrecks U.S. coronavirus defenses - but also South African industrial policy starting three decades ago

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Great piece by Louis:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/03/covid-19-and-the-just-in-time-supply-chain-why-hospitals-ran-out-of-ventilators-and-grocery-stores-ran-out-of-toilet-paper/

***

Ouch, that brings back some painful reminiscing of our Marxist lads' 
right-turn here:


Excerpt from Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South 
Africa (Pluto Press, 2000)


Many progressive economists across the globe had taken to describing 
mass production/mass consumption systems as ‘Fordist’ and to projecting 
a ‘post-Fordist’ epoch characterised by an emphasis on product quality, 
variety and differentiation, speed of innovation, increased workplace 
democracy (‘team concept,’ ‘quality circles’), and Japanised production 
and inventory control techniques (‘Just-In-Time,’ also a favourite of 
Nedcor/Old Mutual).


  Inspired by a growing literature in ‘flexible 
specialisation’ and a popular academic offshoot of marxism known as 
French Regulation Theory, and having established a new moniker for 
apartheid-capitalism--racial Fordism--Cosatu’s academic allies began 
developing scenarios for a future economic growth path (‘the regime of 
accumulation’) characterised by much different institutions, norms and 
practices (‘the mode of regulation’). Specifically, the 1990 arrival of 
Raphie Kaplinksy of Sussex University, to co-direct Cosatu’s Industrial 
Strategy Project (ISP), helped inaugurate post-Fordist thinking in SA.


  There was some overlap here with Tucker’s Prospects, 
which never reached the sophistication of ISP but for which the Cosatu 
researchers were known to have developed great ideological fondness. For 
on the one hand, Kaplinsky and three local colleagues shared the 
post-Fordist critique of monopolistic inefficiencies and its fascination 
with skills upgrading--which are, no doubt, both vital components in any 
progressive labour strategy.(10) Kaplinsky et al’s appraisal of 
corporate structure was often incisive, and the overall objective 
laudable (if purely reformist): ‘an alternative agenda in which high 
productivity is associated with living wages, and [which] involves the 
active participation of the labour force in production’ (probably 
referring here to planning of production).


  But on the other hand, like Tucker and like post-Fordists 
everywhere, the four also tended to place inordinate stock in 
international competitiveness (the most important ISP report summary was 
entitled ‘Meeting the Global Challenge’). Here it is worth recording 
that Kaplinsky’s influential early papers on post-Fordism in South 
Africa--’Is and What is Post-Fordism’ (sic) and ‘A Policy Agenda for 
Post-Apartheid South Africa’--generated a sole (unintentionally comical) 
example of SA’s possible comparative advantage in manufacturing exports: 
swimming-pool filtration systems (‘creepy crawlers’).(11)


  Was this an intelligent basis upon which to develop a 
trade union economic strategy? Cosatu leaders were apparently misled as 
they commissioned more and more work from ISP researchers, even when 
faced with Kaplinsky’s own admission (in the second paper) that ‘It may 
seem crazy for a post-apartheid state to target the export sector in the 
face of the economy’s present problems in meeting basic needs.’ Quite 
right, but Kaplinsky et al plowed ahead anyhow with one concession after 
the next to the neoliberal agenda.


  Thus even after several years spent studying global gluts 
in swimming-pool filtration system (and related) markets, the ISP team 
recorded their agreement ‘with most of the World Bank proposals for 
trade policy reform.’ Granted, such proposals were at that stage 
(mid-1993) much less severe than what the Bank imposed upon the rest of 
Africa. Yet the shared ISP/Bank commitment to ‘outward orientation’ was 
dubious in view of the ongoing failure of SA’s export-led growth 
strategies, not to mention SA’s tough labour movement, relatively high 
wages (by international standards) and durable uncompetitiveness (see 
Chapter 1).


  Simply stated, it was very hard to see how outward 
orientation serves labour’s interests. Consider a conclusion from the 
1993 study of South Africa’s trade prospects by staff of the Gatt: 
‘Export-led growth, while beneficial to the balance of payments, is 
unlikely to immediately affect levels of unemployment, given the capital 
intensity of the export sector, unless labour-intensive downstream 
industries can be developed.’(12) If the main beneficiaries of the 
late-apartheid government’s evolving industrial policy--the gargantuan 
Columbus stainless 

Re: [Marxism] "personal distancing plus social solidarity" Re: Fwd: [pen-l] If we want everyone to stay home during a coronavirus crisis, we need deep change to make that possible

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Thanks, will send over some SA material. Your collection is fabulous, 
I'll let comrades here know!


On 3/17/2020 1:34 PM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:

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First, I have to say that I am not sufficiently informed about the 
situation in South Africa.


In general, for our analysis and perspective on the COVID-19 crisis I 
refer to the numerous documents which are collected on a special page: 
https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/collection-of-articles-on-the-2019-corona-virus/


In short, South Korea has certainly dealt best with the crisis and 
without a mass lock down. Mass and free testing and health care is 
crucial.


I also want to point out that militant sectors of the working class 
and youth don’t accept the bourgeois atomization approach (i.e. 
“social distancing”). The French Yellow Vests and the Chilean 
protestors both demonstrated (and clashed with the police) in the last 
days despite the government forbidding this - using the COVID-19 as a 
pretext.


Am 17.03.2020 um 12:04 schrieb Patrick Bond:

On 3/17/2020 11:46 AM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:
Comrades, allow me to take this opportunity to say something on this 
whole "social distancing" ideology. The title say: "If we want 
everyone to stay home during a coronavirus crisis, we need ..." I 
understand that sectors of the rulering class want people to stay 
home and to forbid mass assemblies. We saw this in China and now in 
Europe (incl. the country where I am living, Austria). I also 
understand that sectors of the masses - terrorized and confused by 
the neverending media propaganda - share this.


Well, to slow the spread until medical interventions and state 
support systems are in place, perhaps "personal distancing plus 
social solidarity" to emphasise mutual aid?


If anyone wants a collection of critical ideas, let me know, as they 
exceed 35k limits here. I have statements of demand from 
working-class and social/health-movement activists from all over the 
world. An example from here in South Africa is from the SA 
Federations of Trade Unions: 
http://saftu.org.za/protect-us-and-we-will-protect-each-other-saftu-call-on-ramaphosa-governmentthe-war-against-covid-19-must-be-fully-engaged-with-working-class-support/


Here is a strong statement - at 1.30' for about 13 minutes - from 
SAFTU leader Zwelinzima Vavi: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meWFTExJmwc (following the SA 
president's statement)


Please send me material we can circulate here to avoid the mere 
medicalization of Covid-19, and instead deepen our class, gender, 
race and ecological perspectives.





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[Marxism] "personal distancing plus social solidarity" Re: Fwd: [pen-l] If we want everyone to stay home during a coronavirus crisis, we need deep change to make that possible

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 3/17/2020 11:46 AM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:
Comrades, allow me to take this opportunity to say something on this 
whole "social distancing" ideology. The title say: "If we want 
everyone to stay home during a coronavirus crisis, we need ..." I 
understand that sectors of the rulering class want people to stay home 
and to forbid mass assemblies. We saw this in China and now in Europe 
(incl. the country where I am living, Austria). I also understand that 
sectors of the masses - terrorized and confused by the neverending 
media propaganda - share this.


Well, to slow the spread until medical interventions and state support 
systems are in place, perhaps "personal distancing plus social 
solidarity" to emphasise mutual aid?


If anyone wants a collection of critical ideas, let me know, as they 
exceed 35k limits here. I have statements of demand from working-class 
and social/health-movement activists from all over the world. An example 
from here in South Africa is from the SA Federations of Trade Unions: 
http://saftu.org.za/protect-us-and-we-will-protect-each-other-saftu-call-on-ramaphosa-governmentthe-war-against-covid-19-must-be-fully-engaged-with-working-class-support/


Here is a strong statement - at 1.30' for about 13 minutes - from SAFTU 
leader Zwelinzima Vavi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meWFTExJmwc 
(following the SA president's statement)


Please send me material we can circulate here to avoid the mere 
medicalization of Covid-19, and instead deepen our class, gender, race 
and ecological perspectives.




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

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Wonderful to hear of the commoning strategy of Salk and Sabin.

On 3/16/2020 1:08 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... Trump is trying to get an exclusive US patent on a German 
coronavirus candidate vaccine. Nobody seems to think there’s anything 
strange about this bit of international thuggery. What a long, sorry 
road we’ve come down since the days of Salk and Sabin.


Except that there was a parallel case in the early 2000s in which U.S. 
and European Big Pharma had Intellectual Property monopoly rights over 
AIDS medicines (antiretroviral drugs known as ARVs), which they charged 
$10 000/year for. Here in South Africa, this was affordable to only a 
tiny fraction of the five million people living with HIV at the time 
(now 7.7 million, as there's still no cure).


But the activists in Treatment Action Campaign plus allies like ACTUP! 
in the U.S. and Medicins sans Frontiers helped lobby to get a World 
Trade Organisation exemption applied. As even local state resistance (by 
the Mbeki government from 1999-2008) was overcome and roll-out began in 
the public sector, generic medicines began to be manufactured.


As access improved, life expectancy soared from 52 in 2005 to 65 today. 
In short, decommodification of the life-saving medicines was 
accomplished by deglobalizing capital and globalizing people.


(Let me know offlist if you'd like more on this inspiring example.)


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Re: [Marxism] sub-imperial characteristics - was Erdogan’s imperial play comes undone

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 3/12/2020 9:27 AM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:
As Ioannis commented, this is too abstract. If the character of states 
is "fluid", it is not really a character. 


pb: Yes it is; at any given moment, the world capitalist system has had 
imperial powers. However, those imperial powers change over time; it's a 
fluid situation. That doesn't mean the system doesn't need to continue 
to build imperial power - or when it falls into dysfunctionality, to 
shift to a different hegemonic state coordinating bloc that is different 
to the prior one. This is the phenomenon of uneven and combined 
development, not so?


Of course, the character can change under specific conditions but 
these are rather exceptions and do not take place permanently. 


pb: Ah, but you'd agree that we witnessed, over centuries, the permanent 
relative decline of Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, prior to the U.S.?


Likewise, the character of classes does not change permanently. 


pb: Yes, if you mean during the era of the capitalist mode of production 
- but even so, certain people and even national proletariats find 
themselves in fluidity, in relation to others, moving up and down the 
ladder of relative privilege from lumpen to labour aristocracy and 
sometimes back. That's not controversial.


This is the whole point about scientific characterizations! Otherwise, 
we arrive to a post-modern approach where everything changes, nothing 
is clear!


pb: No, the categories I provided - again, just below - seem to have 
better depth and meaning than pomo diversions, surely?


* playing the role of a 'key nation' in imperialism's expansion (as Ruy 
Mauro Marini stressed), which in my view would entail substantial 
assimilation into the G20 (e.g. at capitalism's worst crisis moment, 
October 2008) and much greater financial subsidisation of (and greater 
voting power within) multilateral agencies that blatantly support 
corporate rule at the expense of poor countries, of peoples and of the 
environment (Bretton Woods Institutions, WTO, UNFCCC, etc);


* suffering a high degree of overaccumulated capital and needing to 
export it (as David Harvey alerts us to in The New Imperialism);


* regional 'deputy sheriff' duty when, e.g. in Latin America, Eastern 
Europe, South Asia, East Asia and Africa it is apparent that each of the 
BRICS' ruling classes has ambitious economic, geopolitical and often 
military ambitions; and


* within world-capitalist surplus flows, being unable to retain net 
multinational corporate profits and dividends at the same level the 
imperialist powers do (which is typically 150%+), and instead operating 
at a net surplus retention of just 20-80% (my data are unpublished 
dividend repatriation accounts compiled by the SA Reserve Bank so let me 
know if you'd like to see these, offlist, as they're in graphic format 
so can't be posted here).




Well, "siding with workers etc." is fine. But in the real world there 
are conflicts between states. Sometimes, Marxists side with some, 
sometimes they do not. Marxists defended the USSR against 
imperialists. Likewise they defended colonial or semi-colonial 
countries against imperialists. In 1991 and 2003 we defended Iraq 
(despite the bourgeois dictatorship of Sadam Hussein) against US 
imperialism. Today, we would would defend Iran against a similar 
attack. On the other hand, we don't side with China or Russia against 
the US.


pb: Obviously there are different views on this, depending upon the 
circumstances. When Washington bombs a Chinese embassy, we'd join the 
CCP and mass citizen protests, to express outrage, surely? During the 
U.S. bombing of Serbia that was a real option.


In short, clear class characterizations are important for political 
tactics. Saying only that we are "siding with workers" evades a 
central question of political tactics in the real world.



pb: Yes, each situation needs to be evaluated on its own merits. If 
China starts wrecking the environment in Ecuador (e.g. drilling the 
world's most biodiverse hotspot at Yasuni), for example, you can expect 
organisations like Accion Ecologica to be out protesting just as loudly 
(in one case doing a sit-in inside the Quito embassy) as if it were 
Chevron. We've yet to see sufficient international labour solidarity 
when Foxconn workers are demonstrating in Chinese cities, as another 
example, but I hope that's not too far off given the excellent labour 
networks that have been emerging, especially through Hong Kong marxists 
such as https://borderless-hk.com/





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Re: [Marxism] sub-imperial characteristics - was Erdogan’s imperial play comes undone

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 3/9/2020 10:15 AM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:
... 1) Which states concretly are sub-imperialist? 


I'll work on a listing but the characteristics I've proposed give you a 
clear idea.


...as far as I know, Patrick (and others) characterize China and 
Russia as such states.


At times, yes; this is a fluid category - as are the categories of 
imperialist or "core" or "periphery."




So if one of the main characteristics of sub-imperialist states is 
that they act as "regional deputy sheriffs", my question is simple: 
who's deputy are they? Who is the boss they are serving? U.S. 
imperialism? No one can seriously claim this! Of "global capital" 
which is not related to any Great Power? 


Yes, multilateral corporate neoliberalism, which both Xi and Putin 
strongly support, as so much recent evidence demonstrates.


This seems to me the only possible conclusion of such a position. But 
then, such "global capital" above the sphere of national states is a 
myth which was wrong already in past (including the period of 
globalization in which this claim became popular) and which is even 
obvisously wrong today.


2) What are the political consequences of such a characterization? If 
the U.S. is imperialist (on which surely everyone here agrees) and 
China and Russia are "sub-imperialist" (i.e. qualitatively less 
imperialist), should one side with China/Russia against the U.S.? As 
we all know numerous Stalinists and Bolivarians arrive to such 
conclusions.


What about siding with workers, peasants, women, environmentalists, 
youth and all others who toil against the depradations of elites 
everywhere - including here in Africa where they often get material 
support from Western imperialism and from Chinese and Russian 
subimperialism alike.




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Re: [Marxism] sub-imperial characteristics - was Erdogan’s imperial play comes undone

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Comrades, apologies for self-referential posting but just by 
coincidence, the latest version of our analysis of impi U.S. and 
sub-impi BRICS political economy can be found in a brand new (and 
decommodified) book from the University of the Witwatersrand Press, 
where below, editor Vishwas Satgar sums up two chapters by myself and 
two Brazilians. I'm in debate with BRICS anti-imperial claims offered by 
Jacob Zuma, Gennady Zyuganov and others, and critiques of sub-imperial 
analysis by Yash Tandon, William Robinson, Bill Martin etc.


BRICS and the New American Imperialism: Global rivalry and resistance

http://oapen.org/download?type=document=1007788

(Thanks to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation for subsidy allowing free 
download/sharing.)


And in case you want to see the data I mention way below, it's also 
provided:
Figure 4.3 Profit flows, 2015–2017 (average dividend receipts as a per 
cent of

dividend payments)
Source: SA Reserve Bank (personal correspondence, 1 October 2019).

Feedback is very welcome.

***

(from Vish Satgar's intro)

... Patrick Bond provides an analysis of the BRICS as an ersatz bloc of
subimperial countries. The concept of subimperialism has been explained 
by Ruy
Mauro Marini and David Harvey, using characteristics ranging across 
class structure,

geopolitics and the displacement of overaccumulated capital, to which Bond
adds a vital component: select middle-income countries’ contributions to 
neoliberal

global governance. One of the best examples of the phenomenon is the BRICS
bloc, which for a decade since 2009 has rhetorically asserted an 
‘alternative’ strategy
to key features of Western imperialism, while in reality fitting tightly 
within it. This
fit works through amplified neoliberal multilateralism serving both the 
BRICS and
the West, the regional displacement of overaccumulated capital, 
financialisation
and persistent super-exploitative social relations. In short, in spite 
of what some
term the ‘schizophrenic’ character of subimperialism, the BRICS all 
generally

promote extreme spatio-temporal fixes and the predatory condition known
as accumulation-by-dispossession. They thus amplify the world’s 
‘centrifugal’

BRICS and the New American Imperialism

capitalist crisis tendencies, instead of providing a coherent bloc and 
the purported

alternative to Western power. While Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin remain
Washington’s most durable potential competitors, the other BRICS 
countries are
splintering in unpredictable ways. Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist 
defeat of

the Congress Movement in 2014, Cyril Ramaphosa’s replacement of Jacob Zuma
in 2018 and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s ascension in 2019 
together confirm
the rightward political drift. The ‘anti-imperialist’ potential of the 
BRICS, if it ever
existed, is exhausted, although fierce debate continues over the merits 
of subimperial

theory. Bond takes on this debate to provide a strong defense of subimperial
analysis. All told, he concludes that a much more brutal period appears 
on the horizon
– in social, political, economic and ecological respects – unless ‘BRICS 
from

below’ forces can make their resistance more coherent.

In chapter 5, Ana Garcia and Karina Kato draw on Rosa Luxemburg’s 
inside-outside

model of capitalism and the subjection of the natural economy to capitalist
accumulation, and Harvey’s innovation of accumulation by dispossession to
explore a detailed case study of Brazilian and global interests in the 
development
of the Nacala Corridor in Mozambique. Their study reveals increasing 
expansion
and penetration of Brazilian capital, in a symbiotic relationship with 
the global
power structure, to deepen resource extraction in Mozambique. This spans 
massive
investments in coal, gas, construction and food production as part of 
the Nacala
Corridor. Brazil’s leading corporations, like Vale, are at the vanguard 
of this and
have invested heavily to create an export pipeline that brings together 
coal and gas
extraction, transport infrastructure (including an export terminal) and 
external

markets. At the same time, the ProSavana farming programme pushes a model of
export-led agriculture that also connects with this value chain. The 
dispossession,
social conflict and violence associated with this necessitates thinking 
in terms of the
subimperial dynamics shaping Brazil–Mozambique relations. In response to 
this
subimperial accumulation by dispossession, Garcia and Kato, like Bond, 
make the

argument for a ‘BRICS-from-below’ approach to resistance.
...

On 3/5/2020 11:51 AM, Patrick Bond via Marxism wrote:
Just briefly, qualifying as sub-imperialist

[Marxism] sub-imperial characteristics - was Erdogan’s imperial play comes undone

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Just briefly, qualifying as sub-imperialist entails some or all of the 
following political-economic characteristics:


* playing the role of a 'key nation' in imperialism's expansion (as Ruy 
Mauro Marini stressed), which in my view would entail substantial 
assimilation into the G20 (e.g. at capitalism's worst crisis moment, 
October 2008) and much greater financial subsidisation of (and greater 
voting power within) multilateral agencies that blatantly support 
corporate rule at the expense of poor countries, of peoples and of the 
environment (Bretton Woods Institutions, WTO, UNFCCC, etc);


* suffering a high degree of overaccumulated capital and needing to 
export it (as David Harvey alerts us to in The New Imperialism);


* regional 'deputy sheriff' duty when, e.g. in Latin America, Eastern 
Europe, South Asia, East Asia and Africa it is apparent that each of the 
BRICS' ruling classes has ambitious economic, geopolitical and often 
military ambitions; and


* within world-capitalist surplus flows, being unable to retain net 
multinational corporate profits and dividends at the same level the 
imperialist powers do (which is typically 150%+), and instead operating 
at a net surplus retention of just 20-80% (my data are unpublished 
dividend repatriation accounts compiled by the SA Reserve Bank so let me 
know if you'd like to see these, offlist, as they're in graphic format 
so can't be posted here).


Amendments or corrections are warmly welcomed.

Cheers,

Patrick

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Re: [Marxism] Erdogan’s imperial play comes undone

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 3/4/2020 7:22 PM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:

...
This article is a good example of the weaknesses... Subscribing to 
confusing theories like that of "sub-imperialism" (which in the case 
of Turkey is a wellcome pretext for refusing to support the 
rebels/Turkish army against Russian imperialism and Assad the Butcher.)


Comrade, it doesn't need to be "confusing" ... some ideas on the 
categorisations are here: 
http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/






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Re: [Marxism] Can Bernie Sanders Make the Democratic Party a Democratic Party? | The Indypendent

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2/26/2020 1:03 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism wrote:

...
The former suggests something for which nobody . . . NOBODY . . . has ever
been able to identify a means and a strategy.


I have a recollection from when I worked at the Institute for Policy 
Studies in 1988, that Robert Borosage did have such a strategy, and for 
awhile (about this time into the 1988 primaries) there was a sense it 
could be accomplished by Jesse Jackson. As is the case now, the central 
question posed - e.g. by another Jackson advisor, Vicente Navarro - was 
whether single-payer health insurance was the sort of issue that would 
break the oligarchs' and neoliberals' hold.


I'm sure in places like /Monthly Review /you could find this argument 
from 1988.


Cheers,

Patrick

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Re: [Marxism] The Story of China’s Economic Rise Unfolds in Switzerland

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 1/22/2020 2:19 AM, MM via Marxism wrote:
On Jan 21, 2020, at 4:13 PM, Michael Meeropol via Marxism 
 wrote:

But is China an IMPERIALIST capitalist country or a NATIONALIST capitalist
country ---


I'm sure some comrades will disagree, but the case for reading China and 
other countries aspiring to greater shares of increasingly polycentric 
global power not as imperialist or anti-imperialist or 
national-capitalist, but as sub-imperialist, is based on the framing 
that Ruy Mauro Marini and David Harvey have established - and that many 
Chinese researchers have advanced:


* the accumulation process which entails geographical displacement of 
China's massive crisis of overaccumulated capital (hence Belt & Road, etc);


* super-exploitative processes in which China's lack of environmental 
regulation and its rural-urban migrancy system contributed to the 
cheapening of labour power (as ever, in a predictable gendered manner);


* the role China plays in financing and legitimising multilateral 
imperialist power politics, especially in the IMF, WTO and UNFCCC, and 
as Xi put it at the World Economic Forum and in BRICS meetings, above 
all maintaining the merits of corporate globalisation, in search of 
centripetal economies of scale (when in reality centrifugal capitalist 
crisis tendencies are tearing the world apart);


* the regional sub-hegemonic 'deputy sherriff' functions for global 
capital undertaken by Beijing, particularly to spread traditional 
Western crass materialism; and


* an historically (and per-capita) minor role in global-scale ecological 
catastrophe, but one nevertheless that entails the worst tendencies of 
imperial-corporate emissions-trading, energy and transport expansion, 
through municipal/national carbon markets and export of coal-fired power 
plants and port building, often characterised by just-as-corrupt 
relations with local elites as practiced in the West.


Let me know, offlist, if you want longer essays by myself and others on 
these themes of uneven and combined development now driven more by China 
than any other power - yet China's capacity to retain surplus value 
streams for this accumulation process remains weak, in the 20-30% net 
range (of corporate profit/dividends received to dividends paid) 
compared to the US' 150-220% and even to South Africa where our 
sub-imperial accumulation nets a 40-60% return.


But the overarching dilemma for Beijing's economic managers is whether 
China's vast overproduction problem can continue to be mopped up with 
existing globalisation and financial techniques (along with a small 
degree of internal devalorisation) - or whether the sub-imperial powers' 
death spiral will be decisive at global scale in coming months and years.



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Re: [Marxism] Capitalism needs racism: A response to the NYT 1619 Project | Joel Wendland-Liu | People's World

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 1/10/2020 6:51 PM, Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism wrote:

https://peoplesworld.org/article/capitalism-needs-racism-a-response-to-the-nyt-1619-project/


Actually, there's such a big theoretical problem here, as to whether 
capitalism 'needs' racism, or can jettison even its most profound 
manifestations  - such as apartheid - when more effective systems of 
surplus extraction emerge. The South African case is exemplary, and the 
main writers on this have tried over several decades to specify when 
racism is functional, and when it creates contradictions that become 
debilitating. If you're interested in identifying the contingent versus 
the necessary, have a look at Ben Magubane's historical work, e.g. 
http://unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/63265CAFF973018D80256B6D005785D1/%24file/dmaguban.pdf



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Re: [Marxism] British elections: "The Center Blows itself up"

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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friendly corrections: yellow stripe... armadillo (they move SO slowly)

that would be Jim Hightower, former Texas Secretary of Agriculture?

On 1/15/2020 5:01 PM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:

I'm reminded of the saying that the only two things in the middle of the
road are a yellow strike and a dead skunk.

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Re: [Marxism] The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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good critiques of other e-waste are also the basis of this little video 
by Annie Leonard:


https://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-electronics/?utm_source=storyofelectronicsdotorg


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Re: [Marxism] Documentary Exposes Wall Street Power Behind Global Gentrification Boom

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2019/10/02 2:21 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... As Sassen has written for Truthout, “These expulsions don’t simply 
happen; they are made.”


The place-making that capital imposes is revealing, and it's good to see 
attention to the flows of financial capital: the typical debate in urban 
geography is whether the gentrifiers lead the finance capitalists, or 
the other way around.


Nevertheless, flows of people are typically mediated by ad agencies and 
clever place marketing. One of the newish strategies to watch out for is 
an artificial evaporation of racial oppression through a nostalgia 
white-wash.


Here's a comparison of a couple of sites that are indicative of how hard 
these lads have to push in secondary cities where the creatives are 
thinner on the ground than the likes of SF, NY, Boston, etc:


Deracialized Nostalgia, reracialized community, and truncated 
gentrification: Capital and cultural flows in Richmond, Virginia and 
Durban, South Africa


Patrick Bond & Laura Browder
Pages 211-245 | Published online: 28 Mar 2019

Gentrification literature often focuses on frictions between gentrifiers 
(often white) and those being displaced by the process (often low-income 
people of color). Far less attention is paid to a revealing 
place-marketing strategy that papers over race politics. Businesses in 
gentrifying neighborhoods appeal to their customers’ sense of nostalgia 
for a vanished way of life, while eliding racial injustices prevalent in 
the times they evoke. The process entails re-racialization of such sites 
without reference to the segregatory politics central to their creation: 
a mode of remaking history, without memory. In larger cities this may 
not be so evident, since gentrification dynamics are driven by both a 
sufficiently large share of the population with high disposable incomes, 
and a well-developed property redevelopment industry with the capacity 
to unleash real estate speculation. In contrast, smaller cities that 
have partially gentrified still exhibit incomplete erasure of the past. 
They provide a valuable window into this process of historical de- and 
re-racialization. Two such secondary cities are Richmond, Virginia, and 
Durban, South Africa. Both have histories of legally-enshrined racial 
segregation, and both are attempting, with varying degrees of success, 
to recast inner-city neighborhoods as cool, creative places for 
middle-class residents to live, consume, and produce.


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332075747_Deracialized_Nostalgia_reracialized_community_and_truncated_gentrification_capital_and_cultural_flows_in_Richmond_Virginia_and_Durban_South_Africa


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Re: [Marxism] Greta Thunberg, AOC and the Green New Deal - Climate and the Money Trail

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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The climate justice movement has for more than a dozen years set up a 
contrasting pole compared to 'climate action' - with very different 
principles, analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances. In recent 
months we've seen stronger moves from institutions in the 'action' camp 
to co-opt justice language up to a point, but the very clear divisions 
remain.


(I'm not sure the Wrong Kind of Green critics are following this 
historic trajectory, but I haven't read all of the recent posts; 
however, their occasional Third Worldism, especially in relation to Evo 
Morales' government in Bolivia, is an indication of hostility to the CJ 
movements of the Andes.)


On 2019/09/28 11:36 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... I have a different take on this stuff than A. O-C, Greta Thunberg, 
Bill McKibben and even Naomi Klein. I think that we are headed toward 
massive crises because neither wing of the capitalist class is capable 
of what they call "de-growth". 


CJ politics generally includes degrowth, applied to the Global North. 
There are problems, however, with degrowth framings of capitalism I'll 
address in another post soon, and improvements offered from Latin 
America and other sites of struggle. Here's one take: 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800918307626


On 2019/09/28 11:36 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
The Paris Accords were woefully lacking but we have to speak out in 
favor of enforcing them even if that puts on the same side as 
Goldman-Sachs. 


Here I think you're making a mistake by legitimizing Paris, which 
ultimately needs to be replaced. It is non-binding, with no 
accountability or penalty system - thanks to an alliance between Obama 
and four the BRICS countries in 2009. The costs of climate-related “Loss 
and Damage” are being disproportionately borne by Africans and others 
who did the least to cause the problems, yet thanks to a Paris 
provision, they have no recourse to claiming “climate debt” and polluter 
liability in lawsuits. The Paris Climate Agreement reintroduced the 
unworkable carbon trading gimmick, which failed miserably over the prior 
15 years, through the back door. Moreover, Paris negotiators neglected 
to include several major categories of emitters, especially militaries, 
airplanes and ships. There was no attempt to penalize fossil fuel 
companies, or to incentivize their Just Transition to post-carbon energy 
supply, nor even rhetorically to endorse the need to leave fossil fuels 
underground. No progress was made to enhance poor countries' acquisition 
of climate-friendly technologies that are currently protected by 
Intellectual Property. As a result, when in June 2017, just over four 
months after taking power, U.S. president Donald Trump announced he 
would withdraw the largest historic emitter from the deal, there was no 
punishment whatsoever. Not even a carbon tax (as even Joe Stiglitz had 
called for), much less sanctions.


While 'climate action' celebrated Paris, 'climate justice' condemned 
these fatal flaws.


On 9/28/19 5:05 PM, Ralph Johansen wrote:

There are highly paid policy wonks and apologists for capital in think 
tanks and right wing funded foundations, those with control of the 
media, the IMF, World Bank, EU and transnational capitalist agencies 
all over the capitalist world, some of whom no longer think denial is 
going to get it - the evidence is too palpable - and they are instead 
pondering how they can divert attention and attack from those with the 
real power, the real culprits,

On 2019/09/29 12:51 AM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote:
...enormously powerful people have the means and every design, not 
just to profit from windmills but to seize the issue of climate 
disaster and run with it in directions that will mean still more years 
of evasion, run-away profit-taking, increasing inequality and 
confusion, untold suffering for most of us, irreversible destruction 
of our planet, buttressing of capital as solution or only alternative, 
more of the "lesser evil," more delay in tackling the real problem, 
exacerbation of these enormous contradictions, and that we're kind of 
facing a diversion point that we should be very wary of, chilled by, 
cataclysmally frightened about. Then this discussion is put to rest, 
to that extent. 


Ralph, I think that the division here is not only in relation to climate 
action and climate justice. It's whether the 'internalization of 
externalities' can be accomplished using market mechanisms like carbon 
trading and offsetting (and even a carbon tax). The adoption of 
'neoliberal nature' policies and practices has been underway for several 

Re: [Marxism] Imperialism in a coffee cup | openDemocracy

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Yes, but...

On 2019/07/18 3:00 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/imperialism-coffee-cup/


    Great stuff, here, regarding unequal exchange based on 
super-exploitative labor relations.


    (For those interested, one of the originators of this thesis, Samir 
Amin, died on 12 August 2018 and will be commemorated here in 
Johannesburg, at Wits University, a year later - as we tend to do in 
these parts - as well with allies in Dakar where he worked these 
arguments into all sorts of fascinating applied critiques of imperialism.)


    One of the most critical aspects of our own Southern African 
migrant labor super-exploitation, is how gendered it is, with women 
ensuring the rates of pay can often dip below social reproduction costs, 
since those are borne by women in far-away rural areas with only 
sporadic remittances. Child-care, healthcare and elder care are 
massively subsidised by women and girls. The role of patriarchy 
amplifying such capitalist power relations would surely be feasible for 
Smith to add? (The literature here is rich, dating in some respects to 
Rosa Luxemburg's 1913 Accumulation of Capital, and more explicitly 
since, 40 years ago, Annette Kuhn and Ann-Marie Wolpe wrote Feminism and 
Materialism: Women and modes of production.)


    And there's a parallel socio-ecological process, unequal ecological 
exchange, in which the non-renewable resources looted from most South 
locations (e.g. 88% of African countries) are too rarely calculated, 
much less incorporated into critiques of imperialism.


    So what Smith scathingly points out about the North's failure to 
properly count Southern labor - "Evidence of the persistence and indeed 
pervasiveness of imperialism is all around us, yet liberals, social 
democrats and even many who consider themselves revolutionary socialists 
are blind to this" - also goes for his own failure to properly count the 
natural wealth of the South that's looted when extractive industries 
don't provide meaningful compensation for non-renewable resources, i.e., 
wealth 'that doesn't grow back' once lifted by TNCs (unlike his case of 
coffee beans, which do).


    I've tried to point this out in debate with Smith (and David Harvey 
- who I feel is also inadvertently guilty here), i.e. that study of 
imperialism - and any forms of uneven and combined development 
associated with resource-intensive countries of the South - must be more 
cognizant of the way 'free gifts of nature' are simply removed, without 
shareholder profits recirculated or capital reinvested (unlike in 
Canada, Norway, Australia, the U.S. and other resource-rich countries 
whose TNCs return the fruits of the plunder to their own countries' 
shareholders or fiscus):


http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/ and

https://hugeog.com/east-west-north-south-or-imperial-subimperial-the-brics-global-governance-and-capital-accumulation/

    And here are some other (2018) sites where you can determine if 
this argument adds to the anti-imperialist repertoire, as I think it 
should:


   New evidence of Africa’s systematic looting, provided by an
   increasingly schizophrenic World Bank
   
https://www.pambazuka.org/economics/new-evidence-africa%E2%80%99s-systematic-looting-provided-increasingly-schizophrenic-world-bank

   Corporate Looting: Sub-Saharan Africa Loses $100B A Year
   
https://therealnews.com/stories/corporate-looting-sub-saharan-africa-loses-100b-a-year

   Ecological-Economic Narratives for Resisting Extractive Industries
   in Africa
   
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S0161-72302018033004/full/html?fullSc=1

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Re: [Marxism] Camejo and Shawki

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On 2019/06/27 3:58 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


I'm working on an article about the ex-ISO right now and accessed this 
article I wrote in 2004 for background.


http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/CamejoShawki.htm
_ 



On Camejo: "He pointed to the likelihood that the United States has 
either reached the Hibbert curve or will soon do so. This means that the 
rate of economic growth will be slowed by energy shortages. We are also 
facing a situation in which home ownership has become a kind of savings 
plan for most working people, as house values increase as a result of 
cheap mortgage rates induced by low inflation rates. When rising energy 
costs leads to an inflationary spike, home values will begin to sharply 
decrease. The consequence might be massive consumer default and bankruptcy."


This is a line of argument I'm not too familiar with, but it's plausible 
since the oil price hit $145/barrel in 2008 (before crashing to $35 
within a few months). But I thought the general correlation of inflation 
to real estate was opposite to what's posited below (i.e., inflationary 
spikes allow real estate to hold value better than other commodity 
forms). Also, my sense of 2007-08 mortgage defaults in the U.S. was much 
more based upon the Exploding Adjustable Rate Mortgage phenomenon (a 
low-interest baiting, then switching to high rates after a few years), 
which especially hit African American neighborhoods, as well as those 
who were engaged in real estate flips coming up to the top of the 
Kuznets property cycle in particular locales in the U.S. Southwest, 
Florida and a few vulnerable cities. But I stand to be corrected. Has 
anyone revisited this?


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Re: [Marxism] What South Africa Can Teach Us as Worldwide Inequality Grows | Time

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On 2019/05/04 10:33 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

...

http://time.com/longform/south-africa-unequal-country/
_


Thanks, Louis.

It's a fine article on the Cape Town symptoms of urban class-apartheid 
planning. If anyone wants more on the causes, here's a book, Cities of 
Gold, Townships of Coal, which documents the World Bank's influence over 
Joe Slovo, a (neoliberal) Communist Party leader who became the 
country's first post-1994 housing minister, shortly before his death, 
and implemented a policy designed mainly to 'normalize the market' for 
bank housing finance: 
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20Cities%20Of%20Gold%20Townships%20Of%20Coal.pdf


"Half the population lives on less than $5 a day." Actually it's more 
like 65% living on less than $3.50/day: 
https://theconversation.com/how-current-measures-underestimate-the-level-of-poverty-in-south-africa-46704 




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Re: [Marxism] Happy anniversary

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Yes, and more than merely keeping the list going, I don't know anyone 
whose suggestions for linked readings - and spicy commentaries - have 
been so valuable as Lou's.


Keep 'em coming!

Patrick

On 2019/05/01 5:04 PM, Michael Yates via Marxism wrote:

Let's raise a glass to Louis on this May Day. Through thick and thin, he has 
kept this list going. Congratulations and Happy Birthday! And solidarity to all!


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Re: [Marxism] SWV on Earth Day 2019 and trends in environmental movement

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On 2019/04/14 7:46 AM, jgreen--- via Marxism wrote:

As the demand for climate action grows:
...Rather than attempting to plan and directly regulate industry, agriculture 
and
transportation, in the 1990s a large number of "environmentally aware"
governments embarked on the path of trying to use market measures--setting up
a market in carbon-emission certificates ("cap and trade)" and/or imposing 
carbon
taxes--to rein in green house gas emissions.  Other countries, such as the 
United
States, didn't even do that much.  Furthermore, establishment environmentalism,
as represented by Al Gore and the leaders of the mainstream environmental
groups, did their utmost to divert the environmentalists into becoming champions
of these market solutions that have so miserably failed.



Joe, I always respect your work, as you know, especially in statements 
like that above.


But in the rest of the piece, you've missed an entire genre of activism 
and radical critique, known as "climate justice." Was this intentional?


The framing around "climate action" is most often understood within the 
likes of Al Gore, WWF and other ecological-modernizers; that's a why a 
global CJ network emerged in 2007.


The idea of "class struggle" in climate change is excellent, but could 
be seen as downplaying the indigenous, feminist and ecological 
considerations that have become so important on the left in the last 
dozen years.


Today, seeing the radicalizing youth, Extinction Rebellion and Ende 
Galaende moving so firmly is excellent, and your outreach to them with 
this sort of analysis is appreciated - since the distinction between 
market-oriented strategies and eco-socialism is vital to stress.


But since groups like Climate Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental 
Network, DAPL warriors, Attac and so many others are in motion, and 
their roots go back so far in this struggle, the evacuation of the 
anti-capitalist CJ tradition doesn't seem logical.


Cheers,

Patrick



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[Marxism] (Fwd) New Samir Amin documentary, free to view

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKBJNpTU1Jw

*Samir Amin: The Organic Intellectual*

Z. Fall, 59 m., (o.v. English-French)

“In our era, when we consider the destructive (ecological and military) 
might at the disposal of the powers-that-be, the risk, denounced by Marx 
in his time, that war will end up destroying all the opposing camps, is 
real. On the other hand, there is a second path that demands the lucid 
and organized intervention of the internationalist front of workers and 
peoples.”


Taking as its point of departure this observation, itself a feature of 
50 books by Samir Amin, the film depicts the audacious struggles of, as 
well as interviews with, addresses by and special moments involving this 
most outstanding intellectual of the South. In the film Samir Amin 
discusses the political economy of development, capitalism and 
imperialism, as well as the resistance of workers and peoples.


In addition, the film is structured around the testimonies of: Isabelle 
Eynard Amin, Francois Houtart, Isabelle del Almeida, Ibrahima Thioub, 
Isham el Makhood, Fatou Sow, Cherif Salif Sy, Bernard Founou,Eric Koebe, 
Floriant Rochat, Lau Kin Chi, Rémy Herrera, Yash Tandon, Taoufik ben 
Abdallah, Ebrima Sall, Gustave Massiah and Aziz Salmone Fall. Samir Amin 
is, moreover, shown in the company of Mamdouh Habashi, Issa Shivji, 
Firoze Manji, Krishna Murty Padmanabhan, Sandeep Chachra, Luciana 
Castellina, Tina Ebro, Pedro Paez, Shahida El Baz, Helmi Shaarawi, 
Tawhida Shaarawi, Mohamed Nour El Din, Salwa El Antari, Aziz S. Fall, 
Saad El Taweel, Mary El Taweel and Gabriele Habashi. This bilingual 
(English-French) cinematic homage is enhanced by some images from the 
film The Dispossessed by Mathieu Roy, and also by several other 
sequences from throughout the world illustrating poetically.


For public screening, conference please contact damelak...@gmail.com

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Re: [Marxism] Haussman Plan

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On 2019/02/22 6:00 PM, Anthony Boynton via Marxism wrote:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-30/harvard-guru-advising-guaido-has-harsh-message-for-bondholders



Thanks. We've been seeing this lad in South Africa the last few weeks, 
as he's a favorite of the neoliberal finance minister: 
https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/daily-dispatch/20190202/281814285100303


On Haussman's biases, here's an older article I did: 
http://triplecrisis.com/ricardo-hausmanns-tall-tales/



That finance minister quoted him a couple of days in his main annual 
budget speech: 
https://ewn.co.za/2019/02/20/must-read-2019-budget-speech-by-tito-mboweni



A critique of that speech: 
https://mg.co.za/article/2019-02-22-the-triumph-of-trumponomics



Solidarity with Venezuelans fighting off this militarist-neoliberal 
invasion!




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Re: [Marxism] On Venezuela: Down with Trump, Maduro, and Guaido!

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On 2019/02/07 6:14 AM, jgr...@communistvoice.org wrote:

If you have different information, Patrick, about the results of the system of
exchange rates in Venezuela, I would be interested to hear about it.


Thanks Joe, I don't. I'll check in with comrades at CEPR in Washington 
who know much more about this. They always told Chavez that the black 
market would be a serious economic cancer, and that he needed to address 
the premium on hard currency... and I guess that was the correct advice 
back then.


Certainly Zimbabwe's recent experience in managing scarce currency 
reserves is as bad as they come: 
http://www.cadtm.org/In-Zimbabwe-capitalist-crisis-ultra-neoliberal-policy-Mugabesque


The recent period stands in contrast (I'm very very sad to say) to the 
much more efficient system of exchange control management that occurred 
in the same place - though under racist rule - in 1965-74 when Zim was 
growing at 9.5% annually thanks to the hot-house effect of trapping 
liquid finance inside, instead of letting it leak out to London bank 
headquarters as had been the case: 
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrick_Bond/publication/250226419_Uneven_Zimbabwe_A_Study_of_Finance_Development_and_Underdevelopment/links/586d302308ae6eb871bce0e0/Uneven-Zimbabwe-A-Study-of-Finance-Development-and-Underdevelopment.pdf


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Re: [Marxism] Venezuela: No to Intervention, No to Maduro - FPIF

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On 2019/01/31 8:05 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
... Patrick, Argentina and Brazil both benefited from the stand-off 
between rival imperialisms. Widely regarded as fascists, Juan Peron 
and Getúlio Vargas were both nationalists. In Mexico, you had the same 
thing with Lázaro Cárdenas who tilted left rather than right. Another 
economic nationalist who took advantage of big power rivalries was 
Mustafa Kemal. It is no accident that both Kemal and Cardenas offered 
political asylum to Trotsky. Another thing to keep in mind was the 
existence of the USSR that put pressure on the imperialists to back 
off from obvious colonial bullying...


I'm with you. All that looks very very good in comparison to the 
degeneration now underway.


But I'm getting at something different: global accumulation dynamics 
which give these national elites a chance to avoid dependency.




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Re: [Marxism] Venezuela: No to Intervention, No to Maduro - FPIF

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2019/01/31 3:28 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... every time I hear this stuff about Venezuela functioning as a 
rentier state under Chavez, I wonder what the hell they are talking 
about. In Latin America, there are only 2 countries that ever 
"diversified": Argentina and Brazil. 


Louis, you mean during the 1930s-40s deglobalization era? If so, the 
interesting question is whether the era we entered since around 2008 can 
also be described as deglobalization by some optimists (like me) on the 
basis of lots of the trade, investment and financial data (the current 
Socialist Register has my argument, with Brazilian co-author Ana 
Garcia). In other words, is this era enough like the 1930s, that those 
of us in such sites (me in Johannesburg) can argue convincingly for a 
sensible retreat from world capitalism, in macro-economic policy? That 
would entail tight exchange controls, import protection and a 
redirection of state subsidies to redistributive ends, for example.


Have they been able to stave off economic collapse? 


When do you mean? In the 1930s-40s, they did, for sure. (South Africa 
had 8% annual GDP growth from 1933-45, and in spite of imminent 
apartheid it was quite balanced, with manufacturing prospering - just as 
in Latin America.)


But is the proper question here: did these two countries run out of 
economic steam by the 1960s as a result of the *luxury-oriented* version 
of import-substitution industrialization, plus the kind of 
super-exploitative and sub-imperialist positioning that dependencia ?


Also, I do agree with this point (and even discussed it with Chavez in 
2008)... not only because of the Dutch Disease problem and dependency on 
chaotic global capitalist commodity prices, but also in part because of 
climate change. Dennis Brutus asked Chavez to 'leave the oil in the 
soil' as they say. That pitch was not persuasive.


Venezuela’s economic miseries are largely homegrown, and they are 
particularly painful given the huge oil resources at the country’s 
command. But Maduro, and Hugo Chavez before him, failed to diversify 
Venezuela’s economy away from petroleum, which made Venezuela 
vulnerable when oil prices fell (and a drought paralyzed the country’s 
hydroelectric sector). Add corruption and gross mismanagement to the 
mix and the country’s economy shrank by half between 2013 and 2018.

    https://fpif.org/venezuela-no-to-intervention-no-to-maduro/

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[Marxism] query on Left Forum 2019 - any idea of the dates?

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The website says it will be in the Spring (instead of standard last days 
of May)... I'd be grateful if anyone knows what dates are most likely.


Thanks,

Patrick

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Re: [Marxism] Great strides in Chinese Marxism: "Follow our party, start your business.”

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On 2019/01/17 8:41 AM, mkaradjis via Marxism wrote:

https://qz.com/1102948/chinas-communist-party-is-all-in-on-the-power-of-technology-and-thats-tricky-for-its-tech-giants/?fbclid=IwAR3F7pagTdowLCempaER6LSBBEUe4wN1P66YArkLh7SXKlA0gWy4GMUv3x4


Thanks for this, though it's 2017. Any updates are welcome, especially 
on Tencent, and especially on the threat posed by its "social credit" 
role in surveillance. (Fans of Black Mirror will know the Nosedive 
episode that spells out the implications of social credit scoring.)


It's a wicked firm that is #1 in my own investment portfolio, very 
regrettably, because my damn university pension manager has to buy some 
Joburg Stock Exchange shares and there, the #1 firm is an 
apartheid-media giant, Naspers, whose share valuation is far far ahead 
of the remnants of Anglo American mining, British American tobacco and 
Anheuser Busch beer - our other sin investments at the top of the JSE 
charts.


The reason Naspers is so vast - worth 20% of the overall JSE share 
valuation - is because the main manager (Koos Bekker) once, on a lark 
more than a decade ago, bought 1/3 of Tencent for $25 million, a stake 
that soared to more than $150 billion at peak about a year ago. This 
helped South Africa become the country with the most overvalued stock 
market in world history (if you add Hong Kong to the rest of China), 
judging by the Buffet Indicator. More here: 
https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-070-08-2019-01_1


This quote from the Quartz story is interesting: "The People’s Daily 
published an editorial calling Honor of Kings, a phenomenally popular 
mobile game published by Tencent, “poison” for keeping youngsters glued 
to their phones. The column alone caused Tencent to lose about $14 
billion in value on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Tencent responded by 
saying it would enforce time limits for players aged under 12 years old."


It turns out that because Beijing told Tencent's Pony Ma he couldn't 
import an equally naughty Japanese game, the firm lost (at peak) around 
20% of its share value last year. So that, in turn (along with a bit of 
other local chaos plus exchange control liberalisation that emptied $35 
billion - about 5% - from local financial markets), pushed down our JSE 
by 16% last year.


We have a working class here in South Africa regularly measured by the 
World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report as the world's most 
militant (2012-18 - though in late 2018 we were downgraded to fifth). 
Yet our ability to redirect our pensions and insurance-related 
investments into useful sites - e.g. state-backed basic-needs 
infrastructure bonds to fund our electricity or transport parastatals - 
is near zero.


The contradictions continue, and "are our hope" - as Brecht said. But 
we're having a hard time recognising them, still...





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Re: [Marxism] Wine, capitalism and your good health

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/01/13/wine-capitalism-and-your-health/

Ok. Thanks for posting this. But as someone who downs closer to 21 than 
14 glasses a week, I like David's rebuttal in the Notes section, below.


Here in South Africa, the core poli-econ of wine story - and critique of 
the industry that employs about 120 000 workers - would be the taste of 
super-exploitation. In one institute I occasionally lecture at in 
Stellenbosch, there is a pre-school and primary school for children of 
nearby farmworkers. They deal with a roughly 10% fetal alcohol spectrum 
disorder, and you can imagine how debilitating that can be. The old "dop 
system" of payments to farmworkers in kind, not in cash, is now illegal. 
But it happens, still.


In early 2013, after the rumble of extraordinary class struggle that 
carried on for about five months in the wake of the August 2012 Marikana 
Massacre (one which still implicates our current president, Cyril 
Ramaphosa, a major Lonmin platinum mine owner), the farmworkers won a 
battle after brave strikes. Some workers took to burning down some of 
the finest vineyards. Eventually they achieved an amazing victory, 
raising daily wages from R70 to R105 (their demand was R150 ... about 
US$17 at the time, but more like $11 now). That 50% increase was, 
naturally, resisted in all sorts of ways by the white wealthy farmers. 
Today a brand new minimum wage (R18/hour for agriculture, R20 for most 
other work) is in effect, so the workers should be getting closer to 
$1.30/hour.


But the class/race/gender struggles in our vineyards remain 
high-pitched. Here's one example:


https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-04-07-groundup-winelands-farmers-accused-of-multiple-assaults/

Probably the most dynamic organiser of farmworkers and land-justice 
campaigns - and most critical Marxist thinker - that you'll find out in 
the vineyards (working from a Cape Town NGO) is Mercia Andrews:


http://aidc.org.za/podcast/ngoisation-politics-mercia-andrews-conference-crisis-politics/ 



https://viacampesina.org/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/05/EN-09.pdf

Perhaps the best scholar to consult is a quasi-Marxist originally from 
the region, Gavin Williams: http://www.gavinwilliams.org/cape-wine/


Cheers,

Patrick

davidwalters66 says:
January 13, 2019 at 11:55 AM 
 



Very typically junk-science at it’s worst. When you seen “Some experts” 
one should run the other direction. Easily I can show that “some 
experts” and “recent studies” show that drinking a glass or two of wine 
*everyday* lengthens ones lifespan. Please this is incredibly nonsensical.


So you all know…there is NO science that says any amount of wine is 
harmful. None. It’s a extrapolations, not done on human clinical trials, 
but on…rats. Generally speaking, the statistics will show that countries 
with similar economic levels of development people live longer with few 
chronic diseases in heavy wine drinking countries than those that 
consume less wine. France vs the United States for example. But it is 
only of ‘interest’ because correlation does not equal causation. 
However, even the American College of Cardiology agrees drinking some 
wine is better than drinking no wine. And a recent study out of UC 
Irvine notes “Drinking about two glasses of wine or beer a day was 
linked to an 18% drop in a person’s risk of early death—an even stronger 
effect than the life-preserving practice of exercise, according to the 
researchers. ”


Secondly, wine has *not* gone up in alcohol content. Since..when 
exactly? Wine is *cheaper* to make *without* as high an alcohol 
content…all wine runs from 9% to 13% and has for over 100 years at 
least. What they found is that the longer a wine ages…the more it tastes 
better, depending on barrel material and the fermentation process. The 
longer it ferments, the more enriched with alcohol it becomes.


This is article is beneath the generally good quality seen here on Red Line…

David Walters


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Re: [Marxism] This memo is being circulated online from Wikileaks re: Syria and ousting Assad.

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2019/01/12 6:09 AM, Stephen Shalom via Marxism wrote:

... Mintpress writer Whitney Webb has quoted from this document multiple times
Sept 2018
https://www.mintpressnews.com/new-russian-s-300-air-defense-system-to-make-syria-untouchable-but-israel-seems-ready-to-test-it/249774/,
Feb. 2018
https://www.mintpressnews.com/israel-preps-for-syrian-war-with-golans-oil-and-water-in-its-sights/237566/,
and Sept. 2017
https://www.mintpressnews.com/why-conflict-syria-was-always-israels-war/231532/
implying but not explicitly saying it was written by Clinton.

On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 9:24 PM mkaradjis via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
The article in the conspiracist tabloid Mintpress begins by saying that
this Wikileaks "Clinton email" "has not gotten the attention it deserves."
Small wonder, since anybody seriously interested at the time it was
published would have done about 10 minutes research and found it wasn't an
email by Clinton, but an email to Clinton, like 1000s of emails with policy
suggestions and advice that circulate each year, the overwhelming majority
of which wind up in obscurity or the trash.


Comrades, on this general point of whether material on Wikileaks is 
reliable, surely we start with that presumption?


On the general point of whether a U.S. State Department cable or email 
that Assange has opened up for the world to see is valuable, surely this 
is one of the great windows into contemporary imperialism? I use the 
State Dept cables and emails occasionally and encourage others in 
academia and anti-imperial activism to, as well (for some reason, most 
social scientists get squeamish and ignore Wikileaks as a source, as 
Assange has pointed out). We should all be enormously grateful to 
Wikileaks, via first Chelsea Manning and then second, whomever in 2016 
hacked the Clinton emails.


On the specific question of how to interpret a given State Department 
cable or email, this one on Syria looks quite frank and plausible. But 
sure, if there were competing interpretations from other forces within 
State, the Pentagon or Presidency, then please enlighten us.


I'm an opponent of conspiracy theory, just as much as you other 
structural Marxists. But are there ways to handle bits and pieces of 
evidence that would fit this kind of memo into some sort of bigger 
picture, rather than cast doubt on it?



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Re: [Marxism] Harvey, Baran-Sweezy and Imperialism

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On 2019/01/02 03:12 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

This is another piece written for the study group discussion:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/david-harvey-and-imperialism-some-further-comments/


Quick reactions (disclosure - I did my PhD under Harvey's supervision so 
carry that bias):


* a longer debate in which Walter also took part ensued at the Review of 
African Political Economy: 
http://roape.net/briefings-and-debates/imperialism-in-the-21st-century/


* Harvey's rebuttal is here: 
http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/


* Perhaps Walter makes a mistake here, in not identifying the subject of 
debate as 'crisis theory', i.e. a study of internal contradictions, when 
he says: "what should one conclude if your theory tells you that the 
imperialists, in their own interest, ought not to be doing what they’d 
been doing for centuries? It should occur to you – indeed, it should be 
“of course obvious” – that your theory is wrong."


 Or Walter, your theory is correct and capitalism is 'wrong', for 
exporting surplus value into a world in which it only displaces but does 
not resolve the underlying contradiction of overaccumulation.


* Walter's view - also dubious, I think - is that Harvey is a 
classical-era MR-School Marxist on crisis formation: "This reasoning is 
reminiscent of the Baran-Sweezy view that the problem with capitalism in 
its monopoly stage is too much “surplus” (they don’t say surplus-value) 
that has to be “absorbed.” B rejected Marx’s law of the tendency for 
the rate of profit to fall – which has been the underlying force behind 
the drive to outsource production from North to South over the past 
half-century – in favor of a “tendency of surplus to rise.” Harvey has 
been using the absorption terminology with increasing frequency, as if 
to reflect the influence of the Monthly Review school."


    My own impressions on this point are that B have much more of an 
underconsumptionist approach at their root, but that John Bellamy Foster 
is eloquently moving the standpoint towards overaccumulation crisis as 
the basis for core contradictions. (These are not two sides of the same 
coin; the former focuses on lack of realisation of surpluses mainly due 
to the gap between what workers produce and what they consume; and the 
latter assumes that the driving force in crisis formation is 
overproduction driven by automation, i.e., the rising organic 
composition of capital - which of course is the basis for the tendency 
for the rate of profit to fall; that's not in doubt, but it tends to be 
more a symptom and conjunctural - e.g. rising in the mid-1980s in most 
advanced capitalist countries - because of the many countervailing 
tendencies, not only relative and absolute surplus value extraction, but 
the so-called spatial fix, temporal fix and accumulation by dispossession.)


    In his more recent work, Harvey has opened up to many more 
catalysts of crisis, including the wage squeeze in the late 1960s. His 
re-reading of the circuitries of capital - including a very useful 
graphic that he regularly explains in lectures posted at 
http://davidharvey.org - also now more profoundly incorporates the 'free 
gifts of nature' and the gifts of social reproduction (patriarchy 
especially) that capitalism draws from the non-capitalist realm, in the 
spirit of Luxemburg's 1913 critique of imperialism.


* My view is that both Harvey and Smith missed the critical question of 
subimperial accumulation, although Harvey flagged it 15 years ago in The 
New Imperialism: 
http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism


    With Bolsonaro in power in Brasilia, that theory - posted by 
Monthly Review in 1965 and 1972 - will no doubt make a comeback. See 
https://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-017-07-1965-11/ and 
https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-023-09-1972-02_2



Happy new year comrades...

Patrick

PS, if you like MR, and I do! - then here's my spin on South Africa, 
posted yesterday as their Review of the Month (feedback is welcome): 
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/01/01/south-africa-suffers-capitalist-crisis-deja-vu/


and if you like to follow discussions in out-of-the-way places, I'll be 
discussing this article for 1/2 hour, in exactly 3 hours from now, on 
our main national radio news program: 
http://www.safm.co.za/digital/player/1.0/safm/index.html



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Re: [Marxism] Rosa Remix

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On 2018/12/25 21:11, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

I'll take a look at the article.


I've sent it offlist. For those wanting a quick glance at a mid-2017 
version of the same thesis, prior to release of 2018 World Bank data, 
you can find it here: 
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/09/01/africa-rising-in-retreat/


Cheers,

Patrick

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Re: [Marxism] Retrieving Rosa Luxemburg

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On 2018/12/24 16:20, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:


*"Rosa Remix *is downloadable at http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/rosa-remix-3/.
The book was published “with support from the German Federal Foreign
Office” and has been promoted and distributed by the Democratic Socialists
of America (DSA). . ."
full at:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/rosa-remixed-up-100-years-after-the-accumulation-of-capital/



Hi Phil,


As usual, thanks for posting from rdln. But as I vaguely recall arguing 
with you before at some point, Walter's way too cranky:


"Another author who deals with imperialism is Patrick Bond from South 
Africa, who effectively dissects his country’s sub-imperialist 
exploitation of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa (and more generally the 
BRICS’ pretensions to anti-imperialism), as he often does. But here he 
also seems to be trying to shoehorn the data into Luxemburg’s particular 
theory, even though he says (in parentheses) that her “orientation to 
[Marx’s] reproduction schemas” was “ultimately mistaken.” He repeatedly 
quotes her statements to the effect that “capital cannot accumulate 
without the aid of non-capitalist relations.” But the main examples he 
provides are those of extractive industries that strip the continent of 
minerals, and he vividly describes the infamous massacre of platinum 
miners at Marikana in 2012. How is this an example of 
“super-exploitative relations between capitalist and non-capitalist 
spheres” being confirmed in Africa today?"


Look, for so many marxist scholars working in this sphere of capitalist 
'accumulation by dispossession,' we have much more acute consciousness 
of the 'free gifts of nature' as well as the free gifts of social 
reproduction (women's unpaid labour), than did earlier generations.


In the current edition of Paul Zarembka's journal Research in Political 
Economy, I have a very long explanation of how in Africa, consistent 
with Luxemburg's 1913 book The Accumulation of Capital, the 
commodity-based capitalist/non-capitalist relations can be understood - 
and measured at around $150 billion annual net loss, which is far 
greater than profit repatriation and illicit financial outflows from 
Africa.


Here's a link - 
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/S0161-72302018033004 
- but I'm not sure if there's a non-paywalled copy so if you want my 
galley-stage version, do let me know...


Cheers,
Patrick

Ecological-Economic Narratives for Resisting Extractive Industries in 
Africa, in Paul Cooney , William Sacher Freslon (ed.) Environmental 
Impacts of Transnational Corporations in the Global South (Research in 
Political Economy, Volume 33) Emerald Publishing Limited, pp.73 - 110


 Abstract

    The World Bank report Changing Wealth of Nations 2018 is only the 
most recent reminder of how much poorer Africa is becoming, losing more 
than US$100 billion annually from minerals, oil, and gas extraction, 
according to (quite conservatively framed) environmentally sensitive 
adjustments of wealth. With popular opposition to socioeconomic, 
political, and ecological abuses rising rapidly in Africa, a robust 
debate may be useful: between those practicing anti-extractivist 
resistance, and those technocrats in states and international agencies 
who promote “ecological modernization” strategies. The latter typically 
aim to generate full-cost environmental accounting, and to do so they 
typically utilize market-related techniques to value, measure, and price 
nature. Between the grassroots and technocratic standpoints, a layer of 
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) do not yet appear capable of 
grappling with anti-extractivist politics with either sufficient 
intellectual tools or political courage. They instead revert to easier 
terrains within ecological modernization: revenue transparency, project 
damage mitigation, Free Prior and Informed Consent (community 
consultation and permission), and other assimilationist reforms. More 
attention to political-economic and political-ecological trends – 
including the end of the commodity super-cycle, worsening climate 
change, financial turbulence and the potential end of a 40-year long 
globalization process – might assist anti-extractivist activists and NGO 
reformers alike. Both could then gravitate to broader, more effective 
ways of conceptualizing extraction and unequal ecological exchange, 
especially in Africa’s hardest hit and most extreme sites of devastation.



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Re: [Marxism] ZCommunications » South Africa searches for a financial parachute

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Thanks Louis,

And if any of you are skilled at - or interested in - critiques of the 
IMF please let me know. Christine Lagarde's press conference in Pretoria 
tomorrow is at 4pm so we're helping critical journos understand what's 
at stake. The more voices we can call upon to amplify the message, the 
better.


Cheers,

Patrick

On 2018/12/18 11:20, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/south-africa-searches-for-a-financial-parachute/ 




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[Marxism] Climate Justice standpoint Re: France’s protesters are part of a global backlash against climate-change taxes - The Washington Post

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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 Forwarded Message 
Subject: 	[REDlistserve] Yellow vests movement: Macron’s fuel tax was no 
solution to climate chaos

Date:   Wed, 5 Dec 2018 13:43:58 +0100
From:   Maxime Combes 




For your information, please find below a piece published two weeks ago 
in a French media now available in English


*/A few words on the situation in the country : /*
The situation in the country is moving up quite quickly: the yellow 
vests movement was initially seen as a "No-Tax right-wing movement" but 
it is much more complicated. Most of them are fighting against tax 
injustice and Macron's decisions in favor of the richs / TNCs / 
capital-owners. That doesn't mean that far-right wing groups are not 
infiltrated in the movement, but that does mean this is a complex social 
movement with more and more references to social and leftists demands 
(rising up of the minimum salary, etc). Macron government annoucements 
that they did yesterday are far to calm dow the situation. People feel 
flouted and the mobilisation coming on saturday is a key, since this is 
also a big climate day of mobilisation, and, with some others, we are 
trying to make some links. Not an easy task, but since we have now 
under-18 students in the streets, we hope to get some good news in the 
coming days.
(you may all know that all French revolutions came first through 
"anti-tax movements" - not saying that we are about to get a new 
revolution, but these are very important days in our country and 
definetely key to get a left answer to all of this)


Please feel free to share widely and to come back to us. (I have a lot 
of info - materials, but only in French)


Yellow vests: Macron’s fuel tax was no solution to climate chaos 


By
Maxime Combes 
-
4 December 2018


/The French government has now decided to suspend a planned eco-tax on 
fuel in response to mass protests. While the movement of the ‘yellow 
vests’ (gilets jaunes) has turned into a broader revolt against 
inequality and Macron’s neoliberal reforms, e/conomist and climate 
activist *Maxime Combes* (Attac France) argues that as a way to tackle 
climate change, the tax is neither fair nor effective. //


//Analysis originally published on the daily internet journal of ideas 
AOC 
 and 
translated by *Taisie Tsikas*.//


It is in the name of “ecological transition” and the need to “liberate 
households from dependence on petrol” that French Prime Minister Edouard 
Phillippe justified the status quo: no new proposal was announced the 
day after the “gilets jaunes” protests. By making the carbon tax, and 
hence the rise in fuel prices, the central plank of its policy to reduce 
fossil fuel consumption – a legitimate objective in itself – the 
government, blinded by an ideological and narrow understanding of the 
role that ecological fiscal policy can and must play, are leading the 
transition to a dead-end.


This discourse is intended to be simple and accessible: by increasing 
prices of fuels, consumers can be made to modify their behaviour, 
reducing their use of vehicles and/or buying more fuel-efficient 
vehicles. The same applies to boilers that use oil, in which case the 
emphasis is put on replacing them in favour of wood-burning or gas 
boilers. The case of tobacco is often used as an example: hasn’t its 
increase in price, done in the name of public health, reduced its 
consumption?


*Little impact on behaviour*

However, 

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Why are Democrats okay with losing? | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2018/11/10 16:17, Louis Proyect wrote:

...
There is no way for capitalism to resolve these contradictions. It 
took WWII to create a new footing for the expanded accumulation of 
capital. The underlying dynamic is toward a new world war that will 
not lead to a new long wave in a new Kondratiev wave but a global heap 
of radioactive rubble instead.



There is a tendency towards overaccumulation, as you describe, based on 
the rising organic composition of capital - and then there is 
devalorisation (including WWII's massive industrial destruction in 
Europe and Japan), which occasionally keeps the system in check by 
wiping out the least productive units. But the overall problem leaks 
into the financial sector, generating much higher ratios of debt and 
other forms of fictitious capital.


Usually there's some sort of fight-back against devalorisation, and 
sometimes, as you point out in the U.S. steel industry in the 1930s, 
that involves cross-class alliances.


But mainly the devaluation is visited upon poor and working people, 
women, the environment and other sites where resistance has not been 
well enough coordinated. (It took 3 years for Occupy to emerge from the 
global heap of real estate and student-debt rubble, for instance.)


So has anyone in our circuits been researching - and most importantly, 
organizing against - devaluation? (I'm writing about it now in the 
context of the degrowth movement's surprising lack of engagement - 
advice is welcome.)



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Re: [Marxism] Sussex Uni professor tweets ‘Israelis blew up Twin Towers’

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On 2018/11/06 17:06, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
https://thetab.com/uk/sussex/2018/11/05/sussex-uni-investigates-after-professor-tweets-israelis-blew-up-twin-towers-30917 



Yikes. In past years we could count on van der Pijl for solid 
structuralism, even when thinking through agency, such as in/The Making 
of an Atlantic Ruling Class /(Verso 1984)/... /or in helping me 
understand Alex Jones' Bilderbergphobia: 
https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/bilderbergers-beware


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[Marxism] don't forget those BRICS Re: How Obama’s Normalization of the Brazil Coup Prefigured Trumpism

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2018/10/29 17:06, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


https://www.thenation.com/article/how-obamas-normalization-of-the-brazil-coup-prefigured-trumpism/ 



He was joined in that normalisation process by Xi, Putin, Modi and even 
Zuma: 
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/brazil-south-africa-rousseff-zuma-imperialism-cia-coup/


There were various strange theories floated on the left - even at the 
top of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement - about why these coup 
processes in Brazil and also South Africa emanated primarily from 
Washington... some we included in a (quite balanced) educational booklet 
downloadable here: https://www.bricsfrombelow.org/ - specifically, by 
Gayton Mckenzie and Andile Mngxitama here: 
https://peoplesbrics.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/brics-politricks-for-july-2018-johannesburg-teach-in.pdf


Now with this tragic turn, for many of us interested in geopolitics, we 
might return to the kind of analysis of Brazilian sub-imperialism made 
famous by Ruy Mauro Marini: 
https://archive.monthlyreview.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-023-09-1972-02_2


To be sure, until Bolsonaro there was reason for the highly-regarded 
Argentine Marxist Claudio Katz to dispute a contemporary application of 
Marini's sub-imperialism label: 
http://links.org.au/imperialism-today-critical-assessment-latin-american-dependency-theory


But there's also room to disagree with him: 
http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/


Most important is solidarity, and today's best Joburg newspaper 
suggested we prepare for activism in alliance with the Brazilians about 
to suffer repression, and provide exile: 
https://mg.co.za/article/2018-10-28-what-bolsonaros-election-victory-could-mean


While the Pretoria regime will have no qualms about attending the next 
BRICS summit in Brazil (assuming Bolsonaro doesn't just quit as part of 
his Sinophobic populism), there are indeed concerns at the base, 
especially in organised labour. About ten weeks ago, our largest union - 
the metalworkers - ran a picket at the Brazilian embassy in Pretoria: 
https://www.numsa.org.za/article/reminder-numsa-to-picket-at-the-brazilian-embassy-on-monday/


We'll need to be doing much more of that, when the MST and other 
progressives call for solidarity in the form of protests, sanctions or 
other pressure points. I saw reports of this sort of solidarity in 
protests yesterday in Warsaw and Mexico City. Elsewhere too?



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Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg 100 years on

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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I have enjoyed debating (this reviewer) Walter Daum for many years, and 
so on it now goes...


On 2018/10/23 11:21 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

full at:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/rosa-remixed-up-100-years-after-the-accumulation-of-capital/
_


Walter:

Another author who deals with imperialism is Patrick Bond from South 
Africa, who effectively dissects his country’s sub-imperialist 
exploitation of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa (and more generally the 
BRICS’ pretensions to anti-imperialism), as he often does. But here he 
also seems to be trying to shoehorn the data into Luxemburg’s 
particular theory, even though he says (in parentheses) that her 
“orientation to [Marx’s] reproduction schemas” was “ultimately 
mistaken.” He repeatedly quotes her statements to the effect that 
“capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist 
relations.” But the main examples he provides are those of extractive 
industries that strip the continent of minerals, and he vividly 
describes the infamous massacre of platinum miners at Marikana in 
2012. How is this an example of “super-exploitative relations between 
capitalist and non-capitalist spheres” being confirmed in Africa today?



Well, the capitalist sphere of exploitation, in basic theoretical terms, 
entails capital and labour coming together in the production of value 
and surplus value. The 'super-exploitative' realm arises when there 
exists extra-economic power to extract 'free gifts.' At least three 
places from which these can be systematically drawn from Luxemburg's 
(and Luxemburgist) work, are within the 'natural economy' of 
pre-capitalist and non-capitalist relations, specifically in societies 
and states that have decommodified commons; in the non-compensated 
reproduction of labour power by women; and in the extraction of natural 
resources (and related society-nature interactions). Her theory of 
imperialism advanced our understandings of capitalist and non-capitalist 
relations by describing in great detail the South African (as well as 
Namibian and Congolese) systems of accumulation, as central to her main 
work, the 1913 book, The Accumulation of Capital.


The Rosa Remixed from RLS-NYC necessarily entailed simplification and 
popularization. I've done an update on all this for an Austrian journal 
so let me know if you'd like that offlist (feedback is warmly 
welcomed)... but it starts like this:


Luxemburg’s critique of capital accumulation, applied again in Africa
Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, December 2018

Abstract
Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital provided Africa’s first known 
Marxist account of class, race, gender, society-nature and regional 
oppressions. She was far ahead of her time in grappling with the theory 
and practice of capitalist/non-capitalist relations that today not only 
characterise Western multinational corporate extraction but also that of 
firms from several contemporary ‘emerging’ economies. This article 
contends that in her tradition, two recent areas of analysis now stand 
out, even if they have not yet received sufficient attention by critics 
of underdevelopment: the expanded understandings of value transfers from 
Africa based on natural resource depletion; and the ways that 
collaborations between imperial and subimperial national powers (and 
power blocs) contribute to Africa’s poverty. Using these two 
newly-revived areas of enquiry, several aspects of Luxemburg’s 
Accumulation stand out for their continuing relevance to the current 
conjuncture in contemporary Africa: capitalist/non-capitalist relations; 
natural resource value transfer; capitalist crisis tendencies and 
displacements; imperialism then and imperialism-subimperialism now; and 
the need to evolve from protests to solidarities through socialist ideology.


REST: pb...@mail.ngo.za


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Re: [Marxism] Reply to S. Jeong on labor-time calculation

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Fascinating, Joseph.

Let me cc to Seongjin, one of the most engaged and generous Marxist 
thinkers I know. He'll be interested in your comradely criticisms.


Cheers,

Patrick

On 2018/10/18 07:37 AM, jgreen--- via Marxism wrote:

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A reply to Seongjin Jeong on labor-time calculation
and 21st century socialism
===
(from Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice list, Oct. 14, 2018)

By Joseph Green

 * Jeong takes the labor-hour as the bottom-line of communist economic
planning
 * But the PLTC can't handle environmental issues
 * Is reducing things to a single unit of measure necessary for economic
calculation?
 * Marx vs. the single unit of measure
 * Calculation with many units of measure
 * The use of material balances does not prove an economic system is 
socialist
 * Input-output tables may or may not be material planning
 * The supposed abolition of labor and economic planning
 * Notes

The issue of what economic planning under socialism would look like was
discussed at one of the panels at the 50th anniversary conference of the Union 
of
Radical Political Economists (URPE), which was held at the end of September at
the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Seongjin Jeong put forward the view
that money would be replaced by labor certificates, and that planning would be
done according to the single measure of the labor hour.

I wasn't at the URPE conference; what I know about it is from a report written 
up
by the left-wing economist Michael Roberts and placed on his blog, and from
Jeong's draft paper "Soviet planning and the labor-time calculation model:
implications for 21st-century socialism" which Roberts linked to. (1) In his 
paper,
Jeong considers objections to his view, and as part of this, conscientiously 
refers
to my three-part article "Labor-money and socialist planning", which puts 
forward
a very different view. (http://www.communistvoice.org/00LaborHour.html) (2)

My article on socialist planning centered on showing that there was no single
measure that could serve as the natural unit of socialist planning, not even the
labor-hour, and that the use of the labor-hour as such a measure would result in
duplicating many faults of capitalism. It traced the history of the idea of 
labor
money in the socialist movement, and the repeated failures of the attempts to 
use
labor money. It pointed out that the labor certificate under communism, as
envisioned as a possibility by Marx, was only to be used for the distribution of
consumer goods and not for overall economic planning nor for how workplaces
would obtain the goods they needed for their operation. My article pointed to 
the
development of methods to plan in material terms.

This might seem a rather obscure subject, but it bears on many practical 
matters.
For example, the rationale for using market measures for environmental goals,
rather than relying mainly on regulation and planning, lies in the belief that a
single unit of measure is the way to achieve economic results. The rationale for
reducing every decision to a calculation of profit and loss lies in the belief 
in a
single unit of measure. And yet in reality it won't matter that much if money
denominated in dollars or other national currency was replaced by calculation in
labor-hours.

Moreover, Jeong also claims that the Soviet planning agencies didn't really
calculate properly or use input-output tables, and that this was a major cause 
of
the shortages and disproportions in the Soviet economy.  According to Roberts,
this line of reasoning led to the view that "with the development of AI 
[artificial
intelligence], algorithms, big data and quantum power, such planning by labour
time calculation is clearly feasible. Communism will work." In my view, such 
views
slur over the fact that the problem with the Stalinist economy wasn't simply bad
choices by Stalin and his successors, nor was it bad calculation due to the 
lack of
computing power, but that the Soviet Union under Stalinism became a
state-capitalist country with a new ruling class.

Given the importance of these issues, I would like to take this occasion to 
reply to
Jeong's article, especially as Jeong focuses on several important points of
economic analysis.

Jeong takes the labor-hour as the bottom-line of
communist 

Re: [Marxism] Climate Change: What About the Marxists?

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On 2018/09/06 14:28, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/06/climate-change-what-about-the-marxists/ 
]


I think what could be added here, is that capital seeks solutions to its 
problems that merely move them around (as Engels remarked about the 
Housing Question). For example, the commodification of the air and 
financialization of emissions mitigation strategies are topics I take up 
in a book: 
http://ggjalliance.org/sites/default/files/Bond%20Politics%20of%20Climate%20Justice%20UKZN%20Press.pdf



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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism in the 21st Century : Global Value Chains and International Labour Arbitrage | Economic and Political Weekly

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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In my view, comrades, these two reviews are written without thinking 
about - much less working through - the most profitable aspects of 
(South-to-North) value transfers, namely the expropriation of 
'free gifts of nature' by colonial, neo-colonial and multinational 
corporate extractive industries. It's as if Rosa Luxemburg's and Samir 
Amin's most profound insights don't exist.


On 2018/08/18 03:16 PM, Barry Finger via Marxism wrote:

For a critical assessment of “unequal exchange”:

https://isreview.org/issue/107/unequal-exchange



On Aug 18, 2018, at 8:16 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
 wrote:


https://www.epw.in/journal/2018/32/perspectives/imperialism-21st-century.html
_



To remind, here's Luxemburg's statement from The Accumulation of Capital 
(p.349 in the Verso edn):


"What is most important, however, is that, in any natural economy, 
production only goes on because both means of production and labour 
power are bound in one form or another. The communist peasant community 
no less than the feudal corvee farm and similar institutions maintain 
their economic organisation by subjecting the labour power, and the most 
important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom. 
A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every 
turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and 
everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form 
of natural economy that it encounters…In detail, capital in its struggle 
against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends:


(1) To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive 
forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones 
and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc.

(2) To ‘liberate’ labour power and to coerce it into service.
(3) To introduce a commodity economy.
(4) To separate trade and agriculture."


Please let's not neglect point (1), because the natural resource 
depletion component of this process - i.e., minerals and other 
non-renewable resources stripped from poor countries without adequate 
compensation - is measured now at around $150 billion per annum from 
Africa alone. (Specifically, that's 'net natural capital depletion' 
within the 'Adjusted Net Savings' accounts in the World Bank's Changing 
Wealth of Nations 2018 database.)


Soon we'll have a much deeper analysis of this process online at Paul's 
Research in Political Economy, but I try to explain it simply here: 
https://www.pambazuka.org/economics/new-evidence-africa%E2%80%99s-systematic-looting-provided-increasingly-schizophrenic-world-bank


And in a video version on RealNews: 
https://therealnews.com/stories/corporate-looting-sub-saharan-africa-loses-100b-a-year


Adding not only resource depletion but also the other crucial missing 
category - the 'subimperial' layer of super-exploitative regimes - 
here's where I address the debate between Smith and Harvey: 
http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/


Why is it so hard for otherwise well-equipped Marxist scholars to 
address these points, especially natural resources extraction?


After all, in his latest book (from MR Press), Amin certainly 
did:"capitalist accumulation is founded on the destruction of the bases 
of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment. It took a 
wait lasting a century and a half until our environmentalists 
rediscovered that reality, now become blindingly clear. It is true that 
historical Marxisms had largely passed an eraser over the analyses 
advanced by Marx on this subject and taken the point of view of the 
bourgeoisie – equated to an atemporal ‘rational’ point of view – in 
regard to the exploitation of natural resources." (Modern Imperialism, 
2018, p.86)


So please retire those ecology-erasers, dear comrades, and factor in the 
depletion of non-renewable resources!


Cheers,
Patrick
(I'm writing a new essay dedicated to Luxemburg-in-Africa now, so if you 
disagree, please help by explaining why.)


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Re: [Marxism] Zimbabwe elections

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Fine article, just one disagreement:

On 2018/08/09 05:55 PM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote

... socialism in one country is impossible.
That even goes for an industrialized one, never mind one like Zimbabwe.


After three decades of intense structural adjustment, poor Zimbabwe is 
nearly completely deindustrialized today. But in 1980 it had the third 
highest industry/GDP ratio in the world, behind only South Korea and 
Germany. Gory details of the subsequent demise: 
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20Zimbabwe's%20Long%20Economic%20Crisis.pdf



On 2018/08/09 06:46 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... I am not sure what possibilities the metalworkers union has but it 
sounds like it might signal a rebirth of Marxism in South Africa. 
Let's cross our fingers. 


Here are some pros and cons, done about 18 months ago:
https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/african-labour-and-social-militancy-marxist-framing-and-revolutionary-movement

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Re: [Marxism] South Africa Vows to End Corruption. Are Its New Leaders Part of the Problem?

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On 2018/08/05 08:32 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

NY Times, August 5, 2018
South Africa Vows to End Corruption. Are Its New Leaders Part of the 
Problem? By Norimitsu Onishi and Selam Gebrekidan


A terribly misleading title, for it focuses on only one of the tsotsis 
the ruling class has entrusted to run South Africa: the deputy president 
David Mabuza. (Sure, that's a well-deserved critique.) (But sure, 
Ramaphosa would reply that if he hadn't made an electoral deal with 
Mabuza, he would have lost last December's party leadership vote to 
Jacob Zuma's pick, his ex-wife.)


Yet again - and now this is getting absurd - the NYTimes correspondents 
cannot bring themselves to address corruption by Cyril Ramaphosa or 
Pravin Gordhan, the two ANC centrists (both formerly Marxists) who are 
the darling of liberal international capital and local wicked capital.


Partial antidotes:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/20/in-south-africa-ramaphosa-rises-as-lonmin-expires-workers-women-and-communities-prepare-to-fight-not-mourn/

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/khadija-sharife/south-africas-dirty-secre_b_576996.html

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/south-africa%E2%80%99s-fight-between-hostile-brothers-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Czuptas%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cwhite-monopoly-capital%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93
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Re: [Marxism] Where Is Barack Obama?

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2018/06/25 01:59 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
Long rueful article about Obama's reticence vis-a-vis Trump. The 
answer is obvious. Obama never gave a crap about the marginal and 
vulnerable members of American society.


True enough. Since Obama is coming here to Johannesburg in three weeks 
to do the Mandela centenary talk for the Mandela Foundation, it's very 
useful to have more critical information than ruefulness. What can you 
comrades help us with?


(And the week after that, Joburg's hosting the BRICS+: 
Xi-Putin-Modi-Temer-Erdogan-Al-Sisi-Macri and a few other tyrants yet to 
be named... watch for more info from the BREAK the BRICS coalition...)


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Re: [Marxism] PKK’s message for May 1 and a “united struggle against fascism”

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It was interesting being in Kreuzberg, Berlin last night, where in spite 
of the banning of PKK symbols there was impressive solidarity from 
thousands marching through the traditionally Turkish neighborhoods... 
and not much else to report as unlike past years, no widespread violence 
occurred, just small flashpoints involving an antifascist black bloc and 
autonomists... auf deutsch: 
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/polizei-justiz/nach-dem-1-mai-in-berlin-kreuzberg-so-wenig-krawall-war-nie/21234060.html?inIsFirst=false



On 2018/05/02 01:30 PM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:
Unsurprisingly, this PKK May Day statement talks about the Middle East 
but manages not to mention the U.S., Russia, Assad or imperialism even 
a single time! This reflects the PKK's leadership dirty realpolitik 
towards the imperialist Great Powers and the Assad regime.


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Re: [Marxism] ‘They Eat Money’: How Mandela’s Political Heirs Grow Rich Off Corruption - The New York Times

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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There they go again: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/opinion/south-africa-corruption-anc.html



On 2018/04/17 07:15 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:

On 2018/04/17 01:29 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... I never would have dreamed that the ANC would end up as such a 
comprador bourgeoisie...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/world/africa/south-africa-corruption-jacob-zuma-african-national-congress.html 



Amongst other concerns about the original article, was the extreme bias 
in understanding South Africa's corruption crisis.


Whomever the /NYTimes /chose to write the follow-up editorial today just 
amplified the bias. Not a mention of SA's world-leading avaricious 
bourgeoisie. The lads in Sandton corporate offices - nearly all white - 
just got another pass.





The piece paints Ramaphosa as an untainted businessman trying to clean 
up the corruption. More on his record:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/20/in-south-africa-ramaphosa-rises-as-lonmin-expires-workers-women-and-communities-prepare-to-fight-not-mourn/

Worse, the NYT writers completely neglect the existing record of white 
corporate economic crime, which is persistently the world's highest. 
Indeed in February the (corrupt) consulting firm PwC, which does these 
measurements, again gave the SA bourgeoisie the gold medal in the 
world corruption olympics: 
https://www.fin24.com/Economy/sas-economic-crime-highest-in-the-world-pwc-20180227


How bad is the rate of corruption?: "eight out of ten top corporate 
managers do crime": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6cD5JzFZMo


Occasionally this orientation to corruption, driven by local and 
global corporations, is recognized within the ruling elite, but it's 
all too rare: 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/05/in-south-africas-fight-between-hostile-brothers-the-zuptas-and-white-monopoly-capital-a-new-consensus-appears/


Meanwhile the SA bureaucratic petit-bourgeoisie has a mediocre 
ranking: the 109th most corrupt out of 180 countries in Transparency 
International's state corruption index: 
https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017


It would be interesting to gauge the impact on world-elite NYT readers 
of this kind of reporting, with its class and race biases.




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[Marxism] (Fwd) Reminder of 30 April deadline for World Association for Poli Econ: Call for Papers for 2018 forum in Berlin, 16-18 July

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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http://www.wapeweb.org/index.php?m=content=index=show=19=41


   WAPE 2018 Forum Call for Papers

2018-03-20

WAPE 2018 Forum Call for Papers 


World Association for Political Economy
WAPE [2018] No.1

Call for Papers
Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg: Thought Legacy
and Contemporary Value
——The Thirteenth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy
July 16-18, 2018, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany
Proposed Topics:
1. The Thought of Karl Marx and Its Contemporary Value
2. The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg and Its Contemporary Value
3. The Communist Manifesto and the World Socialist Movement
4. World System Theories: Core, Periphery, and Quasi-core
5. The Basic Contradiction of Capitalism and Various Forms of Economic 
Crisis
6. Unbalanced Development of the World Economy and New Features of 
Contemporary Capitalism

7. Fair Economic Globalization and Narrow Anti-globalization
8. International Cooperation and Sharing Development in the “Belt and 
Road” Initiative
9. To Construct a New International Economic, Political and Military 
Order and a Community of Shared Future for Humankind
10. Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism, Contemporary Neo-imperialism and 
Neo-colonism
11. The New Trends in Neoliberalism and Its Negative Effects on the 
World Economy and People’s Livelihood
12. Studies of Schools of Marxist Political Economy in Different 
Countries and in the World

13. Other Related Topics of Political Economy
How to apply to attend the thirteenth WAPE Forum
Please send a paper abstract of 500 words together with your full 
curriculum vitae in English to wapemem...@vip.163.com. Once your 
abstract is accepted, please pay your registration fee upon receiving an 
email for payment. When your payment is confirmed, you will receive an 
official invitation. Please submit your full paper so that it can be 
considered for publication in our journals. You also have the option to 
apply to attend the
forum without a paper. Both individual papers and complete panels on the 
theme and proposed topics are welcome. You can find more information 
about past WAPE forums at www.wapeweb.org.

• Important dates
Deadline for abstract: April 30, 2018;
Notice of acceptance: May 15, 2018;
Deadline for full paper: June 30, 2018.
• All accepted papers will be considered for publication in World Review 
of Political Economy (ESCI) and International Critical Thought (ESCI).

• Registration fee
US$180 for online payment before May 31, 2018;
US$220 for online payment after May 31, 2018 or on-site payment.
• Official Languages: English and German
• Schedule
1. On-site registration on July 16-18, 2018.
2. WAPE Council meeting/WRPE editorial meeting on July 16 morning, 2018.
3. Official program on July 16 afternoon through July 18, 2018.
• What is the benefit of joining WAPE?
While applying to attend the thirteenth WAPE Forum, you have the option 
to join WAPE.
It is highly recommended that you choose to join WAPE. Please find below 
the details on WAPE membership.

• General Membership
WAPE has decided to develop itself as a membership organization in order 
to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, new thought and research across 
the divide of languages and geography, and offer its members access to 
certain benefits. These include:
• Free digital copies of the organization’s peer reviewed academic 
journal, World

Review of Political Economy (WRPE), which is published four times a year.
• Publishing of members’ selected articles on our websites.
• Translating selected books and articles into Chinese and publishing 
them in China.

• Invitations to attend a variety of conferences in China.
• Scholars who are members may be invited to China on a lecture tour.
• Members will be invited to join panels, which WAPE will organize for 
various international conferences held in different countries.
The general membership fee of WAPE is only US$30 per year, and the 
membership fee including a hard copy of WRPE is US$100 per year. 
Membership taken out in 2018 has the added benefit to members of 
receiving eight digital issues of WRPE Volumes 7 and 8.
• WAPE. The World Association for Political Economy, registered in 
Paris, is an international academic organization founded by Marxist 
economists and related groups around the world. The mission of WAPE is 
to utilize modern Marxist economics to analyze and study the world 
economy, reveal its laws of development, and offer policies to promote 
economic and social progress on the national and global levels. The last 
twelve WAPE forums were successively held in Shanghai, 

Re: [Marxism] the imperialism debate (was Marx’s law of value: a debate between David Harvey and Michael Roberts | Michael Roberts Blog)

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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A bit delayed, here's my long piece mentioned below:

http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/

Towards a Broader Theory of Imperialism

In a major contribution to the on-going debate on imperialism, Patrick 
Bond argues that an explanation of imperialist political-economy and 
geopolitics must incorporate subimperialisms. John Smith’s old-fashioned 
binary of North/South prevents him from fully engaging with David 
Harvey’s overall concern about uneven geographical development


***

Also just out, a view of the bible from Johannesburg:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70347-3_10

The Unfinished System of Karl Marx pp 299-330

Capital, Volume III—Gaps Seen from South Africa: Marx’s Crisis Theory, 
Luxemburg’s Capitalist/Non-capitalist Relations and Harvey’s Seventeen 
Contradictions of Capitalism


(Let me know if you'd like this offlist - pb...@mail.ngo.za - because 
it's behind a paywall for now.)


On 2018/04/10 02:17 PM, Patrick Bond via Marxism wrote:

Comrades, hi,

There's another frustrating input in the Smith-Harvey debate over at 
the Review of African Political Economy website:  "Dissolving Empire: 
David Harvey, John Smith, and the Migrant" 
http://roape.net/2018/04/10/dissolving-empire-david-harvey-john-smith-and-the-migrant/ 



"Does this mean that China in economic, cultural, social, or military 
terms has reached the status of an imperialist power?," asks Adam 
Mayer, who studies Marxism in Nigeria.


Wrong question, hence wrong formulation of the terrain of debate, and 
wrong answer...


I think the question should be, instead, "aren't China and other BRICS 
countries slotting into global imperialism as *subimperial* allies, in 
relation to the accumulation of capital, the super-exploitation of 
labour, species-threatening ecological destruction and global 
malgovernance?"


The answer is "Yes!" And there, in the next post, I argue, the problem 
is immense. (My post ended up drawling on for 8300 words so if anyone 
wants it, let me know. It'll be online next Monday.)



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Re: [Marxism] ‘They Eat Money’: How Mandela’s Political Heirs Grow Rich Off Corruption - The New York Times

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On 2018/04/17 01:29 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... I never would have dreamed that the ANC would end up as such a 
comprador bourgeoisie...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/world/africa/south-africa-corruption-jacob-zuma-african-national-congress.html 



Here in Joburg this is an irritating read, because on the one hand it's 
useful for new details about a well-known scandal; on the other, it 
reproduces a pro-corporate bias that is no surprise coming from the NYT.


First, one revealing mistake in this piece: "While poverty has declined 
since the end of apartheid"... Indeed the rate has gone from 46% to 65% 
using the Upper Bound Poverty Line (of about $4/day), a measure the 
state persistently underestimates: 
https://theconversation.com/how-current-measures-underestimate-the-level-of-poverty-in-south-africa-46704


Second, here's a biased spin:

"Mandela did not understand South Africa’s political economy and agreed 
to a settlement that failed to secure black South Africans’ economic 
independence, said Mamphela Ramphele, an anti-apartheid activist who 
became close to Mr. Mandela. She later went on to serve as a managing 
director of the World Bank. “He didn’t know any better,” Ms. Ramphele said."


The plea of ignorance is not terribly unusual as an explanation, but it 
undermines the agency of the elites who managed the neoliberal 
transition. I worked in Mandela's Reconstruction and Development office 
and was chief drafter of the government's first White Paper in mid-1994. 
Here's a description of ten deals which Mandela was fully aware of and 
in agreement with: 
https://theconversation.com/why-south-africa-should-undo-mandelas-economic-deals-52767 



But third, and most importantly, this piece repeats the bias in 
mainstream commentary that the Pretoria Regime has been profoundly 
corrupt. The article includes the standard details about a few firms 
caught in the Gupta corruption nexus (another is Bell Pottinger, the 
London PR firm that was given a corporate death sentence last September 
due to its South African games).


"South African regulators have urged the police to begin a criminal 
inquiry into McKinsey, the American consulting giant, over its 
relationship with a Gupta-linked company in a contract involving a 
state-owned utility. A South African court has frozen the $83 million 
McKinsey was paid for the contract, and the firm says it will return the 
fee.


"Regulators say they have also pressed the police to investigate KPMG, 
the Big Four auditing firm based in the Netherlands, for its work for 
the national revenue service in 2015. KPMG has acknowledged that 
elements of the work “should no longer be relied upon” and offered to 
pay back its consulting fees.


"SAP, the German software behemoth, is being investigated by the United 
States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission 
after it disclosed payments to intermediaries on state contracts that 
may have contravened the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.


"International banks have been ensnared in the scandals, too. HSBC and 
Standard Chartered have been accused by a British lawmaker of laundering 
the Guptas’ ill-gotten gains. HSBC says it has closed a number of 
accounts that belonged to front companies operated by the Gupta family."



***

The piece paints Ramaphosa as an untainted businessman trying to clean 
up the corruption. More on his record:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/20/in-south-africa-ramaphosa-rises-as-lonmin-expires-workers-women-and-communities-prepare-to-fight-not-mourn/

Worse, the NYT writers completely neglect the existing record of white 
corporate economic crime, which is persistently the world's highest. 
Indeed in February the (corrupt) consulting firm PwC, which does these 
measurements, again gave the SA bourgeoisie the gold medal in the world 
corruption olympics: 
https://www.fin24.com/Economy/sas-economic-crime-highest-in-the-world-pwc-20180227


How bad is the rate of corruption?: "eight out of ten top corporate 
managers do crime": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6cD5JzFZMo


Occasionally this orientation to corruption, driven by local and global 
corporations, is recognized within the ruling elite, but it's all too 
rare: 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/05/in-south-africas-fight-between-hostile-brothers-the-zuptas-and-white-monopoly-capital-a-new-consensus-appears/


Meanwhile the SA bureaucratic petit-bourgeoisie has a mediocre ranking: 
the 109th most corrupt out of 180 countries in Transparency 
International's state corruption index: 
https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017


It would 

Re: [Marxism] labor theory of value

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2018/04/06 05:29 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:

...
All of which reinforces my insistence that we continue to educate about the
centrality of the point of production, that the labor theory of value
underlaying that conception is essential for the most effective
participation in struggles in the community, the family, etc., and that
separate theories for each sector is madness, and that the sphere of social
reproduction is inseparable from that theory.


My impression, Andy, is that no one in the classical Marxist tradition 
would disagree with this, if by which you also mean Harvey does not have 
"separate theories" but that he has sought to explain an integrated 
system of circulation. You're happy with that diagram?


Again, to my mind (and I may be wrong), the most powerful Harvey 
innovation here, following debates he's had with Nancy Fraser and 
integration of her "foreground/background" analysis of how capitalism 
works, is the new way in which social reproduction ("free gifts of human 
nature") and environment ("free gifts of nature") are brought within - 
not outside - the conceptual apparatus.


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Re: [Marxism] Marx’s law of value: a debate between David Harvey and Michael Roberts | Michael Roberts Blog

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On 2018/04/02 07:32 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:

One particularly scary aspect of Harvey's argument is, as the quote below
shows, that he believes there needs to be different theories and therefore
different strategies for different sectors and movements. Or if not that,
then, at least implicitly, an insistence on no coherent theory.
This is particularly upsetting given the valiant efforts of some theorists
and activists to unite theoretically production with social reproduction
and thus with struggles against oppression linked in a coherent way with
the struggle against exploitation.



I'm very biased, yeah, but really Andy, it's the opposite: his latest 
circulation model (more so than his 1985 three-circuits-of-capital) is a 
coherent, holistic approach to capitalism that builds in social 
reproduction (especially gendered roles) and ecological 'free gifts of 
nature' in a way that's ordinarily left out from Marxist theorizing.


Have a look at that .docx file or check the diagram out directly at 
http://davidharvey.org/


In the same way as you, I think comrade Michael is doing a disservice 
here, with his primitive either/or formulation (because obviously class 
struggle is waged and 'decided' in production, realisation and 
distribution circuitries, all the time):


"I conclude from DH’s short paper that he aims to establish an argument 
that class struggle is no longer centred or decided between labour and 
capital at the point of production of surplus value. Instead in ‘modern’ 
capitalism, it is to be found in other places in his ‘circuit of 
capital’ that he presents in latest book and in various presentations 
globally.  For DH, it is in the point of realisation (ie over rents, 
mortgages, price gouging by pharma firms etc) or in distribution (over 
taxes, public services etc) that the ‘hotspots’’ of class struggle are 
now centred.  The class struggle in production is now less important 
(even non-existent)."


Cracks like those last five words are distractions.

But likewise, I don't think David was particularly fair to Michael in 
this remark - "Devaluation rarely appears in Roberts’ accounts" - 
because after all, the blog is entitled "The next recession" and Michael 
regularly makes his predictions about how crises will play out in the 
context of his (rather monological) falling-rate-of-profit causality. 
But David's absolutely right to call on all Marxists to pay more 
attention to the way this vast batch of overaccumulated capital that 
regrouped in untenable ways since 2008 is going to come crashing down: 
"we would need to construct a strong theory of devaluation to account 
for what happens in the market place."


(Occupy movement strategists worked a rather esoteric theory up to the 
level of public consciousness, but it took three years after the major 
crisis inflection point. We surely have to do better, and do it faster, 
in response to the next melt?)


Anyhow, there is a bit too much of this kind of simplification going on. 
Later this week I'll have a comment posted at the Review of African 
Political Economy website where the Smith-Harvey debate on how to 
characterize imperialism has been raging; it too would be improved (in 
my view) by more generosity between leading intellectual comrades.


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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism and super-exploitation

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On 2018/03/12 05:50 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

As Smith so brilliantly shows, capital in the North restored much of the
fall in its profitability suffered in the 1970s on the back of the super
exploitation of the South:
full at:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/imperialism-and-super-exploitation/



Thanks Phil,

First, it's also good to recall Michael's caveats: "I am not sure that 
Smith has proved that ‘super-exploitation’ is the dominant 
characteristic of modern imperialism.  As he shows, imperialism of the 
19th century also relied on super-exploitation of the masses in the 
colonies (to the level of slavery) and that, in the industrialisation of 
imperialist countries like Britain in the late 18th and early 19th 
century, driving wages below the value of labour power was a powerful 
factor in the exploitation of labour (see Engels on The condition of the 
working-class in England). For that matter, super-exploitation is 
visible in the imperialist economies too..."


Second, you might know some of this debate has migrated to the Review of 
African Political Economy, where the "North" and "South" now also 
includes disputes over East and West, and the role of spatial processes 
as part of capital's super-exploitative armory:


http://roape.net/2018/01/10/david-harvey-denies-imperialism/
http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

However, neither Smith nor Harvey address the full implications of 
sub-imperial accumulation in the Mauro Marini tradition (a tradition 
which also centrally stresses the role of super-exploitation). I've 
nearly finished an intervention along these lines. Anyone else gathering 
information about these processes?


Cheers,
Patrick
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Re: [Marxism] update after cabinet reshuffle Fwd: After Jacob Zuma’s Firing, South Africa Risks Budget Austerity and Even Renewed BRICS ‘Poisoning’

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Thanks Louis

On 2018/02/27 02:49 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/after-jacob-zumas-firing-south-africa-risks-budget-austerity-and-even-renewed-brics-poisoning/ 



There was quite a political dust-up in Pretoria last night, so the 
updated version - 
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/cyril-ramaphosa-relaunches-neo-liberalism/ 
- has these new paragraphs below. They seek to explain the transition 
from 2009-18 "Zupta" time (Zuma+Gupta brothers, who are now in full 
flight) to a neoliberal-nationalist "Ramazupta" regime, in which the 
ultra-corporate new president is weighed down by dreadful characters he 
has to retain so as to maintain the coherence of the corruption-riddled 
ruling ANC. At the end of these four paragraphs, I set the stage for 
what marxmail readers may want to debate with me: the sub-imperial 
character of the BRICS. Latest update on that riff is at both 
counterpunch and zcomm today.


Of course I didn't get too far with that last line of argument on RT 
recently, before running into trouble with the host!: 
https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/419094-zuma-legacy-south-africa/


Cheers,
Patrick

***

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/cyril-ramaphosa-relaunches-neo-liberalism/

Indeed a wicked combination of patronage politics and neo-liberalism is 
likely to continue, given that on February 26, Ramaphosa announced a new 
cabinet that includes the return of two former finance ministers 
celebrated by the financial markets – Nhlanhla Nene and Pravin Gordhan – 
and a deputy president, David Mabuza, who ran the eastern Mpumalanga 
province since 2009.


Mabuza’s predecessor in that job, Mathews Phosa – also a former ANC 
national treasurer – was scathing about his reputation as a corrupt 
thug: “He’s engulfed in this cloud of scandals and let me tell you it’s 
going to follow him where he is today…  People fear him. They talk about 
the killings in the province, when they talk about them, they link them 
with him… I don’t think the ANC will win the 2019 elections.”


The leader of the new SA Federation of Trade Unions (second largest 
after the ANC-supporting Congress of SA Trade Unions), Zwelinzima Vavi, 
was just as critical of the new ministers: “Ramaphosa’s appointment has 
changed nothing. He has reshuffled names but remains rooted in the 
corrupt and pro-business ANC led by his predecessor. In particular it is 
incredible that he has appointed a deputy president, and therefore 
potential president, who has for years been implicated in of some of the 
most serious crimes when Premier of Mpumalanga. These crimes included 
alleged bribery in the awarding of contracts for World Cup facilities, 
threatening and spying on journalists and drawing up a hit-list of 
political opponents, of whom at least 15 were assassinated while no-one 
was arrested for any of these murders.”


However on the positive side, Ramaphosa fired Zuma’s closest cabinet 
ally – energy minister David Mahlobo – and as a result, Pretoria’s 
attempted $100 billion purchase of eight nuclear energy reactors from 
Rosatom is now highly unlikely. This is largely due to Pretoria’s 
worsening debt crisis, so that really leaves just one accomplishment as 
Zuma’s legacy: annual networking with leaders in Beijing, Brasilia, 
Delhi and Moscow.



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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

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On 2017/09/03 01:00 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/


David's just replied to the latest version of the critique by John 
Smith, published recently in the Review of African Political Economy:


http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

Realities on the Ground: David Harvey replies to John Smith

John Smith is lost in the desert and dying for water. His trusty GPS 
system tells him there is fresh water ten miles to the East. Since he 
believes ‘for East to West’ one should ‘read South to North,’ he heads 
off to the South never to be seen again. This is alas the quality of the 
argument he makes against me.


The East whereof I speak when I comment that wealth has moved from West 
to East in recent times, is constituted by China, now the second largest 
economy in the world (if Europe is not considered as one economy) 
followed by Japan as the third largest economy. Add in South Korea, 
Taiwan and (with a bit of geographical license) Singapore and you have a 
power block in the global economy (once referred to as the ‘flying 
geese’ model of capitalist development) that now accounts for roughly a 
third of total global GDP (compared to North America that now accounts 
for just over a quarter).  If we look back at the world as it was 
ordered in, say, 1960, then the astonishing rise of East Asia as a power 
center of global capital accumulation will be blindingly obvious.


The Chinese and the Japanese now own large chunks of a spiraling US 
government debt. There has also been an interesting sequence of each 
national economy in East Asia taking its turn in searching out a spatial 
fix for the massive amounts of surplus capital being accumulated within 
their borders.  Japan began capital export in the late 1960s, South 
Korea in the late 1970s, Taiwan in the early 1980s.  A lot of that 
investment went to North America and Europe.


Now it is China’s turn.  A map of Chinese foreign investment in 2000 was 
almost totally empty.  Now a flood of it is passing not only along the 
‘One Belt One Road’ through Central Asia into Europe, but also 
throughout East Africa in particular and into Latin America (Ecuador has 
more than half its foreign direct investment from China).  When China 
invited leaders from around the world to attend a One Belt One Road 
conference in May of 2017, more than forty world leaders came to listen 
to President Xi enunciate what many there saw as the initiation of a new 
world order in which China would be a (if not the) hegemonic power.  
Does this mean China is the new imperialist power?


There are interesting micro-features to this scenario.  When we read 
accounts of awful super-exploitative conditions in manufacturing in the 
global South it often transpires that it is Taiwanese or South Korean 
firms that are involved even as the final product finds its way to 
Europe or the United States.  Chinese thirst for minerals and 
agricultural commodities (soy beans in particular) means that Chinese 
firms are also at the center of an extractivism that is wrecking the 
landscape all around the world (look at Latin America).  A cursory look 
at land grabs all across Africa shows Chinese companies and wealth funds 
are way ahead of everyone else in their acquisitions. The two largest 
mineral companies operating in Zambia’s copper belt are Indian and Chinese.


So, what does the fixed, rigid theory of imperialism to which John Smith 
appeals have to say about all of this?


According to John Smith I failed to take up the question of imperialism 
in The Limits to Capital.  I mentioned it only once, he says.  The index 
records some 24 mentions and the last chapter is entitled “the 
dialectics of imperialism.” It is perfectly true that I there found the 
traditional conception of imperialism derived from Lenin (and 
subsequently set in stone by the likes of John Smith) inadequate to 
describe the complex spatial, interterritorial and place-specific forms 
of production, realization and distribution that were going on around 
the world.


In this I was later intrigued to find a fellow spirit in Giovanni 
Arrighi who in The Geometry of Imperialism (written around the same 
time) abandons the concept of imperialism (or for that matter the rigid 
geography of core and periphery set out in world systems theory) in 
favor of a more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within 
the world system.  Neither of us deny that value produced in one place 
ends up being appropriated somewhere else and there is a degree of 
viciousness in all of this that is 

Re: [Marxism] Viewpoint magazine on imperialism

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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My quibble with the sub- characterization of the BRICS is that it 
implies they act on behalf of one or another major or full-fledged 
imperialist power, whereas they are mainly acting out of their own 
self-interest, albeit in contexts where they are not the strongest powers.


Well Fred, what, in this sense, is an "imperialist power"? A country, 
and indeed one led by a con-man president such as Donald J Trump?


And from the standpoint of the BRICS, what is "their" self-interest? 
Who's 'they'? If the leading capitalist blocs (neoliberal, financial and 
export mining in my South African case) controlling a state are 
perfectly happy to endorse BRICS as sub-imperial within a world system 
from which they derive maximum profits and hide their wealth (as was the 
case until the 'Zupta' power bloc went out of control on corruption 
around five years ago), then sub-impi is what we can call it.


So isn't it more satisfying, politically and intellectually, to consider 
the broader imperial project of accumulation through global corporate 
power relations, and assess each conjunctural situation on its own merits?


a German journal, out today

http://welttrends.de/

Weltmächte im Wartestand?


   /WeltTrends/

WeltTrends 136 Februar 2018

South Africa suffers political-economic poisoning from its BRICS membership

By Patrick Bond

The emergence of an alliance between Brazil, Russia, India, China and 
South Africa in 2010 signaled enormous potential for a new political 
arrangement to challenge Western hegemony. The reality, however, has 
disappointed constituencies, especially in the most unequal and troubled 
of the five countries, South Africa, where leaderships talks left but 
walks right.


***

Jacob Zuma will likely exit the South African presidency earlier than 
the next national elections, due within fifteen months. He will leave, 
presumably, with certain guarantees against prosecution for large-scale 
corruption. He also must give sufficient time to his successor, Cyril 
Ramaphosa, to erase the electorate’s memory of the so-called ‘Zupta’ 
networks combining Zuma’s cronies with the three Gupta brothers, who are 
Indian immigrants. Their ‘state capture’ strategy since Zuma took power 
in 2009 included a luxurious family wedding in 2013 that notoriously 
violated immigration and airport security regulations; the costs were 
paid from agricultural support meant for black farmers in the Free State 
province. Nearly €1 billion per year was lost to Zupta looting, 
according to the former finance minister Pravin Gordhan.[1] (To be sure, 
that is a small fraction of the €15 billion lost annually to 
overcharging on state procurement contracts by what is the world’s most 
corrupt business elite, Johannesburg’s, according to 
PricewaterhouseCoopers polling.)[2]


Just before the December holiday break, Ramaphosa’s party presidential 
acceptance speech at the African National Congress (ANC) convention 
followed a tight election with former African Union chairperson 
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who if victorious was widely expected to pardon 
her ex-husband Jacob. Ramaphosa graciously thanked Zuma for promoting 
the 2012 National Development Plan (NDP) and providing four million 
South Africans with free AIDS medicines. Indeed, the latter 
accomplishment helped raise life expectancy by 12 years from the early 
2000s trough of 52. But the Treatment Action Campaign’s world-historic 
battle against Big Pharmacorp profiteering and President Thabo Mbeki’s 
AIDS denialism had already been won largely without Zuma’s visible 
assistance back in 2004.


Ramaphosa himself will proudly enforce the NDP in coming years, as he 
was its co-author. Lacking climate-change consciousness, the NDP’s top 
priority infrastructure commitment is a €55 billion rail line, mainly to 
export 18 billion tons of coal, entailing 50 major projects of which 14 
have already begun.[3] The rail agency, Transnet, has a €4.2 billion 
credit from China to finance Chinese-made locomotives that are 
sufficiently strong to carry 3 kilometre-long coal trains, though 
corruption is already a major problem with the acquisitions.[4] Zuma’s 
desired €100 billion purchase of eight nuclear energy reactors from 
Rosatom is now highly unlikely thanks to Pretoria’s worsening debt 
crisis, so that really leaves just one accomplishment as his legacy: 
annual networking with leaders in Beijing, Brasilia, Delhi and Moscow.


BRICS reforms?

Conventional wisdom, as expressed by foreign policy scholar Oscar van 
Heerden in late 2017, is that Zuma “ensured our ascendency into the 
BRICS Geo-Strategic grouping, made up of Brazil, Russia, India and 
China: 

Re: [Marxism] Viewpoint magazine on imperialism

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2018/02/02 05:14 PM, Fred Murphy via Marxism wrote:

... For example, the lead article by Salar Mohandesi at
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/the-specificity-of-imperialism/

“Lim­it­ing impe­ri­al­ism only to the “West,” or even just the Unit­ed
States, tends to obscure the impe­ri­al­ism of those states often
com­bat­ting that impe­ri­al­ism. Of course, there are enor­mous
dif­fer­ences between, for exam­ple, U.S. and Russ­ian impe­ri­al­ism,
which become espe­cial­ly impor­tant when con­sid­er­ing the strug­gles on
the ground today, but the fact remains that for those who call them­selves
social­ists, the ulti­mate objec­tive must remain the abo­li­tion of both,
not the defense of one against the oth­er.


Hear hear.

Ah, but there arise the dilemma of whether a country fighting on a 
specific geographic terrain (Russia in Syria) for specific territorial 
and geopolitical reasons is genuinely anti- or perhaps 
inter-imperialist... or whether this conjunctural battle occurs within - 
not against - the broader imperial project of accumulation through 
global corporate power relations. The latter I consider 'imperialism' 
proper, no matter the conjunctures in specific sites.


Which means we may want to take up the question of whether the Russian - 
and broader BRICS agenda (which will be on display when their 
head-of-states-summit comes here to Johannesburg in late July) for that 
matter - is better described not as anti- or inter- ... but as 
sub-imperialist.


More soon as this debate percolates, here and there.

Patrick


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Re: [Marxism] Terreblanche Fwd: The Co-Optation of the African National Congress: South Africa’s Original ‘State Capture’

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On 2018/01/26 12:45 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/26/the-co-optation-of-the-african-national-congress-south-africas-original-state-capture/ 



Thank for posting, Louis,

    We're nearing the end of Sampie's wonderful contributions, as his 
brain cancer is at an advanced stage. He's 84 and his last book, four 
years ago, was a 600 page critique of Western imperialism, a real tour 
de force - and surprisingly, published by Penguin, though they did a 
terrible marketing job.


    Still, meeting Sampie two weeks ago, he was full of energy and a 
desire to see his work critiqued and spread. So on Monday we'll be doing 
so with a symposium in his honor at the University of Johannesburg, with 
quite a stellar roster of South African radicals cheering him on.


    If anyone wants to chip in a tribute with some few sentences by 
email, or if you want to read his work, do let me know, I'll send you a 
little package by email.


Cheers,

Patrick

PS, I've spent the last three days with Samir Amin - age 86 - in Dakar 
(including his humble apartment in the city's oldest major building). 
He's going very very strong, making constant inputs into a workshop 
(where we're writing an "Alternative Report on Africa") of the Council 
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, a group of 
4000 critical intellectuals he founded more than 40 years ago. I can't 
wait for the next MR Press book he has authored, the second half of his 
autobiography. Amazing! Our continent has some of the finest critics of 
Washington's shithole imperialism.



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Vivek Chibber's "Road to Power" Is Not | New Politics

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Excellent contribution, Raju! I got it in London a couple of months ago 
when Brill was selling its paperbacks cheap at the HM conference. I hope 
it'll be in the Haymarket catalogue soon too?



On 2018/01/12 07:01 PM, Raju Das via Marxism wrote:

...
For a Marxist critique of this position and its underlying problematic 
class theory, one might see this book: 
http://www.brill.com/products/book/marxist-class-theory-skeptical-world

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Re: [Marxism] Jacob Zuma Prepares to Depart a Diminished A.N.C.

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/12/16 01:32 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... “Theft and corruption in the private sector is as bad as that in 
government,” he said.


This is true. It's typical for an either/or mentality to prevail, so 
it's vital to recall that Johannesburg corporations known locally as 
"White Monopoly Capital" are the world leaders in corruption, just as 
wicked as the "Zuptas" (Zuma plus the Gupta brothers). More: 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/05/in-south-africas-fight-between-hostile-brothers-the-zuptas-and-white-monopoly-capital-a-new-consensus-appears/


State enterprises, through the awarding of contracts, or tenders, have 
created an entire class of A.N.C. loyalists sometimes derided as 
“tenderpreneurs.”


The NYTimes conveniently forgets to mention that a huge share of 
procurement contracts are overcharged by WMC corps, not black 
businesses: 
http://www.702.co.za/articles/176836/40-of-government-goods-and-service-budget-consumed-by-inflated-prices-it-pays 



“What makes this different is that people’s expectations of the A.N.C. 
were higher because it was a latecomer and because of Mandela.”


And, though the NYTimes dare not admit this, because the South African 
proletariat is considered by the World Economic Forum to be the world's 
most militant (i.e., most "confrontational"), and has been since 
Marikana in 2012: 
http://reports.weforum.org/global-competitiveness-index-2017-2018/


Many of the lefties I know are rooting for Dlamini-Zuma, as a route to 
more rapid ANC degeneration, hence lowering its vote below 50% in the 
2019 national elections so the Economic Freedom Fighters can be major 
players.


Most social democrats are desperately hoping for Ramaphosa to prevail, 
just to slow the state's looting. I think that's rather wishful thinking.


Also this week, Ramaphosa's old firm Lonmin died, and was bought for 
1.4% of its prior (2012) share price high. He helped kill it, by 
emailing in a request for "concomitant action" against the wildcat 
strikers at the Marikana platinum mine, 24 hours before the massacre.


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Re: [Marxism] from 2008 - Mahmood Mamdani - lessons of Zimbabwe

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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A fierce debate then ensued:

http://concernedafricascholars.org/bulletin/issue82/

mine: http://links.org.au/node/815

On 2017/12/04 05:20 AM, Dennis Brasky via Marxism wrote:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n23/mahmood-mamdani/lessons-of-zimbabwe



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Re: [Marxism] Edward Herman, 92, Critic of U.S. Media and Foreign Policy, Dies

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Why does an ornery lad like this get to have this terribly silly 
soundbite cited in both the NYT and Washington Post?



On 2017/11/23 12:58 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... “If we consider mainstream media to be nothing but 
propagandistic,” said the author Todd Gitlin, a journalism and 
sociology professor at Columbia University, “we have no vocabulary 
left to condemn the likes of Fox News and Breitbart.”


And why is anti-imperialist resistance so difficult for this guy to 
conceptualize? Ed always knew this terrain, even if he often despaired 
at the adverse balance of forces.


For example, he noted that the authors acknowledged that despite the 
supposedly omnipotent media propaganda system, “an active grass-roots 
oppositional movement with very limited media access” was pivotal in 
undermining President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to aid right-wing rebel 
groups in Nicaragua. But “the only explanation they offer for this 
apparent anomaly,” Professor LaFeber added, “is that the ‘system is 
not all-powerful.’ ”


If he were to have read attempts to undermine his political values in 
establishment obits like this, I know Ed would have smiled and nodded.


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: ZCommunications » Economic meltdown looms in Zimbabwe

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Ah, sorry, just saw you posted a version...


On 2017/11/20 03:47 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

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By Patrick Bond.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/economic-meltdown-looms-in-zimbabwe/
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[Marxism] (Fwd) American Empire discussion in Washington DC, December 8

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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(What lines of argument need to be made here?
    Join us if you can, RSVP: 
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfT6EKj73O5TmVW29omJJrXPEO_Y2ZZaKlbvihEDkAgzdQRKg/viewform?c=0=1 
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AMERICAN EMPIRE: FROM OBAMA TO TRUMP
December 8, 2017 - Washington, D.C.

One year into Donald Trump’s presidency, we look at the political 
patterns that have emerged on an international scale and the lessons we 
can draw from them. What impact has the Trump administration had on the 
rest of the world and what can we do to counter his politics?


Providing a critical analysis of US foreign policy and its global 
impacts, this conference brings together internationally known analysts 
and activists to discuss core strategic questions of importance to the 
international community. How has American Empire changed in the 
transition from Obama to Trump? And is Trump a passing phenomenon or is 
he a harbinger of a more permanent shift in global politics?


Engaging differing visions of America’s role in the world under Trump, 
we address issues of global power relations, resurgent nationalism, 
right-wing populism, and climate change. In active support of 
progressive civil society, “American Empire: From Obama to Trump” seeks 
to foster a space for exchange to build toward an international 
resistance movement.


The conference is co-convened by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York 
Office and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).


*RSVP*for the eventhere 
.


PROGRAM

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8

Location: Holeman Lounge, National Press Club

12:00pm-12:30pm: Welcome from RLS—NYC and IPS

12:30pm-2:15pm: AMERICAN EMPIRE

 * Maude Barlow – Chairperson, Council of Canadians and Food & Water
   Watch; 2005 Right Livelihood Award recipient
 * Walden Bello – Former Member of Congress, Philippines; 2003 Right
   Livelihood Award recipient
 * Medea Benjamin – Co-founder, CODEPINK and Global Exchange
 * Mark Weisbrot – Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
   (CEPR), Washington, D.C.


2:15pm-2:45pm: Coffee Break

2:45pm-4:30pm: A TRUMP WORLD ORDER?

 * Susan George – President, Transnational Institute (TNI), Amsterdam;
   Fellow, Royal Society of Arts
 * Patrick Bond – Professor, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa;
   former director, Centre for Civil Society
 * Christine Hong – Professor, UC-Santa Cruz; executive board member,
   Korea Policy Institute
 * Bhaskar Sunkara – Founding Publisher and Editor, Jacobin magazine


4:30pm-5:00pm: Denouement

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms - The New York Times

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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The best lines in this article reflect a genuine class struggle, with 
poor people resorting to the very last biopolitical weapon at their 
disposal, a tactic that also helped rid Univ of Cape Town of the statue 
of Cecil Rhodes in March 2015:


In wealthy, traditionally white parts of Cape Town, public restrooms 
came stocked with toilet paper and soap. They were looked after by 
janitors and security guards. People in Barcelona demanded the same. Mr. 
Lili, the City Council member, persuaded residents to unleash a more 
combative form of protest. They ferried their buckets into Cape Town, 
emptying their contents at the entrance to City Hall. Mr. Lili’s 
movement produced immediate consequences. First, the city fixed 
persistent sanitation problems in his own community. Then, they gave him 
a government-furnished house. One day in November 2014, as he was 
planning a march, two men arrived at his home and shot him twice — once 
in the arm and once in the gut.


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950American Danger | The American Historical Review | Oxford Academic

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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This looks like an important historical reconstruction, unearthing 
another way that Africa has been the North's useful tool.


Last week I happened to be on a panel at a Marseille conference with a 
comrade - Peo Hansen - who has a very similar view about the Eurafrica 
side of this story: 
https://books.google.com/books/about/Eurafrica.html?id=-FuCBAAAQBAJ



On 2017/10/20 07:11 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the 
Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950          Sven 
Beckert
The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 4, 1 October 2017, 
Pages 1137–1170, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.4.1137


During the last third of the nineteenth century, a debate emerged in a 
number of European countries on the “American danger.” Responding to 
the rapid rise of the United States as the world’s most important 
economy, some European observers feared their nations’ declining 
competitiveness in the face of the territorial extent of the United 
States, and its ability to integrate a dynamic industrial sector with 
ample raw material supplies, agriculture commodities, markets, and 
labor into one national economy. This “second great divergence” 
provoked a range of responses, as statesmen, capitalists, and 
intellectuals advocated for territorial rearrangements of various 
European economies, a discussion that lasted with greater or lesser 
intensity from the 1870s to the 1950s. Their sometimes competing and 
sometimes mutually reinforcing efforts focused on African colonialism, 
European integration, and violent territorial expansion within Europe 
itself. Using the debate as a lens to understand the connections 
between a wide range of policy responses, this article argues that 
efforts to territorialize capitalist economies delineate a particular 
moment in the long history of capitalism; and it demonstrates the 
unsettling effects of the rise of the United States on European powers.




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Re: [Marxism] Ian Angus skewers Jacobin magazine issue on the environment

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/09/26 04:12 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:

...
The more interesting thing, IMO, is not Parenti but Angus' non-take on
ecomodernism. There is little substance in his charges against them (there
is, actually, but Angus fails to document this). I have of course a lot in
common with some aspects of ecomodernism, which in someways is a helluva
lot closer to the actual Marxist outlook on what is *needed* to solve the
environmental crisis than, say, the Greens or Greenpeace, Joseph Romm or
others Angus defends or quotes.


Yes, although Greenpeace has begun to move to an environmental justice 
perspective, the difficulty in getting useful discourses between the 
camps remains. There's an argument - which I try to move into the realm 
of contemporary climate politics here: 
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond_Frankfurt_talk_June_2016_version_of_19_April.pdf 
- drawing upon advice offered more than 20 years ago by David Harvey in 
his book Justice, Nature and the Politics of Difference. In suggesting 
that "the environmental justice movement has to radicalize the 
ecological modernization discourse," the key passage (3 'grafs) is this:


At this conjuncture, therefore, all of those militant particularist 
movements around the world that loosely come together under the umbrella 
of environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor are faced 
with a critical choice. They can either ignore the contradictions, 
remain with the confines of their own particularist militancies - 
fighting an incinerator here, a toxic waste dump there, a World Bank dam 
project somewhere else, and commercial logging in yet another place - or 
they can treat the contradictions as a fecund nexus to create a more 
transcendent and universal politics. If they take the latter path, they 
have to find a discourse of universality and generality that unites the 
emancipatory quest for social justice with a strong recognition that 
social justice is impossible without environmental justice (and vice 
versa). But any such discourse has to transcend the narrow solidarities 
and particular affinities shaped in particular places - the preferred 
milieu of most grass roots environmental activism - and adopt a politics 
of abstraction capable of reaching out across space, across the multiple 
environmental and social conditions that constitute the geography of 
difference in a contemporary world that capitalism has intensely shaped 
to its own purposes. And it has to do this without abandoning its 
militant particularist base.


The abstractions cannot rest solely upon a moral politics dedicated to 
protecting the sanctity of Mother Earth. It has to deal in the material 
and institutional issues of how to organize production and distribution 
in general, how to confront the realities of global power politics and 
how to displace the hegemonic powers of capitalism not simply with 
dispersed, autonomous, localized, and essentially communitarian 
solutions (apologists for which can be found on both right and left ends 
of the political spectrum), but with a rather more complex politics that 
recognizes how environmental and social justice must be sought by a 
rational ordering of activities at different scales. The reinsertion of 
the idea of "rational ordering" indicates that such a movement will have 
no option, as it broadens out from its militant particularist base, but 
to reclaim for itself a noncoopted and nonperverted version of the 
theses of ecological modernization. On the one hand that means subsuming 
the highly geographically differentiated desire for cultural autonomy 
and dispersion, for the proliferation of tradition and difference within 
a more global politics, but on the other hand making the quest for 
environmental and social justice central rather than peripheral concerns.


For that to happen, the environmental justice movement has to radicalize 
the ecological modernization discourse. And that requires confronting 
the fundamental underlying processes (and their associated power 
structures, social relations, institutional configurations, discourses, 
and belief systems) that generate environmental and social injustices. 
Here, I revert to a key moment in the argument advanced in Social 
Justice and the City (Harvey, 1973: 136-7): it is vital, when 
encountering a serious problem, not merely to try to solve the problem 
in itself but to confront and transform the processes that gave rise to 
the problem in the first place. Then, as now, the fundamental problem is 
that of unrelenting capital accumulation and the extraordinary 
asymmetrics of money and political power that are embedded in that 
process. 

Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg's 'The Accumulation of Capital', , 100 years on

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/09/06 06:41 PM, Walter Daum via Marxism wrote:


Hi Patrick, Of course I agree that the three “grabs” you mention 
occur, and that they are crucial for capitalist production. But I 
don’t agree that they are, in today’s conditions, non-capitalist. They 
are part of how capitalist economy works; they exist in addition to 
the direct extraction of surplus-value in the sphere of production. 


The "in addition to" is what we're trying to get at, using the theory of 
uneven and combined development in application sites such as South Africa.


Luxemburg held that capitalism required not just the grabbing of extra 
surplus-value outside the production sphere – it needed to loot by 
force non-capitalist *modes of production.* 


Yes, the way we have traditionally described that process in this part 
of the world is as the "articulations of modes of production" (Harold 
Wolpe developed the concept during the 1970s, making some unfortunate 
errors en route, by failing to distinguish necessary from contingent 
processes within this articulation, such as the apartheid state form).


Harvey's student Neil Smith remarked how this process of articulation 
was a moment within capitalism's uneven development. (More on this: p.5 
of 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304622213_Uneven_Development_and_Scale_Politics_in_Southern_Africa_What_We_Learn_from_Neil_Smith_Uneven_Development_in_Southern_Africa 
)


The Marikana massacre was the forcible suppression of a strike within 
capitalist production, a strike by proletarian miners whose labor was 
super-exploited by capitalists. 


Yes, but in a context of migrant labour, which is the main symptom here 
of articulations of modes of production. There's not space in Louis' 
allowed commentary - still, I think 35kb - but there are plenty of good 
articles and a few books which make it abundantly clear how the workers 
demanded a $1000/month living wage because they were compelled to keep 
two households - one in the shack settlements of Nkaneng and Wonderkop, 
and the other back in their home region. This was the logic of a system 
in which Lonmin draws profits not just from surplus value at the point 
of production, but also from "free gifts of nature" (platinum, water, 
coal to fire electricity) and from ongoing disruption of the 
reproduction of a rural society (in labour-sending areas) that, for 
centuries before mining-based colonialism, was itself a coherent mode of 
peasant production. Marikana must be seen in context.


Luxemburg’s scheme doesn’t apply here. As John Smith said in the post 
that triggered this discussion: “Harvey is right to draw attention to 
the continuing and even increasing importance of old and new forms of 
accumulation by dispossession, but he does not recognize that 
imperialism’s most significant shift in emphasis is in an entirely 
different direction – toward the transformation of its own core 
processes of surplus-value extraction through the global labor 
arbitrage-driven [i.e., by super-exploitation] globalization of 
production, a phenomenon that is entirely internal to the 
labor-capital relation.” Yes, my comments were grumpy. I grump 
especially at reformist institutions that inappropriately appropriate 
Luxemburg’s revolutionary good name. But my main point was to grump at 
theorists (Harvey and Wolff) who suggest that the center of 
imperialism has moved South, or that it is the oppressed countries in 
the global South that extract surplus-value from the imperialist 
countries in the global North. Those fictions turn the real 
imperialist globe upside down. Walter


Look, I'm rushed now, but I think is an ungenerous, indeed uncomradely 
reading of Harvey - and I really doubt he'd agree that "the center of 
imperialism has moved South" (though it is unevenly developing, as the 
rise of the sub-imperialist BRICS shows).


Full respect to MR for advancing the debate - and my two cents on how 
Africa looks in this context is here: 
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/09/01/africa-rising-in-retreat/ - but it 
would have been better for Smith (and you, Walter), to seriously 
consider what the Harvey/Smith approach to uneven development looks like 
as it has developed over the past 50 years or so since Harvey first 
start confronting extreme uneven urban development in Baltimore. 
Otherwise you risk caricature.


More soon...

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Re: [Marxism] What a German Communist said about the Nazis in 1930

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Fast forward a bit, though, and you will find Harro Schulze-Boysen (my 
grandmother's favorite cousin) leading a Red Orchestra group of 
Communists who harassed the Nazi regime from the early 1930s, and fed 
information to Moscow (and later Washington), until they were caught and 
executed in 1942. There was no ideological confusion there.





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Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg's 'The Accumulation of Capital', 100 years on

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/09/05 11:01 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/rosa-remixed-up-100-years-after-the-accumulation-of-capital/


There are questions in this (exceedingly grumpy) review posed to me, so 
I sent back this quick answer to Walter Daum:


Walter: [Bond] repeatedly quotes her statements to the effect that 
“capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist relations.” 
But the main examples he provides are those of extractive industries 
that strip the continent of minerals, and he vividly describes the 
infamous massacre of platinum miners at Marikana in 2012. How is this an 
example of “super-exploitative relations between capitalist and 
non-capitalist spheres” being confirmed in Africa today?


My reply: The super-exploitation of the non-capitalist sphere entails:
1) land grabs of the soil above which the minerals are found;
2) nature grabs of the minerals themselves;
3) grabs of the social reproduction of labour power in the form of 
super-exploited women suffering the conditions of migrant labour in 
neo-apartheid SA (more at http://womin.org.za)


Sorry I didn't make that clear, but you'd agree?

Cheers,
Patrick


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Re: [Marxism] The China-India Conflict: Its Causes and Consequences (Pamphlet)

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/08/20 09:01 AM, RKOB via Marxism wrote:

The China-India Conflict: Its Causes and Consequences
/A Pamphlet by/ /Michael Pröbsting (RCIT),18 August 2017/
...
3. Is the Category of “Sub-Imperialism” Useful?


Thanks for this. It's got great material in it. But let me jump to the 
end (see below), to ask why Pröbsting has only two categories of 
exploitation, when it is evident (as Marini showed in Brazil from the 
1960s) that there are semi-peripheral - or 'sub-imperial' - powers that 
act as deputy sheriffs and whose firms do far better in relation to 
accumulation within the South, than the fully exploited countries?


"As Marxists we must focus on the law of value and the transfer of value 
between countries and the political order associated with this."


Right then, I would add, here (were Louis not .txt-dogmatic rather than 
.html-friendly), a small .jpg of a graph that comes from the South 
African Reserve Bank, whose mid-2015 Quarterly Bulletin measured the 
extent of profit transfers. It's quite obvious that there are imperial 
powers whose corporates take more than 100% of repatriated profits; a 
middle layer - including all the BRICS - whose profit repatriation 
ranges from 20-50%; and an exploited layer with 10% or less profit 
repatriation. I'll send this to you off-list, but I discuss it as part 
of the theory of sub-imperialism - which also relates to other features 
of accumulation and class struggle - in the Marini tradition, here: 
https://peoplesbrics.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/bond-2016-brics-banking-and-the-debate-over-subimperialism-in-third-world-quarterly.pdf


The "political order" associated with this value transfer includes the 
IMF (where 4 BRICS countries are expanding their influence dramatically 
at the expense of poor countries), the WTO (where 3 BRICS helped destroy 
food sovereignty at the last summit in 2015), the UNFCCC (where the 
BRICS and West are the main beneficiaries of the "bullshit" agreement, 
in the words of Jim Hansens) and the G20. The latter's role in the 
expanded super-exploitation of Africa became abundantly clear last month 
in Hamburg, with Schauble's Compact with Africa, which is a public 
subsidy system for both Western and BRICS corporates to amplify the 
looting. Next month in Monthly Review, I will publish a long article 
explaining this, but here are a half-dozen more short pieces if you want 
to explore this problem.


https://www.pambazuka.org/emerging-powers/falling-brics-endanger-their-citizens%E2%80%99-health-starting-south-africa%E2%80%99s-jacob-zuma

https://www.pambazuka.org/economics/world-economic-forum-africa-germany-pitched-dubious-new-g20-corporate-strategy

https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/brics-new-development-bank-meets-delhi-dashing-africa%E2%80%99s-green-developmental

https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/taking-down-trumpism-africa-delegitimation-not-collaboration-please

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/will-washington%E2%80%99s-new-pro-moscow-anti-beijing-gang-drive-wedge-through-brics-2017

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/brics-fantasies-and-unintended-revelations

https://www.pambazuka.org/emerging-powers/imperialism%E2%80%99s-junior-partners

If anyone would like our irregular newsletter discussing what we term 
'brics-from-below' (focusing on social struggles and BRICS sub-imperial 
contradictions), please let me know: pb...@mail.ngo.za (We are having 
seminars in Johannesburg on 31 August and 18 September, as well as a 2-3 
September counter-summit in Hong Kong.)


Cheers,
Patrick

***

*Is the Category of “Sub-Imperialism” Useful? *

**

A number of progressive theoreticians support the conception of a 
“transitional” or “sub-imperialist” state as a third, additional 
category of countries in addition to colonial and semi-colonial 
countries. We have elaborated our criticism of the theory of 
sub-imperialism in /The Great Robbery of the South /and we will only 
summarize here briefly some conclusions.


Naturally if states undergo a process of transformation from an 
imperialist to a semi-colonial country or the other way around, they are 
“in transition” and in this sense it can be useful to describe a 
temporary process of transformation. However, the supporters of the 
theory of sub-imperialism don’t understand this as a category to 
describe the transition process but rather see it as a separate, 
independent category. And here lies the fundamental problem.


Capitalism unites all nations in the world via economic and political 
expansion and the formation of a world market. This process has taken 
place from the beginning of the capitalist mode of 

Re: [Marxism] The China-India Conflict: Its Causes and Consequences (Pamphlet)

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Thanks for this. It's got great material in it. But let me jump to the 
end (see below), to ask why Pröbsting has only two categories of 
exploitation, when it is evident (as Marini showed in Brazil from the 
1960s) that there are semi-peripheral - or 'sub-imperial' - powers that 
act as deputy sheriffs and whose firms do far better in relation to 
accumulation within the South, than the fully exploited countries?


"As Marxists we must focus on the law of value and the transfer of value 
between countries and the political order associated with this."


Right then, I would add, here (were Louis not .txt-dogmatic rather than 
.html-friendly), a small .jpg of a graph that comes from the South 
African Reserve Bank, whose mid-2015 Quarterly Bulletin measured the 
extent of profit transfers. It's quite obvious that there are imperial 
powers whose corporates take more than 100% of repatriated profits; a 
middle layer - including all the BRICS - whose profit repatriation 
ranges from 20-50%; and an exploited layer with 10% or less profit 
repatriation. I'll send this to you off-list, but I discuss it as part 
of the theory of sub-imperialism - which also relates to other features 
of accumulation and class struggle - in the Marini tradition, here: 
https://peoplesbrics.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/bond-2016-brics-banking-and-the-debate-over-subimperialism-in-third-world-quarterly.pdf


The "political order" associated with this value transfer includes the 
IMF (where 4 BRICS countries are expanding their influence dramatically 
at the expense of poor countries), the WTO (where 3 BRICS helped destroy 
food sovereignty at the last summit in 2015), the UNFCCC (where the 
BRICS and West are the main beneficiaries of the "bullshit" agreement, 
in the words of Jim Hansens) and the G20. The latter's role in the 
expanded super-exploitation of Africa became abundantly clear last month 
in Hamburg, with Schauble's Compact with Africa, which is a public 
subsidy system for both Western and BRICS corporates to amplify the 
looting. Next month in Monthly Review, I will publish a long article 
explaining this, but here are a half-dozen more short pieces if you want 
to explore this problem.


https://www.pambazuka.org/emerging-powers/falling-brics-endanger-their-citizens%E2%80%99-health-starting-south-africa%E2%80%99s-jacob-zuma

https://www.pambazuka.org/economics/world-economic-forum-africa-germany-pitched-dubious-new-g20-corporate-strategy

https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/brics-new-development-bank-meets-delhi-dashing-africa%E2%80%99s-green-developmental

https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/taking-down-trumpism-africa-delegitimation-not-collaboration-please

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/will-washington%E2%80%99s-new-pro-moscow-anti-beijing-gang-drive-wedge-through-brics-2017

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/brics-fantasies-and-unintended-revelations

https://www.pambazuka.org/emerging-powers/imperialism%E2%80%99s-junior-partners

If anyone would like our irregular newsletter discussing what we term 
'brics-from-below' (focusing on social struggles and BRICS sub-imperial 
contradictions), please let me know: pb...@mail.ngo.za (We are having 
seminars in Johannesburg on 31 August and 18 September, as well as a 2-3 
September counter-summit in Hong Kong.)


Cheers,
Patrick

***

Is the Category of “Sub-Imperialism” Useful?

A number of progressive theoreticians support the conception of a 
“transitional” or “sub-imperialist” state as a third, additional 
category of countries in addition to colonial and semi-colonial 
countries. We have elaborated our criticism of the theory of 
sub-imperialism in The Great Robbery of the South and we will only 
summarize here briefly some conclusions.


Naturally if states undergo a process of transformation from an 
imperialist to a semi-colonial country or the other way around, they are 
“in transition” and in this sense it can be useful to describe a 
temporary process of transformation. However, the supporters of the 
theory of sub-imperialism don’t understand this as a category to 
describe the transition process but rather see it as a separate, 
independent category. And here lies the fundamental problem.


Capitalism unites all nations in the world via economic and political 
expansion and the formation of a world market. This process has taken 
place from the beginning of the capitalist mode of production and has 
tremendously accelerated in the epoch of imperialism. Under these 
conditions, no nation escapes the formation of ever closer economic and 
political ties with the dominant imperialist powers. Such close 

[Marxism] (Fwd) Moscow's Bolshevism@100/World Association for Poli Econ conferences - 3-5 November (deadline for abstract: August 15)

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(comrades, let me know off-list if you're interested and if I can help 
by briefing you on WAPE, which we hosted in 2015 here in Johannesburg... 
do join us!)


Call for papers

To all those who are not indifferent to the fate of the October Revolution,

We invite you to take part in the work

International Forum



OCTOBER. REVOLUTION. FUTURE

(Moscow, November 3-5, 2017)



The purpose of the Forum - an appeal to the future, and not just a 
historical analysis of the Revolution and its results. What, who and how 
can and should do, in order that the impulse of the Revolution live in 
the 21st century - the Forum participants will be looking for these 
questions.


The forum will combine the achievements of scientific conferences and 
social forums will become a place for dialogues within the framework of 
a single space of theorists and practitioners of social creativity.


The Forum is preceded by a series of three international scientific 
conferences that are going on simultaneously, dedicated to the 
philosophical, historical, political and economic problems of the 
Revolution and its heritage. The conferences will be held on November 
3-4 on the basis of the Moscow Finance and Law University.


Within the framework of the forum on November 3-4, there will be a 
conference of the World Association for Political Economy The October 
Revolution: Promoting the Development of World Economy and Improving 
People’s Livelihood).


The Forum itself will be held on November 5 in the art space "Red 
October". The forum will be held as a series of open seminars and 
roundtables, discussions and performances. The unity of the Forum will 
be ensured by plenary sessions, complimentarity and coherence of the 
program..


Leading scientists from Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State 
University, RAS institutes, other scientific and educational centers of 
Russia, countries of Europe, Asia, America, Africa, politicians, 
artists, activists of various social organizations and social movements 
will take part in the Forum.


Initiators of the Forum: "Alternatives" journal, Rosa Luxemburg 
Foundation (Russian branch)


The working languages of the Forum are Russian and English



To participate in the Forum seminars or one of its conferences, it is 
necessary to register by sending an e-mail to address alternat...@bk.ru 
before August 15, indicating regalia, topic and annotation of the 
report. Please note that of all participants of the seminar (round 
table) must register on web-site. The link will be sent before the end 
of July!




Confirmation of inclusion in the program are sent before September 10th.

Payment of registration fee - until September 25th.

Invitations to obtain a visa will be sent until October 1st

Travel and accommodation of nonresident participants, as a rule, is NOT 
paid for by the organizing committee.






Recommended hotels in Moscow:.



http://www.president-hotel.ru/index/ - President hotel

http://www.hotelwarsaw.ru – Warsaw

http://www.maanhotels.ru/akademical/ - Akademicheskaya

http://www.sevastopol-hotel.ru/ru/nomera-i-tseny/vtoroj-korpus - 
Sevastopol Modern


https://www.hotelsputnik.ru - Sputnik





Program of the Forum (Project):



3-4 November. MFUA (Vvedenskogo Street, 1a). Work of international 
scientific conferences:


International Conference "Philosophy of the Revolution" (November 3rd, 2 
sections). Co-organizers: Moscow University of Finance and Law (MFYuA), 
Center for Contemporary Marxist Studies of the Philosophical Faculty of 
Moscow State University.


Problematic field:

• Revolution: socio-philosophical comprehension and phenomenology;

• Dialectics of the Revolution: creation and destruction; Progress and 
regress; Goals and means; Revolution and counter-revolution; Revolution 
and reform;


• Theoretical model and practices of social revolutions of the twentieth 
century: nature, prerequisites, driving forces, results;


• Socialist revolution as social liberation: economy, and society; 
Classes and parties; Man and culture.


International Conference "October: Lessons and Challenges of History" 
(4th of November; 2-3 секции). Co-organizers: Moscow University of 
Finance and Law (MFYuA)


Problematic field:

· October: what was it? Historical events and their theoretical 
qualifications


· Istria and the historiography of October: "white spots", 
myths, ideologems;


· The history of October: theoretical and political-ideological 
discussions.


 International Conference "Political Economy of the Revolution" 
(November 3rd-4th, 4-5 sections). Co-organizers: World Association for 
Political Economy, Moscow 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Trump’s new war plan is an awful lot like the old one | Free Charles Davis

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and here in Hamburg, it's war back at him...

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19490:%27Welcome-to-Hell%27%3A-100%2C000-Protesters-Aim-to-%27Kettle%27-G20-Over-Inequality%2C-War-%0D%0Aand-Climate-%0D%0AChang

the spirit of these European youth is absolutely inspiring... best demos 
I've been to in years


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Re: [Marxism] "Ground rent" thesis at the Left forum

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On 2017/06/09 12:05 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
...I am for all attempts in Latin America to take control of country's 
resources and use it for the public good whether it was copper in 
Allende's Chile, oil in Venezuela, gas in Bolivia, etc. I thought that 
Federico Fuentes and the other Socialist Alliance comrades 
overprojected what was possible in Venezuela but I think he was right 
on this:
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/05/19/dangerous-myths-anti-extractivism/ 



As Fred points out,

   Even some of the keenest critics of extractivism in Latin America...
   acknowledge the need to differentiate between what they term
   “predatory”, “sensible” and “indispensable” extractivism. It is also
   true that most movements against specific extractive projects do not
   propose ending all extractive industries and that within local
   communities involved in such campaigns a variety of views exist.


Each case needs to be considered separately, but the overall net 
negative wealth effect once GDP is properly corrected, suggests more 
caution is needed.


The other two factors that are more acute now than in 2014, are the 
commodity price crash (especially in 2015) which in some cases led to 
declining Western or BRICS corporate exploitation (especially of 
greenfield projects) but in others led to more intense exploitation as 
shareholders demanded profits based on high volumes of extraction rather 
than on the high prices of prior years; and the imperative of climate 
change to leave fossil fuels underground.


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Venezuela on fire: What happened - Renegade Inc

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On 2017/06/08 03:57 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
(The same old critique. How is it that so little of this was heard 
before oil prices began to plummet?)


Because, I think, we haven't been good at connecting the dots between 
climate activism and general tendencies of Resource Cursing, applicable 
also in Venezuela. That failure to work across sectors is a more general 
problem, evident across the left, environmentalists, community, labour - 
certainly in Africa: 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/disconnecting-the-minerals-energy-climate-dots/


It's why Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything is so vital.

Actually, the lefty critique of fossil extractivism in the Pink Tide 
zone that I just mentioned, from Edgardo Lander, has been rising fast in 
that region since at least the early 2000s. One very interesting group - 
Accion Ecologica radical eco-feminists based in Quito - has been central 
to the Oilwatch global network, along with their comrades at 
Environmental RIghts Action in Nigeria.


I hung out with them 6 years ago in the Yasuni forest trying to get a 
handle on "leave the oil in the soil" politics: 
http://links.org.au/node/2430


Here's a bit of a translation to an eco-social struggle in northern 
KwaZulu-Natal not far from Durban: 
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Leave-the-coal-in-the-ground-somkhele.pdf


Obviously there's a great deal of debate going on about whether 
'environmental justice' is the appropriate framing, or whether 
eco-socialism can get traction in scenes like this, as a result of 
various EJ limitations...




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Re: [Marxism] "Ground rent" thesis at the Left forum

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On 2017/06/08 04:07 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:

... what people were
standing online for in truly massive numbers: toilet paper, soap, food,
clothing, medicine, etc. ...
At the end of the day...how could what is happening in Venezuela today
*not* happen??? Anyone?


Today I happen to be in Beirut with eco-social (and a few eco-socialist) 
activists who are fighting mega-project maldevelopment, fossil fuels, 
pipelines and all sorts of environmental injustices - our network is 
connected through https://ejatlas.org/


What often emerges from these local battles is a fairly clear choice for 
a state: investment in extractive-oriented infrastructure with vast 
subsidies that typically benefit multinational corporations, displace 
local residents and wreck the eco-system on the one hand, or on the 
other, shift state resources towards meeting basic needs, including 
infrastructural backlogs in water and sanitation, household electricity, 
clinics and schools.


Finding the proper balance is vital, including nationalisation of 
commodity production and processing, for the sake of planning, retention 
of value and leaving resources underground when necessary, such as 
fossil fuels. (If you want one of the worst cases, I can tell you loads 
about South African ruling class choices along these lines.)


On the basis of a couple of visits to Caracas (2007-08) and discussions 
with people like Michael Lebowitz, Marta Harnecker and their allies 
(including a one-time planning minister) at the Centro Internacional 
Miranda, I was quite convinced of Chavez' desire to do the latter. 
Amazing radical hospitality was on display at CIM in those days, 
especially with Marta and Michael interpreting the complex shifts in 
power within the revolution.


However, there is a body of work by Edgardo Lander and his "Beyond 
Development" allies at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Quito office that 
suggests far too much emphasis was placed on extractivism, with all that 
that entails in terms of a political resource curse eating away at 
Chavez' legacy.


Edgardo was offering a comradely critique of this self-destructive 
extractivism well before the 2008 and 2015 oil price crashes, and I hope 
more comrades become familiar with his approach. At RealNews, Paul Jay 
did a fine 9-part interview with Edgardo: 
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content=view=767=74=11723




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Re: [Marxism] Making America first in climate change denialism

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Superb, but I hope the next part(s) address the strategic question of 
stripping away capitalist support from Trump, by invoking invoking 
climate sanctions against US goods and services. There is talk of this 
strategy from Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz and a few far-sighted 
capitalists, and the largest European eco-network (EEB) also just called 
for a carbon tariff against the US. (I know your strong opposition to 
relying on 'market-based strategies' such as a carbon tax and generally 
I agree - but this is different.)


Another critical factor worth examining, Joseph, is that Trump screwed 
up on legal liability for the climate debt owed by the Global North 
(including me in Johannesburg). That debt was officially written off in 
Paris (thanks to State Dep't chief climate negotiator Todd Stern's 
wicked lobbying including bribery and bullying). Trump claimed the Paris 
Climate Agreement entails a "massive liability" for the US - but the 
opposite is true: by exiting Paris, he leaves the shield. The US can be 
sued now, for its contribution to climate change. Trump is really a chump...






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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The High Cost of Gadgetry

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Another classic: http://storyofelectronics.com/

On 2017/06/02 03:38 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:


Two new documentaries will make you look differently at your 
electronic gadgets, especially the cool iPhone or other products from 
Apple whose logo might be changed to a skull-and-crossbones after 
seeing “Death by Design” and “Complicit”. They examine the damage done 
to both the workers who produce them and the environment, especially 
in China, as well as raise important questions about the meaning of 
“progress”. If being able to use an iPhone to pay for your Starbucks 
coffee comes at the expense of a leukemia epidemic for Foxconn workers 
and making 60 percent of China’s groundwater unsuitable for drinking, 
then the whole question of progress has to be thought through.


full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/02/the-high-cost-of-gadgetry/



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Re: [Marxism] In praise of Trump pulling out of the Paris climate pact | TheHill

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On 2017/06/01 11:35 PM, Richard Sprout via Marxism wrote:

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/335848-in-praise-of-trump-pulling-out-of-the-paris-climate


Good one. There are all sorts of reasons to generate anti-Trump solidarity:
https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/taking-down-trumpism-africa-delegitimation-not-collaboration-please

We had a little protest of 500 at the US Consulate in Durban, South 
Africa on May 3.


But climate is now absolutely vital to move forward as a global unifying 
campaign:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/6/1/1668071/-Trump-is-Withdrawing-from-the-Paris-Climate-Agreement-Is-it-Time-to-Boycott-America





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Re: [Marxism] The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache

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On 2017/03/10 01:46 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


NY Times Op-Ed, Mar. 10 2017
The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache
by Zeynep Tufekci
..Security experts I spoke with, however, stressed that these 
techniques appear to be mostly known methods — some of them learned 
from academic and other open conferences — and that there were no big 
surprises or unexpected wizardry.

... WikiLeaks seems to have a playbook for its disinformation campaigns.


Wouldn't we trust Snowden more on this?

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/03/07/snowden-calls-trove-alleged-cia-hacking-tools-published-wikileaks-big-deal


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Choices for the Left in the Age of Trump

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similar debating in Africa's main ezine, Pambazuka:

https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/taking-down-trumpism-africa-delegitimation-not-collaboration-please


On 2017/02/07 10:25 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/07/the-choices-for-the-left-in-the-age-of-trump/ 





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[Marxism] (Fwd) Political economists gather in Brooklyn, 8 April

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 Union of Radical Political Economics Brooklyn Conference:


 Left-Wing Economics in a Right-Wing Political Climate

St. Francis College, Brooklyn NY, April 8, 2017

The Conference will bring together the theoretical perspectives of 
radical political economics and the organizational experiences of those 
engaged in struggle on the many crucial issues confronting us today.   
It will, we hope, contribute to the development of an agenda that can 
guide all of us in the difficult years ahead.


*Workshops*

Each workshop will include presentations on both the contribution of 
radical political economics to an understanding of the issues, and the 
current political activity relating to these. Approximately half of the 
two-hour period will be available for contribution from workshop 
participants.  Each workshop will conclude with a collective summary of 
areas of agreement and disagreement and the nomination of one or two 
people to present this summary at the closing session of the conference. 
(URPE plans to record this final session and make it available on the 
URPE web-site.)


The following is a preliminary listing of possible workshops topics:

   /Trump’s fiscal policy (tax policy and infrastructure spending)/
   /Income distribution: wages vs. profits/
   /The Fight for $15 and other labor issues/
   /Workplace organization – unions today/
   /Immigration and global capitalism/
   /Community organization and cooperatives/
   /Health care after Obamacare/
   /Student debt and the state of higher education/
   /Households and the care economy/
   /Black Lives Matter
   Climate change and the environment
   /

It is assumed that all workshops will recognize the class, gender, and 
racial/ethnic dimensions of issues.


All URPE members, friends of URPE, and those whose work (not limited to 
that in educational institutions) involves the development and 
presentation of radical political economic theory, are invited to 
contribute to the presentation of radical political economic theory.  
The conference organizers also ask for help in soliciting input to the 
workshops from the activists whose work provides us with direction for 
our collective struggle.


Please register your interest in this conference, including nominations 
(or self-nominations) for workshop participants with: u...@urpe.org 
.   This will contribute to the organization of 
the conference and ensure that you will receive updates on conference 
plans as they develop.


***

Structure of Conference (estimated attendance: 100 – 150)

10  – 11  Plenary (Two or three speakers addressing 
overall theme of conference)


11 – 1 Workshops

1 – 2:15 Lunch

2:15 – 4:15Workshops

4:30 – 5:30Closing session: reports from all workshops, with 
focus on where we go from here)


5:30 – 7 Cocktail party

*Suggested Registration Fee*

Early registration: $30 per person; $15 for students.

Late registration (after March 18): $35  per person, $20 for students.

Note:  All participants may choose to pay more or less depending on 
their individual circumstances.  Registration fee includes cocktail 
party.  (Alcohol will be served only to those aged 21 or over.)


Since space for workshops is limited, participants will be asked to sign 
up for specific workshops – those who register early will be given 
preference when attendance reaches rooms’ full capacity.


Online registration is here. 



The registration form can be viewed and downloaded here. 



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Economists versus the Economy by Robert Skidelsky - Project Syndicate

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Skidelsky: "/Unfortunately, the frictions that disrupt the machine’s 
smooth operation are human beings. One can understand why economists 
trained in this way were seduced by financial models that implied that 
banks had virtually eliminated risk/."


Hmmm, so he /has /engaged Keynes' theories of disequilibrium but hasn't 
considered Marx's?


On 2016/12/27 08:52 AM, Jim Farmelant via Marxism wrote:

...The first person to hold an academic chair in economics was Alfred Marshall. 
Marshall studied mathematics as an undergraduate. He then pursued studies in 
philosophy which led to his becoming interested in economics.


But isn't context everything?

Wasn't Marshall's contribution mainly in marginalist theory, especially 
in the micro-economics of corporate behavior, in which marginal revenue 
and marginal cost curves were increasingly important to understanding 
the logic of a relatively new form of economic activity: the 
corporation? If you invest your money in a corporation, you want to know 
its inner workings (a reliable indicator of its source and direction of 
profitability), and then logically you want an economic theory that can 
put this information into a scientific-sounding form.


If so, isn't the degradation of what we call neo-classical economics - 
i.e. its origins in serving the rise of a speicifically corporate power 
that sought a pseudo-scientific basis for its existence - parallel to 
the degradation of so many other social sciences that began in the 19th 
century to serve power?


German sociology to serve Bismarck's modernising, urbanising society 
(Weber and Toennies)? British geography to serve the empire's 
geopolitical expansion and later its containment of Bolshevism 
(Mackinder)? Anthropology with its focus on racist craniometry to serve 
European imperialism (Morton, Vacher de Lapouge)? Political science with 
its commitment to social Darwinian and legitimating growing state power 
(Adams, Wilson, Beard)?


And if so, don't we need to restructure intellectual disciplinary 
arrangements to recognise that so many of those core knowledge systems 
dating to the late 19th century are hard-wired with ongoing service to 
mainly wicked forms of power, forms that still maintain many residual 
features of their origins? (Just watch the way 'economic geographers' 
engage in spatial fetishism, for instance, or how sociologists adhere to 
dualistic epistemologies so as to avoid engaging life's dialectics.)


The 20th century gave us add-ons, such as Development Studies, Planning, 
area studies, gender and race studies, and various others with a largely 
/inter/disciplinary orientation.


For effective 21st century intellectual work, isn't it time for 
/anti-/disciplinary approaches? I like the way the New School is 
structuring "Capitalism Studies" (not just as historical US business 
studies as happens elsewhere), but with people like Nancy Fraser, a much 
more integrated approach to the topic that avoids the old disciplinary 
territorial boundaries like the plague... Is that the way forward, to 
deal with the /cul de sac /- or in many cases cliff-face - that so many 
Marxist economists encountered in trying to reform the discipline from 
within?



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Re: [Marxism] 'Tomorrow is too late' -- When Fidel Castro urged urgent climate action at Rio in 1992

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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A big thanks to//GLW and Links. As I circulate the kinds of 
accomplishments Castro led in the climate and energy spheres here in 
South Africa, it's always the Australian socialists who have provided 
the english-speaking left's best information on Cuba. Another example is 
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/cubas-green-revolution-%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%94-achieving-sustainability 





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Re: [Marxism] ‘Africa Rising’? ‘Africa Reeling’ May Be More Fitting Now

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Better still, "Africans uprising against 'Africa Rising' hucksters":

http://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/protests-rise-against-world-economic-forum%E2%80%99s-implausible-%E2%80%98africa-keeps-rising%E2%80%99

ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond_%202016_CCS_Africans_uprising_against_Africa_Rising.pdf

forschungsjournal.de/sites/default/files/fjsbplus/fjsb-plus_2014-3_bond.pdf
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[Marxism] (Fwd) "Class Dynamics of Development" special issue of Third World Quarterly - Open Access

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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Really superb radical intellectual work at least briefly decommodified:


On 2016/09/06 10:31 AM, Benjamin Selwyn wrote:


Dear all,

Just to let you know that we have secured open access during September 
for our special issue on Class Dynamics of Development.


Wishing you all the best,

Ben

*Enjoy FREE ACCESS throughout September at: 
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctwq20/37/10*



Dr Benjamin Selwyn

Senior Lecturer in International Relations and International Development

Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy

+44 1273 678191

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/230531

My latest book, The Global Development Crisis, 
http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745660142


21^st Century International Political Economy - 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354066114556659





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Re: [Marxism] Jill Stein’s fairy-tale candidacy - The Washington Post

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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I didn't see the WaPo neoliberals whack Stein on her student loan 
forgiveness strategy, which she told Cuomo on CNN would be the most 
important vote-harvester (for 43 million debtors) as kids get back to 
college next week. Are they conceding its logic? The /WSJ/ seems to 
indicate a logic to student debt cancellation:


http://www.wsj.com/articles/writing-off-student-loans-is-only-a-matter-of-time-1471303339

But I haven't heard anything about progressive economists coming in to 
support this excellent strategy. Who is behind it?


Cheers,
Patrick

On 2016/08/27 03:40 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


When a powerful newspaper writes an editorial attacking your 
candidacy, you must be doing something right.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jill-steins-fairy-tale-candidacy/2016/08/25/3bf8ba1a-6b08-11e6-99bf-f0cf3a6449a6_story.html\ 



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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Why Growth Will Fall by William D. Nordhaus | The New York Review of Books

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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-Original Message-
From: pe...@mail.csuchico.edu [mailto:pe...@mail.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of 
Louis Proyect
full: 
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/why-economic-growth-will-fall/


Thanks, but is this sort of argument plausible?

"Productivity growth slowed sharply after 1970, with little variability from 
decade to decade. The slowdown has been puzzling scholars for four decades. My 
own view is that it is a decline from one thousand cuts. Important ones are 
rising energy prices, growing regulatory burdens, a structural shift from high- 
to low-productivity growth sectors (such as from manufacturing to services), as 
well as the source that Gordon emphasizes, the decline of fundamentally 
important inventions. So Gordon’s basic hypothesis looks rock solid: there has 
been a substantial slowdown in productivity growth since the end of the special 
century in 1970."

Really? Energy price hikes have forced capital to adopt much more efficient 
innovations in all sorts of systems in the energy, transport, production, 
agricultural and other sectors, surely? Deregulatory neoliberalism was 
introduced in the 1980s and intensified in the 1990s. In some sectors, services 
productivity would have soared with the introduction of ICT and internet 
retail. There are infinite numbers of new inventions, including fundamentally 
important ones such as the internet since 1970. 

Can Nordhaus not grapple with another of the 1000 cuts that seems to be the 
core problem the world economy is facing now, namely the overaccumulation of 
capital that started to become noticeable in the early 1970s? Apparently not... 


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Julian Assange 'Jewish conspiracy' comments spark row | Media | The Guardian

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2016/07/24 03:00 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
...This cretin's website gets 40 million unique visits a month. You 
know what P.T. Barnum said, a sucker is born every minute.

_


A few years ago I had an enlightening encounter with these folk near 
Washington, DC: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/08/bilderburgers-beware/

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Re: [Marxism] Chinese overcapacity

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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not a mention of climate change, by this jejune reporter
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[Marxism] (Fwd) Book series seeks 'scripts: "Transforming Capitalism"

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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http://www.rowmaninternational.com/series/transforming-capitalism


   Transforming Capitalism

Series edited by *Ian Bruff (Managing Editor), Julie Cupples, Gemma 
Edwards, Laura Horn, Simon Springer* and *Jacqui True*


This book series provides a platform for the publication of 
path-breaking and interdisciplinary scholarship which seeks to 
understand and critique capitalism along four key lines: crisis, 
development, inequality, and resistance. Through this approach the 
series alerts us to how capitalism is always evolving and hints at how 
we could also transform capitalism itself through our own actions.


/Transforming Capitalism/ is rooted in the vibrant, broad and 
pluralistic debates spanning a range of approaches in a number of fields 
and disciplines. As such, it will appeal to scholars working in 
sociology, geography, cultural studies, international studies, 
development, social theory, politics, labour and welfare studies, 
economics, anthropology, law, and more. It publishes books, in the form 
of monographs, edited volumes and occasional translations of essential 
works, which address numerous topics and issues rooted in these debates 
and literatures. The series has at its core the assumption that the 
world is in various states of transformation, and that these 
transformations may build upon earlier paths of change and conflict 
while also potentially producing new forms of crisis, development, 
inequality, and resistance. The terms crisis, development, inequality, 
and resistance can be interpreted in a range of ways, and we are 
interested in publishing creative and innovative monographs across a 
range of fields, topics, and perspectives.


The series welcomes proposals 
 
on topics including, but not limited to:


• The multiple forms of crisis which characterise capitalism – past, 
present, and future

• Variegated forms and crises of social reproduction and gender regimes
• Socio-economic restructuring and resistances at various levels (local, 
national, transnational)

• Post/decolonial approaches to the study and critique of capitalism
• Insurgent and other new forms of citizenship
• Critical pedagogies and the potential for emancipatory transformations 
of knowledge

• Economic subjectivity and the relationship between identity and capitalism
• Social movements seeking another world to the present
• Intersections of inequality, or the foregrounding of one form of 
inequality (for instance, gender, race, class), across a range of scales 
and cases
• Authoritarian responses to crisis and the growing fragility of 
political authority

• The neoliberalisation and commodification of nature
• New imperialism(s) and the rise of global developmental liberalism

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Re: [Marxism] Brazil's coup gov't 'has revealed its true intentions', MST leader says

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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I love /GLW /and read it cover-to-cover when it arrives here in Durban 
each week. But Stuart, just let me quickly query you on this opening 
line: "In what has been widely condemned as a US-backed right-wing power 
grab..."



The point I want to ask you about, and would ask Stedile if there's a 
chance (as next week I'll be in Sao Paolo and Rio), is /why on earth 
would it be useful to invoke Washington (and the potential for a US 
attack on other BRICS) as a way of fighting this coup?


/The first reaction of Stedile was to say that the coup has Obama 
fingerprints, and one reason for overthrowing Dilma is her role in 
building the BRICS bloc. As I understand it, this was a technique for 
delegitimising the coup plotters, by linking them to imperialism.


As I understand it, and could be wrong, /the only evidence associated 
with Washington's imperialist pro-coup agenda in Brazil is a ten-year 
old WikiLeaks State Department cable which reflects Temer's role as a 
mole. Back then.


/But Dilma must have known this (it's been public since 2010 when these 
cables were leaked) and she chose him as her VP, and in any case 
thousands of foolish people had the same role, surely. Is that all the 
evidence that the international left has to use the description 
"US-backed"? (Correct me if I'm wrong - but that seems thin. We can 
surely do better?)


It seems to me that since Stedile (and quite a few others) started 
making this allegation about the US role around 12 May, they have had 
these problems:


1) lack of evidence aside from the 10-year old memos

2) the other four BRICS have done nothing, and indeed India is publicly 
welcoming Temer to the next BRICS Summit in Goa


3) other Latin American countries have been much more forceful in 
condemning the coup, again showing in contrast how little the BRICS 
offer each other solidarity in such situations


4) the need to activate progressives in places like South Africa and 
India, to protest at Brazilian embassies, is made more difficult by 
invoking the "BRICS coups" hypothesis, since at least in South Africa 
and India, the progressive movements would largely love to see the end 
of their present regimes and are quite suspicious of BRICS (since all 
the BRICS have done in the public eye is spout anti-imperialist rhetoric 
while in practice signing on to imperialism's climate, IMF, world 
finance and world trade deals in recent months)...


As a result, until seeing this GLW article, I had a sense that Stedile 
and the various commentators who are invoking the "US-backed" coup 
thesis, were changing their tune the last few days, once the new 
evidence of why the coup is a corruption cover-up strategy had emerged.


So, I'm just asking about the rationales we invoke, because obviously 
the line of argument taken up by comrades around the world will affect 
our sensibilities regarding solidarity.


Here's my perspective: 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/imperialisms-junior-partners/


Cheers,
Patrick

On 2016/05/28 05:31 AM, Stuart Munckton via Marxism wrote:

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/61843
_



Brazil's coup gov't 'has revealed its true intentions', MST leader says
Saturday, May 28, 2016

In what has been widely condemned as a US-backed right-wing power grab 
to impose harsh neoliberal measures, Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) 
President Dilma Rousseff was forced to stand aside by Brazil's Senate on 
May 12 while she faces impeachment procedures.


However, the “institutional coup” has been met with widespread protests 
and the new administration is facing a host of problems.


This includes the resignation of the coup government's planning minister 
following revelations he directly conspired to have Dilma removed to 
halt corruption investigations against a range of politicians and 
business executives, including himself.


/*João Pedro Stédile*/ is leader of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers 
Movement (MST), one of the world's largest social movements. In an 
article translated by Federico Fuentes and abridged from Links 
International Journal of Socialist Renewal 
, he looks at how the coup government has 
revealed its true intentions.


***

It only took a few hours for the provisional government of the 
coup-plotters to install themselves and demonstrate their intentions 
through the composition of its cabinet, the plans it has announced and 
its public declarations.


The Senate only forced Dilma to temporarily step aside and provisionally 
installed [vice-president] Michel Temer. Some lawyers say the 
constitution stipulates that the 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Elderly Florida man kills ailing wife because medication wasn’t affordable | US news | The Guardian

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2016/05/20 12:59 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/19/florida-man-kills-wife-medication-not-affordable 



I think the biggest miracle I've witnessed here in South Africa - a more 
profound challenge to illegitimate power than anything since, and 
perhaps including, the 1994 transition from racial (to class) apartheid 
- was seeing friends recover from opportunistic AIDS infections because 
they could get antiretroviral ARV medicines for free over the last 10 
years or so, here in the city with the highest # of HIV+ residents, Durban.


That was only possible because of extraordinary activism which lowered 
the price of ARVs from $15,000/year in the early 2000s. From 1999-2004, 
the Treatment Action Campaign militants fought Big Pharma, the US and SA 
political regimes, the World Trade Organisation and the whole idea of 
Intellectual Property, and eventually won. Life expectancy in South 
Africa has risen from 52 a decade ago to 62 today as a result.


One of the great leaders of that struggle, Vuyiseka Dubula (disclosure: 
I co-supervise her PhD) discusses it here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2gEbUcFle4


It's an inspiration, hopefully to the US comrades who need to follow 
this example to limit extreme medicines profiteering.


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: What Went Wrong?

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2016/05/16 03:43 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:

...I'm saying, or asking: is there another way.


Actually in South Africa we are trying a different strategy in which for 
the first time this year, a decent share of state funding subsidises 
those who write academic books and even book chapters, not just academic 
articles.


(In most universities here, if you write a peer-reviewed article in an 
accredited journal, you get a research bonus for buying books and 
conference tickets and research-assistant time of around $1500 each. 
That was a system biased towards natural scientists - one of my UKZN 
colleagues wrote 41 last year - and relatitvely harder for social 
scientists who generate fewer of those commodities and instead, put 
their work into books and book chapters. So the subsidy is now available 
for properly peer-reviewed books and chapters, and a university that 
hosts a book author can get as much as $70 000 subsidy from the 
government for each 300 page book, which it shares usually around 10% 
with the author, and with the rest cross-subsidises other university 
research.)


Some of us are trying to advocate a system to shift publishing so as to 
decommodify the book form, as a result of this generous subsidy (e.g. 
getting the book online immediately - as one state publisher here does 
with some of its books: http://hsrcpress.co.za/  ... e.g. this section 
of their main annual SA review: 
http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/downloadpdf.php?pdffile=files%2FPDF%2F2322%2FState%20of%20Nation_Part5_SA%20and%20the%20World.pdf=State%20of%20the%20Nation%3A%20South%20Africa%201994-2014%20-%20Part5%20SA%20and%20the%20World 
)


But as a general strategy of decommodification, especially to promote 
work by black authors, we're finding that it's very slow going, with no 
immediate prospect of success. The main barrier is the academic research 
bureaucrat, it turns out...


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Re: [Marxism] Martin Hart-Landsberg, "The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Socialist Transformation: The Case of Greece"

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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A very fine paper, which Marty presented to the annual marxist economics 
conference in Korea to acclaim on Thursday.



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