[Marxism] Michael Meeropol review of David Kotz book on neoliberalism

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REVIEW ARTICLE OF THE RISE AND FALL OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM
by David M. Kotz

In 1998, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw published The Commanding 
Heights --- a tour de horizon of the transformation of the relationship 
between governments and the economy between 1979 and the end of the 
1990s. The book covered the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc, 
the transformation of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping, and the 
Reagan and Thatcher revolutions in the US and the UK. In describing 
changes in the US, Western Europe and Japan the book described the rise 
and fall of the post Great Depression version of the mixed economy. The 
changes wrought in these countries beginning in 1979 occurred because 
events in the 1970s undermined the intellectual supports for both the 
centrally planned system of Soviet style communism and the government 
intervention in the social democratic European countries as well as in 
the United States under the post-New Deal mixed economy. These events 
gave credence to the ideas of opponents of both systems, for example, 
the economist Freidrich Hayek. The emerging dominant ideology that they 
describe is one of free market laissez faire economics --- an ideology 
that they believe triumphed as a result of the failures of the more 
interventionist systems.


Though they never use the term, they are describing the rise of what 
David Kotz refers to as neoliberalism. Though his book covers some of 
the same ground, he has the benefit of writing in 2015 whereas Yergin 
and Stanislaw published their book in 1998. More importantly, however, 
whereas Yergin and Stanislaw suggest that the downfall of the postwar 
system in Europe and the US is the result of the triumph of ideas, Kotz 
argues persuasively that it is actually the result of the exercise of 
power by those who benefit from the capitalist economic organization of 
society. The analysis and evidence he brings to bear in support of the 
role of power exercised by business and political leaders is a most 
valuable aspect of this book --- one among many important contributions 
to our knowledge that makes it worthwhile for readers, particularly 
those who are rarely exposed to these types of arguments.


Neoliberalism, according to Kotz and the literature that has developed 
around that term is not just a series of ideas but a series of 
institutional relationships that constitute what US and British writers 
have referred to as a specific social structure of accumulation (SSA) – 
a particular version of capitalism for a particular time and place. 
Economic Historian Douglass C. North won a Nobel Prize in economics for 
his work on the role of institutions in economic growth. He argues that 
whether a particular economy grows or not depends in large part on the 
appropriateness of the institutional structure. Though his analysis of 
institutions is a far cry from that undertaken by those using the SSA 
analysis, his basic point is crucial to their approach – namely that a 
system of markets, including a labor market based on contract rather 
than the coercion of slavery or serfdom, as well as a capital market for 
investment funds and a market for the buying, selling and/or renting of 
land will only work with the appropriate institutional structure.


So far, there is nothing in the Yergin-Stanislaw or North analyses that 
are different from the quite simple description of “different types of 
economic systems” taught in the first few weeks of any Principles of 
Economics course. Capitalism is usually defined as an economic system 
based on 1) Freedom of enterprise and choice, 2) A reliance on markets, 
3) A limited role for government, 4) Private property rights, 5) Free 
(as opposed to coerced) labor. Sometimes this is counter-posed to the 
“mixed” economy where there is a much more significant role for 
government. As the textbook moves into more details in later chapters, 
the arguments as to where the appropriate role for government might be 
take up more and more of the discussion.


Implied in numbers 1 and 2 above is the presumption that competition 
among sellers of goods, services or “factors of production” will produce 
an approximation of the most efficient and dynamic way to organize 
society. What distinguishes the SSA approach from the taxonomy in most 
Principles texts is that Kotz and others emphasize that capitalism is a 
system of power --- that important implications of numbers 1 and 5 above 
are ignored. Those who already own sufficient wealth producing property 
to live off of it are much more likely to be able to successfully pursue 
“freedom of enterprise and choice” than tho

[Marxism] Fwd: Iranian Protests and the Working Class – LobeLog

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https://lobelog.com/iranian-protests-and-the-working-class/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Bullet points on the Iranian revolt – Mosquito Ridge – Medium

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By Paul Mason

https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/bullet-points-on-the-iranian-revolt-16bfd91ec1e1
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[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: The rise and fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution: Its lessons for today | Socialist Action

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https://socialistaction.org/2018/01/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1979-iranian-revolution-its-lessons-for-today/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Why did protests erupt in Iran? | Middle East | Al Jazeera

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/protests-erupt-iran-180101142214891.html
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[Marxism] Crimson Gold Jafar Panahi 2003 full movie (subtitles) - YouTube

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If you want to understand the frustrations of the Iranian working class, 
there's no better film than "Crimson Gold" by Jafar Panahi, the Iranian 
director who has been under house arrest for his support for the Green 
movement. The star of the film is a non-professional very much like the 
character he plays, a shell-shocked veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who 
delivers pizza for a living. It was made in 2003 and all the more 
relevant in light of the country's current economic situation. The film 
has subtitles but you have to make sure to turn English on.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKSbj6jcu0
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Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: The rise and fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution: Its lessons for today | Socialist Action

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On 1/2/18 1:28 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:

Maybe it's a function
of the SA misleadership knowing personally so many Iranian Trotskyists over
the decades. Hard to say.


Yeah, well, Mackler's pal Eva Bartlett has already begun tweeting the 
usual bullshit about CIA-sponsored regime change. I'll leave it up to 
the genius to sort out.

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[Marxism] Fwd: Ahed Tamimi | Richard Seymour on Patreon

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https://www.patreon.com/posts/ahed-tamimi-16184859
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[Marxism] Fwd: Lyndon LaRouche Is Running A Pro-China Party In Germany – Foreign Policy

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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/18/lyndon-larouche-is-running-a-pro-china-party-in-germany/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Protests by impoverished, hungry Iranians | Hands Off the People of Iran

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By Yassamine Mather.

http://hopoi.org/2018/01/protests-by-impoverished-hungry-iranians/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Fighting for Eurasia: Identitarian intellectuals, far-right strategists and Christian fundamentalists converge in Moldova | Southern Poverty Law Center

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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/02/fighting-eurasia-identitarian-intellectuals-far-right-strategists-and-christian
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[Marxism] Radio Broadcaster Pacifica Teeters on Edge of Bankruptcy

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WSJ, Jan. 2 2017
Radio Broadcaster Pacifica Teeters on Edge of Bankruptcy
By Becky Yerak

Pacifica Foundation Inc. might be edging toward bankruptcy as the 
nonprofit radio broadcaster struggles to pay a $1.8 million judgment 
over missed lease payments for its Empire State Building antenna.


Bill Crosier, Pacifica’s interim executive director, is urging the 
foundation’s board to act immediately to protect the foundation’s assets 
from creditors through a voluntary chapter 11 filing. A “small majority” 
of Pacifica directors, however, are holding out hope that the foundation 
can arrange a loan outside of bankruptcy court to pay the judgment, he 
said Monday. Mr. Crosier told the board in an email last Wednesday that 
chapter 11 is the best way to protect the foundation’s assets from 
creditors and allow it to continue to operate.


Pacifica owns five radio stations: WBAI in New York; KPFA in Berkeley, 
Calif.; KPFK in Los Angeles; KPFT in Houston; and WPFW in Washington, 
D.C. Nearly 300 affiliates carry some Pacifica programming, Mr. Crosier 
said Friday.


Pacifica’s finances have been mismanaged for years, according to a 
resolution that Mr. Crosier sent to the board last week with the email 
encouraging it to approve a bankruptcy filing. Since 2015, Pacifica has 
failed to fund its employee retirement plan, to which it now owes 
$750,000, the resolution said. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the 
email and the resolution.


Pacifica’s precarious financial condition stems in part from a recent 
ruling against the Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit in a lawsuit brought 
by ESRT Empire State Building LLC over WBAI’s failure to make lease 
payments for its broadcast antenna on the Empire State Building in New 
York City. The New York State Supreme Court judgment awarded $1.8 
million in damages to ESRT, a real-estate investment trust with a 
portfolio of office and retail properties. ESRT is listed on the New 
York Stock Exchange.


“We have exhausted all options at this time to secure a loan or to pay 
the ESRT judgment or to secure a forbearance agreement,” Mr. Crosier 
said in the email to the board. Pacifica’s assets, including bank 
accounts, are in “imminent danger” of being seized or subject to a lien, 
he added in the email.


A lien has already been put on the building owned by Pacifica’s Texas 
radio station, and a lien could soon be put on a California property, 
Mr. Crosier told WSJ Bankruptcy Pro on Friday.


It is unlikely, however, that the stations will be shut down, Mr. 
Crosier said.


Pacifica’s national board met Thursday night, but postponed discussion 
of a bankruptcy filing until this week.


A small majority of board members disagree with Mr. Crosier’s 
recommendation and oppose filing for bankruptcy because they believe 
that ESRT won’t move to seize assets immediately as long as Pacifica 
shows it is actively looking for a loan to pay the judgment, he said 
Friday. The foundation’s loan broker has talked to ESRT lawyers and 
believes that the landlord will give it time to find financing. “I hope 
they’re right,” Mr. Crosier said.


While some board members hold out hope for getting financing, Mr. 
Crosier remains concerned about the prospects for obtaining a loan on 
reasonable terms unless Pacifica makes changes to its operations. In or 
out of bankruptcy, he said, Pacifica’s shaky finances will likely force 
it to do a signal swap, in which another operator gets a chance to trade 
licenses with Pacifica in exchange for paying the foundation for a 
bigger coverage area.


Sabrina Jacobs, foundation board vice chair, agrees with Mr. Crosier 
that a bankruptcy filing should be sought as soon as possible. “Time is 
running out,” said Ms. Jacobs, who is also a KPFA producer and host of 
“A Rude Awakening,” a community-affairs program on the station. “We owe 
money, and we need to pay the money.”


Appearing on “A Rude Awakening” on New Year’s Day, Mr. Crosier told 
listeners that Pacifica has about $8 million in debt.


But Pacifica board member Grace Aaron, of KPFK, said it makes more sense 
to get a loan to pay the judgment. The foundation estimates that its 
assets, namely its broadcast licenses, could be valued at $100 million.


Ms. Aaron said WBAI, for example, has a spot on the commercial spectrum 
that could be a hot property that, if sold or swapped, could help 
Pacifica pay off its debt, but “we’d lose a treasured asset” and end up 
with a “degraded signal.” She added that bankruptcy is a costly process 
and that she is skeptical Pacifica would be able to reduce its debt in 
bankruptcy.


For the year ended Sept. 30, 2016, Pacifica had revenue of $10,009,19

[Marxism] Fwd: To Show Solidarity with Protestors in Iran, Do Not Erase the Iranian Working Class

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https://muftah.org/to-show-solidarity-with-protestors-in-iran-do-not-erase-the-iranian-working-class/#.WkxFa1Q-fOS
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[Marxism] Fwd: Alain Badiou: "The alleged power of capitalism … today is merely a reflection of the weakness of its opponent." | MR Online

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https://mronline.org/2018/01/02/alain-badiou-the-alleged-power-of-capitalism-today-is-merely-a-reflection-of-the-weakness-of-its-opponent/
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[Marxism] Hard-Liners and Reformers Tapped Iranians’ Ire. Now, Both Are Protest Targets

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Guess what. The Iran protests are detonated by the same causes of the 
Syrian revolt. Just substitute the word Syria for Iran and Baathist for 
Islamist in these paragraphs from the article below:


For decades, those living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages were 
regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime. They tended to 
be conservative, averse to change and pious followers of the sober 
Islamic lifestyle promoted by the state.


In less than a decade, all that has changed. A 14-year drought has 
emptied villages, with residents moving to nearby cities where they 
often struggle to find jobs. Access to satellite television and, more 
important, the mobile internet has widened their world.




NY Times, Jan. 3 2018
Hard-Liners and Reformers Tapped Iranians’ Ire. Now, Both Are Protest 
Targets.

By THOMAS ERDBRINK

TEHRAN — Antigovernment protests roiled Iran on Tuesday, as the death 
toll rose to 21 and the nation’s supreme leader blamed foreign enemies 
for the unrest. But the protests that have spread to dozens of Iranian 
cities in the past six days were set off by miscalculations in a 
long-simmering power struggle between hard-liners and reformers.


By Tuesday, Iran’s leaders could no longer ignore the demonstrations and 
felt compelled to respond publicly. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme 
leader, blamed outside “enemies” but did not specify who. President 
Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, appealed for calm while saying the 
protesters had a right to be heard.


But the anger behind the protests was directed against the entire 
political establishment.


While the protests that swept Iran in 2009 were led by the urban middle 
class, these protests have been largely driven by disaffected young 
people in rural areas, towns and small cities who have seized an opening 
to vent their frustrations with a political elite they say has hijacked 
the economy to serve its own interests.


Unemployment for young people — half the population — runs at 40 
percent, analysts believe. Meanwhile, Iran has spent billions of dollars 
abroad in recent years to extend its influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.


The initial catalyst for the anger appears to have been the leak by 
President Rouhani last month of a proposed government budget. For the 
first time, secret parts of the budget, including details of the 
country’s religious institutes, were exposed.


Iranians discovered that billions of dollars were going to hard-line 
organizations, the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and 
religious foundations that enrich the clerical elite. At the same time, 
the budget proposed to end cash subsidies for millions of citizens, 
increase fuel prices and privatize public schools.


The leak appeared to be intended to tap popular resentment, and it 
worked. Telegram, a social media messaging app used by over 40 million 
Iranians, blew up with angry comments.


“It made me angry,” said Mehdi, 33, from Izeh, a town in Iran’s poor 
Khuzestan Province, who asked that his family name not be used out of 
fear of retaliation. “There were all these religious organs that 
received high budgets, while we struggle with constant unemployment.”


Last Thursday, hard-liners tried to take back the initiative and 
embarrass the president, staging a demonstration in the holy city 
Mashhad, where hundreds chanted slogans against the weak economy and 
shouted “death to the dictator” and “death to Rouhani.”


An Iranian security official confirmed that the Friday prayer leader of 
the city, Ahmad Alamolhoda, a prominent hard-liner, had been summoned by 
Iran’s National Security Council to explain his role in the demonstration.


Videos of the gathering then went viral on social media, where people 
had for weeks been heatedly discussing the proposed budget. Frustrated 
Iranians elsewhere were emboldened.


In reaction to the protest in Mashhad, Hesamodin Ashna, a trusted 
adviser to President Rouhani, sent out a Twitter message on Friday, 
highlighting “the unbalanced distribution of the budget.”


Iran’s military forces, active in several countries in the Middle East, 
saw their budget increase to $11 billion, a nearly 20 percent rise, he 
said. The budget for representatives of the supreme leader in 
universities was increased. An institute run by the hard-line cleric 
Mohammad Taghi Meshbah-Yazdi was to receive eight times as much as a 
decade ago.


Online anger reached a boiling point.

For decades, those living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages were 
regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime. They tended to 
be conservative, averse to change and pious followers of

Re: [Marxism] statements on Iran

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On 1/3/18 3:30 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:


James Bloodworth: “Why have left wingers greeted the Iran protests with
miserable silence”

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/why-have-left-wingers-greeted-iran-protests-miserable-silence-1653446


I would not recommend Bloodworth. He writes a bunch of crap on both Cuba 
and Venezuela.

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[Marxism] Fwd: Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-didn%e2%80%99t-want-to-be-president/ar-BBHPMSG
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[Marxism] Fwd: ZCommunications » Iran’s Streets Again

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The author Mina Khanlarzadeh is an old friend who shares a perspective 
similar to that of Reza Fiyouzat.


https://zcomm.org/zblogs/irans-streets-again/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The greatest radicalisation since 1979 as Iran explodes | Red Flag

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https://redflag.org.au/node/6153
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: ZCommunications » Iran’s Streets Again

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On 1/4/18 7:27 AM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:

that perspective being?


A pro-working class perspective: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13896
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trump’s Sham Populism | New Republic

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https://newrepublic.com/article/146106/trumps-sham-populism
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[Marxism] Idiocracy

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“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump 
won’t read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; 
nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because 
he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who 
knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than 
he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No 
one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but 
feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what 
he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only 
accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel 
policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day.”


Email written by Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic adviser
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[Marxism] Fwd: Iran’s Past and Present

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Interview with Ervand Abrahamian.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/iran-left-tudeh-khomeini-nationalization-orientalism-oil-imperialism/
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[Marxism] Fwd: VIDEO: GPNY Delivers Live, "Green State of the State Address" - Green Party of New York State

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(If the national party was in the same mold as the NY party, we'd be so 
much better off.)


Green Party of NY Co-Chairs Gloria Mattera and Peter LaVenia are joined 
by 2014 GPNY Gubernatorial Candidate Howie Hawkins for a Green State of 
the State for 2018 in New York.


http://www.gpny.org/gpny_delivers_live_green_state_of_the_state_address
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[Marxism] Fwd: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World - Out August 2018 – ADAM TOOZE

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https://www.adamtooze.com/2018/01/04/crashed-decade-financial-crises-changed-world-august-2018/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine

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How the Assadist propaganda machine uses false identities.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/05/ghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine/
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[Marxism] Fwd: American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Victor Debs screening across America

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American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs narrated by 
Amy Madigan (the anti-Trumpism film of 2018 for all political activists) 
screens: Please help spread the word.


I worked on this film for 6 years and now I need your help to send it to 
people you know in these cities (listed below) as well as send me your 
suggestions of where we can screen this film near you. The film should 
be screened at union halls, universities, political action 
groups/organizations, libraries, museums, houses of worship - wherever 
progressive activists want to see the film. A trailer can be seen on our 
Facebook page and on Youtube.com - both under the title of the film. My 
distributor is First Run Features.


Thank you, Yale Strom

San Diego Jewish Film Festival Feb. 11 & 13 http://www.sdcjc.org/sdjff/
Chicago at the Siskel Film Center March 3-8 www.siskelfilmcenter.org 

NYC at Cinema Village April 27 - May 3 www.firstrunfeatures.com 

Los Angeles Laemmle Theatres in Santa Monica and Pasadena May 4-10 
www.laemmle.com 


www.yalestrom.com 

"The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's 
greed." - Mahatma Gandhi

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[Marxism] Fwd: In Between | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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Opening at both Landmark Theaters in N.Y. (57th and East Houston) today, 
“In Between” is a compelling drama about three Arab women sharing and 
apartment as well as the struggle against patriarchy.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/05/in-between/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trumping Democracy | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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Available from Cinema Libre Studios, “Trumping Democracy” provides the 
key to understanding how we have ended up with the most unpopular 
president in history. Despite the tsunami of reports about Russia 
meddling with the 2016 elections, this gripping documentary makes the 
case that it was instead the result of a combination of Robert Mercer’s 
funding and the computer-based Psyops his Cambridge Analytica firm 
exploited. This one-two punch produced a president that Gary Cohn 
described, according to Michael Wolff’s new bombshell book, Fire and 
Fury, as a “An idiot surrounded by clowns.”


Including the director Thomas Huchon, “Trumping Democracy” was the 
product of a creative team that despite (or, perhaps because of) its 
French provenance has a sharper focus on our national calamity than 
MSNBC, CNN and all the other usual suspects. Huchon’s last documentary 
“Conspi Hunter” was based on a bogus conspiracy theory about the CIA 
inventing the AIDS virus in order to subvert Cuba. He released the film 
online in order to show how quickly and easily conspiracy theories can 
go viral on the Internet. Given the role of Breitbart News and Infowars 
in the Trump campaign, it was logical that Huchon would make his latest 
film a kind of follow-up to “Conspi Hunter”.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/05/trumping-democracy/
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[Marxism] Fwd: bellingcat - The Kremlin's Shifting, Self-Contradicting Narratives on MH17 - bellingcat

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Just a few hours after the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 
(MH17), the circumstances that caused the tragedy came to light: a 
Buk-M1 Russian-made anti-aircraft missile system was fired by either 
Russian-led separatists or Russian forces from an area near Snizhne, 
Ukraine, leading to the death of 298 civilians aboard the passenger 
plane. Over three years since the downing, every credible investigation 
into the tragedy has confirmed this initial claim, with each photograph, 
video, and independent forensic investigation reinforcing the 
“Russian/separatist Buk” claim and adding new details that give us a 
greater understanding of how this incident happened. In short, the 
“narrative” from Western governments, the official Dutch criminal and 
forensic investigations, and the site you are reading now has been linear.


This same linear trajectory towards greater clarity and away from 
self-contradiction cannot be attributed to the Kremlin’s narrative, or 
narratives, related to MH17. On July 21, 2014, just four days after the 
downing, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) held a press conference 
that made a series of self-contradictory claims blaming Ukraine, rather 
than Russia or Russian-led separatists, for the Boeing 777’s shoot down. 
Today, the Kremlin–via its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), Ministry 
of Defense, state-funded media outlets, and state-funded defense company 
“Almaz-Antey”–has silently abandoned, while never explicitly retracting, 
nearly every piece of evidence it presented four days after the downing.


full: 
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/01/05/kremlins-shifting-self-contradicting-narratives-mh17/

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[Marxism] Fwd: CDC To Teach The Public How To Prepare For A Nuclear Explosion | HuffPost

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Oh, great. It's "duck and cover" time again.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-cdc-set-to-teach-the-public-how-to-prepare-for-a-nuclear-explosion_us_5a4fe6cee4b089e14dbac318
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[Marxism] Fwd: How White Nationalists Hide in Academia | Alternet

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Inside of the academy, many of these ideas flourished, so much so that 
when white nationalists took over the journal Population and 
Environment, few made headlines. From 1989 to 1999, the journal was 
edited by Virginia Abernethy, one of the most public white separatists 
in the country. Abernethy focused her career as a sociologist on 
"population politics," using coded language about "fertility rates" to 
argue for both the restriction of non-white populations and for white 
social control. She served on the board of the white nationalist 
American Freedom Party, serving as their vice-presidential candidate in 
the 2012 election. Her main political work seemed to be in Arizona 
working on the anti-immigration Proposition 200 with Protect Arizona Now.


full: 
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/how-white-nationalists-hide-academia

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[Marxism] Fwd: How White Nationalists Hide in Academia | Alternet

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Very revealing.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/how-white-nationalists-hide-academia
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[Marxism] Fwd: New Republic, AlterNet, and Nation Institute Had No Real HR When Abuses Occurred

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https://theintercept.com/2018/01/05/new-republic-hamilton-fish-alternet-don-hazen/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Protests in Iran Took Many By Surprise — But Not Iranian Labor Activists

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https://theintercept.com/2018/01/06/iran-protests-working-class-rouhani/
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[Marxism] Fwd: NUMSA New Year Statement: A clarion call to build a Revolutionary Workers Party! | MR Online

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https://mronline.org/2018/01/05/numsa-new-year-statement-a-clarion-call-to-build-a-revolutionary-workers-party/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Protests put spotlight on Iran's vast, shadowy Syria war

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https://apnews.com/8b5e8249789f4478ba54412d6ab45745
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[Marxism] Essential Readings: The Syrian Uprising (by Raymond Hinnebusch)

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http://jadaliyya.com/Details/34883/Essential-Readings-on-the-Syrian-Uprising-An-Annotated-Bibliography-by-Raymond-Hinnebusch
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[Marxism] Fwd: ASSA 2018 – part one: globalisation, inequality and populism | Michael Roberts Blog

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ASSA 2018 is the annual conference of the American Economic Association, 
drawing together the economics profession in the US to discuss hundreds 
of papers and debate the key issues and ideas that mainstream economics 
considers.  This year in freezing Philadelphia, there has been an 
obsession with President Trump, his antics and ‘Trumponomics’ if we can 
call it that.  As Trump launched his latest tirade of weird tweets 
against a new book outlining his mentally unstable antics, the great and 
good of America’s mainstream economists considered his economic policies.


And they were worried.  Three things gripped the mainstream.  The first 
was the apparent failure of globalisation since the Great Recession; the 
poor level of productivity growth in the major capitalist economies in 
the last ten years; and the effectiveness of Trump’s proclaimed 
protectionist trade policy that he has combined with slashing reductions 
in taxation on the US corporate sector and his rich elite friends.


It seems that the mainstream is now aware that free trade and free 
movement of capital that has accelerated globally over the last 30 years 
has not led to gains for all – contrary to the mainstream economic 
theory of comparative advantage and competition.


full: 
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/assa-2018-part-one-globalisation-inequality-and-populism/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Iran: Call for demonstrations from the striking workers of the Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Co.

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(HT, Sebastian Budgen)

https://libcom.org/news/iran-call-demonstrations-striking-workers-haft-tappeh-sugar-cane-co-06012018
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[Marxism] Fwd: Taibbi: Why Michael Wolff's Book Is Good News - Rolling Stone

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By Matt Taibbi.

America has been here before, piloted by mentally adrift presidents. Bob 
Woodward's Veil described how the CIA had to produce movies about 
foreign leaders because Ronald Reagan couldn't take in information (like 
who the heck Hosni Mubarak was) any other way:


"Since Reagan did not read many novels but watched movies, the CIA began 
to produce profiles of leaders that could be shown to the President... 
One was of the new Egyptian President. 'SECRET NOFORN' flashed on the 
screen as the narrator began, 'This is Hosni Mubarak...'"


George W. Bush was a similar figure. He spent much of his first 
presidential campaign lugging around a biography of Dean Acheson in a 
widely derided effort to convince the press corps he read books.


Bush in office openly admitted to not reading newspapers, relaying with 
surfer-dude insouciance that instead he got briefings from people who 
did. He was genuinely proud of knowing nothing.


We survived episodes like that, and a few others. (There is a story, 
perhaps apocryphal, that James Buchanan bought a ten-gallon jug of 
whiskey every week.)


Trump by most accounts is worst of all, and the horror effect is 
enhanced by the seemingly total absence of redeeming qualities in his 
personality. But a guy who fell backwards into the presidency and has 
been too brain-hampered upon arrival to do much with the office – there 
are worse narratives.


Just remember, Trump could be cunning, focused and bursting with 
willpower, in addition to being a gross, ignorant pig. We can only hope 
that Wolff is right that he isn't both.



full: 
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-why-michael-wolffs-book-is-good-news-w515045

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[Marxism] Fwd: Is Government a Protection Racket? How Wheat and Taxes Built the Ancient States - Los Angeles Review of Books

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/is-government-a-protection-racket-how-wheat-and-taxes-built-the-ancient-states/
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] The Pianist of the Resistance Captures a Surprise Award

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NY Times, Jan. 7 2018
The Pianist of the Resistance Captures a Surprise Award
By MICHAEL COOPER

BRUSSELS — It was Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald J. Trump was 
elected president of the United States. The pianist Igor Levit strode 
onto the stage at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, an Art Deco gem here known 
as Bozar, to play Beethoven. But first, he had something to say.


Declaring that “the time of staying in my comfort zone is over,” Mr. 
Levit, 30, did something that would not be in the least unusual at many 
kinds of concerts, but is still quite rare in classical music: He spoke 
directly to his audience, brought up the world outside the concert hall, 
and unhesitatingly took sides in a political controversy.


“Yesterday, the greatest economic power in the world has freely elected 
a bigot, an opportunist, an angry and dangerous man as their new 
president, as their commander in chief,” Mr. Levit said, going on to 
denounce Brexit and the rise of the far right in France and Germany.


His speech caused a commotion, as audience members called out, both 
attacking and defending him. “I don’t think one should use the concert 
stage all the time for political statements,” he said recently. “But 
this day was a very traumatic day for me, and I think for all of us: The 
night before, Donald Trump was elected president. I’d had a concert in 
London, I took a train to Brussels, I couldn’t sleep all night. And I 
just wrote down this speech. I felt a certain urgency.”


On Wednesday, Jan. 3, his potent mixture of powerful art and political 
candor was given a major boost: the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, one 
of the most prestigious, and unusual, prizes in classical music. Granted 
to a pianist every four years, it is not a competition, so contestants 
do not even know they are in the running. Instead, a small, anonymous 
jury travels incognito to concerts around the world, searching for an 
artist with the potential to make a mark on music.



Mr. Levit has certainly, and swiftly, made a mark. It is not easy to 
achieve stardom as a concert pianist these days, with competitions and 
the recording industry fading as launchpads. Some conservatories, 
including the Juilliard School, have cut back on piano students, fearing 
that the market is saturated. Against those odds Mr. Levit has managed 
to break through, thanks to a combination of his playing and his daring 
— as in a 2015 collaboration with the artist Marina Abramovic on a stark 
staging of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations in New York.


And he has stood out by emerging as the de facto pianist of the 
resistance, with politics that do not merely flavor his outspoken 
Twitter feed but inform his musical identity.


On a recent Sony Classical recording, he boldly brought together three 
sets of variations: Bach’s “Goldbergs,” Beethoven’s “Diabellis” and 
Frederic Rzewski’s on a song beloved of the Chilean left, “The People 
United Will Never Be Defeated!” At a BBC Proms concert last summer, in a 
London consumed by Brexit, he played an encore of Liszt’s transcription 
of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” — the official anthem of the European Union 
— and wore a small E.U. pin to drive the point home. (Breitbart took 
notice, in an article that described the Beethoven as a “protest song.”)


Mr. Levit and one of his closest friends, Georg Diez, who writes about 
politics and culture for Der Spiegel, traveled together to the Idomeni 
refugee camp along the Greece-Macedonia border a couple of years ago to 
better understand the refugee crisis.


“What fascinates me about Igor is that art, life and politics are all 
one,” Mr. Diez said. “You have to understand suffering, the state of the 
world, in order to understand music.”


Mr. Levit was born in 1987 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (the same city, he 
noted, as another, slightly younger piano star, Daniil Trifonov), where 
his mother was a serious pianist and his father an engineer. His family 
moved to Germany when he was 8 — in search, he said, of better 
opportunities — and settled in Hanover, where his mother still teaches 
at the conservatory.


He wasn’t shy, even as a teenage student. It was in the conservatory 
library that he first discovered the music of Mr. Rzewski, now 79, a 
passionately political American pianist and composer who is eminent in 
new-music circles. Mr. Levit Googled him and found his email address.


“Would you write something for me?” Mr. Levit recalled asking.

He got a response a few days later. “So I said, ‘Well, if you can find 
somebody to pay for it, sure, why not?’” Mr. Rzewski recalled. “And he did.”


In 2005, Mr. Levit won the silver prize at the Arthur Rubinstein 

[Marxism] Fwd: “Fire and Fury” Is a Book All Too Worthy of the President | The New Yorker

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Masha Gessen trashes Michael Wolff. Glad I got a bootleg copy of the 
book that I will keep in the bathroom when I need something to read 
during a BM.


https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/fire-and-fury-is-a-book-all-too-worthy-of-the-president
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[Marxism] Fwd: The role of Iran’s water crisis in the recent protests | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/07/the-role-of-irans-water-crisis-in-the-recent-protests/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The problems of the third world are not abstract. – Cold and dark stars

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https://colddarkstars.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/your-analysis-on-why-the-third-world-lags-behind-is-shitty/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Corpses of Souls

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Chris Hedges draws upon Walker Percy to capture the current moment.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/corpses-of-souls/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Students Await Judgment in Suit Over Fordham University Banning of Pro-Palestine Club

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https://theintercept.com/2018/01/07/palestine-israel-fordham-sjp-lawsuit-bds/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The New Gilded Age: First Time Arrogance, the Second Time Vengeance

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Very interesting.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/08/the-new-gilded-age-first-time-arrogance-the-second-time-vengeance/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Oprah Winfrey: one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers | Television & radio | The Guardian

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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/09/oprah-winfrey-neoliberal-capitalist-thinkers
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[Marxism] Iran’s President Takes On His Hard-Line Critics

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NY Times, Jan. 8, 2018
Iran’s President Takes On His Hard-Line Critics
By THOMAS ERDBRINK

TEHRAN — President Hassan Rouhani of Iran lashed out at his hard-line 
opponents on Monday, saying the protesters who have shaken Iran in 
recent weeks objected not just to the bad economy but also to widespread 
corruption and the clerical government’s restrictive policies on 
personal conduct and freedoms.


“One cannot force one’s lifestyle on the future generations,” Mr. 
Rouhani said, in remarks reported by the ISNA news agency. “The problem 
is that we want two generations after us to live the way we like them to.”


In his most extensive comments yet on the protests, Mr. Rouhani said 
that those people who took to the streets across the country did so 
because they were seeking a better life. “Some imagine that the people 
only want money and a good economy, but will someone accept a 
considerable amount of money per month when for instance the cyber 
network would be completely blocked?” he asked. “Is freedom and the life 
of the people purchasable with money? Why do some give the wrong 
reasons? This is an insult to the people.”


Mr. Rouhani, a moderate, has been seeking a relaxation in social 
controls, but he faces resistance from hard-liners in unelected power 
centers like the judiciary, vetting councils and the state news media. 
They want to keep in place the framework of Islamic laws that 
effectively dictate how people should live, despite enormous changes in 
Iranian society in the past decade alone.


Iran’s judiciary and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blame 
the country’s “enemies” for the protests in over 80 cities, which 
started on Dec. 28. They said the actions were organized by the United 
States, Israel and Saudi Arabia with the aim of bringing down the 
Islamic government.


They call the hundreds of protesters who have been arrested “rioters” 
and want all social media to be banned. In a move seemingly unrelated to 
the protests, but one that gives insight into hard-liners’ attitudes, 
all English classes in elementary schools were banned on Sunday to 
combat the spread of Western influence.


Several political supporters of Mr. Rouhani say that the first protest 
in the city of Mashhad was actually masterminded by the hard-liners, in 
an attempt to discredit the government.


The Iranian president has twice run for office promising to reinvigorate 
the economy, but has little to show for it. To make matters worse, his 
recent budget enraged many by calling for cuts in fuel subsidies and 
cash payments to the poor, alongside sharp rises in spending for many 
clerical institutions.


But the protesters have also spoken of a host of other problems, 
including endemic corruption and the government’s expensive support for 
the Syrian government and Shiite groups throughout the Middle East, 
particularly Hezbollah, the Shiite movement in Lebanon.


Seeking to blunt criticism over the economy, Mr. Rouhani stressed the 
breadth of the protesters’ demands as well as their validity.


“The people have demands, some of which are economic, social and 
security-related, and all these demands should be heeded,” he said on 
Monday. He did not directly refer to slogans calling for Iran’s supreme 
leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to step down, but he said that no one was 
exempt from criticism.


“We have no infallible officials and any authority can be criticized,” 
he said.


Mr. Rouhani said that the social media platform Telegram, used by over 
40 million Iranians but blocked during the protests, would be reopened. 
The photo-sharing app Instagram, which was also closed, has been 
partially reopened but is still not usable on mobile devices.


“Everything good has its disadvantages,” Mr. Rouhani said of social 
media, “but one cannot say that, for instance, automobile and motorcycle 
factories should be completely closed due to the dangers that these have.”

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[Marxism] Fwd: Fire and Fury? Maybe Donald Trump is only just getting started | Matthew d’Ancona | Opinion | The Guardian

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/07/fire-fury-donald-trump-michael-wolff-book?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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[Marxism] Why So Cold? Climate Change May Be Part of the Answer

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NY Times, Jan. 8, 2018
Why So Cold? Climate Change May Be Part of the Answer
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Want the latest climate news in your inbox? You can sign up here to 
receive Climate Fwd:, our new email newsletter.


As bitter cold continues to grip much of North America and helps spawn 
the fierce storm along the East Coast, the question arises: What’s the 
influence of climate change?


Some scientists studying the connection between climate change and cold 
spells, which occur when cold Arctic air dips south, say that they may 
be related. But the importance of the relationship is not fully clear yet.


The Arctic is not as cold as it used to be — the region is warming 
faster than any other — and studies suggest that this warming is 
weakening the jet stream, which ordinarily acts like a giant lasso, 
corralling cold air around the pole.


“There’s a lot of agreement that the Arctic plays a role, it’s just not 
known exactly how much,” said Marlene Kretschmer, a researcher at the 
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “It’s a very 
complex system.”


The reason a direct connection between cold weather and global warming 
is still up for debate, scientists say, is that there are many other 
factors involved. Ocean temperatures in the tropics, soil moisture, snow 
cover, even the long-term natural variability of large ocean systems all 
can influence the jet stream.


“I think everyone would agree that potentially the warming Arctic could 
have impacts on the lower latitudes,” said Rick Thoman, climate services 
manager with the National Weather Service in Fairbanks, Alaska. “But the 
exact connection on the climate scale is an area of active research.”


Much of the Northern Hemisphere is cold this time of year (it’s winter, 
after all). Cold snaps have occurred throughout history — certainly long 
before industrialization resulted in large emissions of greenhouse 
gases. And as with any single weather event, it’s difficult to directly 
attribute the influence of climate change to a particular cold spell.


But scientists have been puzzled by data that at first seems 
counterintuitive: Despite an undeniable overall year-round warming 
trend, winters in North America and Europe have trended cooler over the 
past quarter-century.


“We’re trying to understand these dynamic processes that lead to cold 
winters,” Ms. Kretschmer said.


She is the lead author of a study published last fall that looked at 
four decades of climate data and concluded that the jet stream — usually 
referred to as the polar vortex this time of year — is weakening more 
frequently and staying weaker for longer periods of time. That allows 
cold air to escape the Arctic and move to lower latitudes. But the study 
focused on Europe and Russia.


“The changes in very persistent weak states actually contributed to cold 
outbreaks in Eurasia,” Ms. Kretschmer said. “The bigger question is how 
this is related to climate change.”


Timo Vihma, head of the polar meteorology and climatology group at the 
Finnish Meteorological Institute, explained that warmer air in the 
Arctic reduces the temperature difference between it and lower latitudes 
and weakens the polar vortex.


“When we have a weak temperature gradient between the Arctic and 
mid-latitudes, the result is weaker winds,” he said.


Ordinarily the jet stream is straight, blowing from west to east. When 
it becomes weaker, Dr. Vihma said, it can become wavy, “more like a big 
snake around the Northern Hemisphere.”


The weaker winds are more susceptible to disturbances, such as a zone of 
high pressure that can force colder air southward. These “blocking” 
high-pressure zones are often what creates a severe cold spell that 
lingers for several days or longer.


The current cold snap has been in place for more than a week, and the 
cold air on Wednesday was moving east and colliding with a mass of 
warmer air from the Atlantic Ocean. That created a storm known as a 
“bomb cyclone.”


In a bomb cyclone, the temperature difference between the two air masses 
leads to a steep and rapid — meteorologists often use the term 
“explosive” — drop in atmospheric pressure. The air starts to move and, 
aided by the earth’s rotation, begins to rotate. The swirling air can 
bring high winds and a lot of precipitation, often in the form of snow.


That could happen this time — depending on the track of the storm, parts 
of the Northeast were expecting heavy snow. But one impact of the storm 
is even more clear: After it eventually moves off to the north and west, 
it should draw even more cold polar air into the eastern half of the 
United States, continuing the

[Marxism] Fwd: Climate Change May Have Helped Spark Iran's Protests - Scientific American

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-may-have-helped-spark-iran-rsquo-s-protests/
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[Marxism] Eric Duncan

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READINGS — From the August 2017 issue of Harper's.

Eric Duncan

By Philip Roth, from remarks he gave at a celebration of his 
seventy-fifth birthday at Columbia University in 2008. They are included 
in Philip Roth: Why Write?, which will be published next month by the 
Library of America.


Seventy-five. How sudden! It may be a commonplace to note that our time 
here steals away at a terrifying speed, but it nonetheless remains 
astonishing that it was just 1943 — it was 1943, the war was on, I was 
ten, and at the kitchen table, my mother was teaching me to type on her 
big Underwood typewriter, its four upward-sloping rows of round white 
keys differentiated by black letters, numerals, and symbols that, taken 
together, constituted all the apparatus necessary to write in English.


I was at the time reading the sea stories of Howard Pease, the Joseph 
Conrad of boys’ books, whose titles included Wind in the Rigging, The 
Black Tanker, Secret Cargo, and Shanghai Passage. As soon as I’d 
mastered the Underwood’s keyboard and the digital gymnastics of the 
touch system of typing, I inserted a clean sheet of white paper into the 
typewriter and tapped out in caps at its exact center a first title of 
my own: Storm Off Hatteras. Beneath that title I didn’t type my name, 
however. I was well aware that Philip Roth wasn’t a writer’s name. I 
typed instead “by Eric Duncan.” That was the name I chose as befitting 
the seafaring author of Storm Off Hatteras, a tale of wild weather and a 
tyrannical captain and mutinous intrigue in the treacherous waters of 
the Atlantic. There’s little that can bestow more confidence and lend 
more authority than a name with two hard c’s in it.


In January 1946, three years later, I graduated from a public elementary 
school in Newark, New Jersey — ours was the first postwar class to enter 
high school. That a brand-new historical moment was upon us was not lost 
on the brightest students in the class, who had been eight or nine when 
the war began and were twelve or thirteen when it concluded. As a result 
of the wartime propaganda to which we’d regularly been exposed for close 
to five years — and because of our almost all being knowledgeable, as 
Jewish children, about anti-Semitism — we had come to be precociously 
alert to the inequalities in American society.


The heady idealistic patriotism with which we were inculcated during the 
war spilled over in its aftermath into a burgeoning concern with 
contemporary social injustice. For me, this led to my being teamed up by 
our eighth-grade teacher with a clever female classmate to write — in 
part on my mother’s Underwood — the script for a graduation play we 
called Let Freedom Ring.


Our one-act play, a quasi allegory with a strong admonitory bent, pitted 
a protagonist named Tolerance (virtuously performed by my coauthor) 
against an antagonist named Prejudice (sinisterly played by me). It 
included a supporting cast of classmates who, in a series of vignettes 
in which they were shown attending to their harmlessly healthy-minded 
pursuits — and which were intended to advertise how wonderful all these 
people were — played representatives of ethnic and religious minorities 
unjustly suffering the injurious inequities of discrimination. Tolerance 
and Prejudice, invisible to the others onstage, stood just to the side 
of each uplifting scene, arguing over the human status of these various 
and sundry non–Anglo-Saxon Americans, Tolerance quoting exemplary 
passages from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the 
United States, and the newspaper columns of Eleanor Roosevelt, while 
Prejudice, appraising her with as much pity as disgust, and in a tone of 
voice he wouldn’t have dared to use at home, said the nastiest things 
about the inferiority of these minorities that he could get away with in 
a school play.


Afterward, in the corridor outside the auditorium, giving me a fervent 
hug to express her delight in my achievement, my proud, admiring mother 
told me, while I was still in my costume of head-to-foot black, that, 
sitting at the edge of her seat in the audience, she who had never 
struck anyone in all her life had wanted to slap my face. “How ever did 
you learn to be so contemptible!” she said, laughing. “You were 
thoroughly despicable!” In truth, I didn’t know — it just seemed to have 
come to me out of nowhere. Secretly it thrilled me to think I had a 
natural talent for it.


Let Freedom Ring ended with the full cast of miscellaneous minorities 
hand in hand at the footlights, joining Tolerance with everything they 
had as she rousingly sang “The House I Live In,” a 1942 pop o

[Marxism] September 1, 1939

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September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

 I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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[Marxism] Fwd: American Capitalism - New Histories | Columbia University Press

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American Capitalism
New Histories

Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds

Columbia University Press

The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising 
shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, huge industrial 
working class, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning 
multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New 
York in the world of finance, America has come to symbolize capitalism 
for two centuries and more. But an understanding of the history of 
American capitalism is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to 
make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential 
across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a 
range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on 
capitalism change our understanding of American history?


American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from 
prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new 
angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and 
political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond 
industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the 
idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest 
emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is 
made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by 
participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be 
reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a 
wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the 
work that the history of capitalism can provoke.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University 
and cofounder of the Program on the Study of Capitalism. He is the 
author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014).


Christine Desan is Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University 
and cofounder of the Program on the Study of Capitalism. She is the 
author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014).


https://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-capitalism/9780231185240
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[Marxism] Fwd: ASSA 2018 part 2: value, profitability and crises | Michael Roberts Blog

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At ASSA 2018, away from the huge arenas where thousands listened to the 
millionaire guru mainstream economists speak, were the sessions under 
the umbrella of the Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE), where 
just handfuls heard papers from a range of heterodox and radical 
economists.  These sessions were a mixture of debate on Marx’s value 
theory (among Marxists) and its dismissal by followers of Piero Sraffa. 
But there was also some very interesting research on the nature of 
capitalist economic cycles and the causes of crises, including the 2008 
crash and the Great Recession.


full: 
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/assa-2018-part-2-value-profitability-and-crises/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Why The Fall of the American Empire Will Come by 2030 | Big Think

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Living in such tense and mercurial times, it’s easy to see that most 
Americans do not have a strong confidence in their country’s future, 
with about 60% thinking it’s headed in the wrong direction, according to 
the polling data from RealClear Politics. They are sharply divided by 
politics, by the role America should play in the world, by how to 
utilize science and education. All such sentiment is not only warranted 
but indicates the reality that the American Empire is in its last years, 
if you believe the prediction of the noted historian Alfred McCoy. He 
laid out his vision for the monumental transformation of the global 
order in the near future in an interview with The Intercept’s Jeremy 
Scahill.


McCoy sees the election of Donald Trump to Presidency as a defining 
moment. He does not think Trump himself is the cause of the waning 
American power, but rather a symptom of it. Nonetheless, McCoy regards 
Trump as likely to hasten the downward trajectory.


The historian writes that all negative trends that are plaguing America 
now are likely to get much worse, growing rapidly by 2020, and would 
“reach a critical mass no later than 2030.”


“The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World 
War II, may already be tattered and fading by 2025 and, except for the 
finger pointing, could be over by 2030,” writes McCoy.


A lifelong observer of America's trajectory, in 1972, McCoy wrote “The 
Politics of Heroin,” a seminal book on the CIA involvement in the heroin 
trade during the Vietnam War. His new book “In the Shadows of the 
American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power” is coming 
out in September. He currently teaches history at the University of 
Wisconsin-Madison.


He describes the coming 2020s as a “demoralizing decade of rising 
prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness.” He 
blames decades of growing deficits on “incessant warfare in distant 
lands”. By 2030, the U.S. dollar will lose its status as the world’s 
dominant reserve currency, marking the empire’s loss of influence.



full: 
http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-fall-of-the-american-empire-will-come-by-2030-predicts-famed-historian

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[Marxism] Comment from an Iranian on my water crisis article

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Thanks for the article, Louis.

The water-scarcity crisis is so critical in Iran that like so many 
socio-economic and political problems are often discussed by the media. 
The root causes and solutions to these problems are also widely known 
and acknowledged but since their implementations require structural 
changes in the fabric of the regime go nowhere. Just yesterday, the 
reformist Etemad newspaper had an interview with Fatemeh Zafarnejad, an 
expert on sustainable development, under the title of “Water Resources: 
Victim of Aggressive Engineering.” 
http://etemadnewspaper.ir/1396/10/18/Main/PDF/13961018-3996-7-124.pdf


Zafarnejad has translated Patrick McCully’s Silenced Rivers to Farsi, 
and has written a book and many articles including the “The contribution 
of dams to Iran’s desertification” in English, for those interested. In 
this latest interview and in her other publications, she sums up the 
problems as follows:


“The political factions come and go, but the engineers and technocrats 
of consulting companies, contractors, and their government and private 
sector observers all continue to destroy the land. In fact, these are 
the “mafia” who are in charge of the inefficient management of water 
resources in Iran, and whenever there are complaints, the mafia blames 
everything on nature or people who have no one to defend them.”


She and others have been arguing that the “water mafia” despite their 
internal warfare have been united in pursuing the same profit-making and 
inefficient plans such as transferring water from the Caspian Sea, Aras, 
Karoon and dam and road construction that have been harmful and in 
conflict with a sustainable development. Isa Kalantari, whom you 
referred to, according to her, is just one of the culprits. He replaced 
Ms. Ebtekar as the new head of the Iranian Environmental Protection 
Agency in Rouhani’s second cabinet. Kalantari has authorized the plans 
to transfer water from Oman, Caspian Sea, and Karun to Iran’s central 
provinces, whereas Ebtekar had rejected them all. Zafarnejad says that 
these two should have a public debate over those policies so that the 
public can find out what is going on. She also criticizes the 
continuation of government policies in construction and maintaining 
water-consuming industries such as Isfahan’s Steel Plant away from 
Persian Gulf region where they would not have required the transfer of 
water to maintain them. Kalantari, by the way, before his latest 
assignment, was for five years the Director of Urmia Lake Revival Plan, 
which he concluded by declaring it un-revival.


On the eve of the 1979 revolution and throughout the Shah’s reign, the 
solution to all Iran’s problems to many seemed to be “just” the 
replacement of the Shah’s dictatorship with a democratic republic. 
Almost forty years later, the post-revolution regime has proved to be so 
incapable of reforming itself that any changes that have taken place 
have been the direct result of struggle of Iranians themselves imposed 
on the regime. The corruption, discrimination and injustice felt by the 
Iranians and the multi-faceted socio-economic, ethnic and ecological 
crises that have for so long ignored by the regime are driving millions 
of people into an unavoidable struggle for structural changes. The 
widespread riots that took place were just a glimpse into that long 
struggle.

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[Marxism] Fwd: Julian Assange May Be Forced to Leave Ecuador Embassy After Upsetting President

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http://www.newsweek.com/julian-assange-ecuador-embassy-leave-776026
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[Marxism] Fwd: Disgust Follows Pictures of Seinfeld at 'Anti-Terror Fantasy Camp' in Occupied West Bank | Common Dreams

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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/01/08/disgust-follows-pictures-seinfeld-anti-terror-fantasy-camp-occupied-west-bank
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[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: What happened to the workers’ movement? | Salvage

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http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/what-happened-to-the-workers-movement/
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[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: Today’s Protests By Workers And The Deprived People Is The Result Of Injustice | The Iranian

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https://iranian.com/2018/01/09/tehran-bus-workers-haft-tapeh-sugarcane/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse | MR Online

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With advertising messages on everything from fruit on supermarket 
shelves, to urinals, and to literally the space beneath our feet (Bamboo 
lingerie conducted a spray-paint pavement campaign in Manhattan telling 
consumers that “from here it looks likes you could use some new 
underwear”), it should not be surprising that many commentators now 
identify the realm of culture as simply an adjunct to the system of 
production and consumption.


Indeed so overwhelming has the commercial colonization of our culture 
become that it has created its own problems for marketers who now worry 
about how to ensure that their individual message stands out from the 
“clutter” and the “noise” of this busy environment. In that sense the 
main competition for marketers is not simply other brands in their 
product type, but all the other advertisers who are competing for the 
attention of an increasingly cynical audience which is doing all it can 
to avoid ads. In a strange paradox, as advertising takes over more and 
more space in the culture the job of the individual advertisers becomes 
much more difficult. Therefore even greater care and resources are 
poured into the creation of commercial messages — much greater care than 
the surrounding editorial matter designed to capture the attention of 
the audience. Indeed if we wanted to compare national television 
commercials to something equivalent, it would the biggest budget movie 
blockbusters. Second by second, it costs more to produce the average 
network ad than a movie like Jurassic Park.


The twin results of these developments are that advertising is 
everywhere and huge amounts of money and creativity are expended upon them.


full: 
https://mronline.org/2018/01/09/advertising-at-the-edge-of-the-apocalypse/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Yacob and Amo: Africa’s precursors to Locke, Hume and Kant | Aeon Essays

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Amazing.

https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant
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[Marxism] 'Bread, Jobs, and Freedom': A Conversation with Arang Keshavarzian about the Street Protests in Iran

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http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34978/Bread,-Jobs,-and-Freedom-A-Conversation-with-Arang-Keshavarzian-about-the-Street-Protests-in-Iran
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[Marxism] Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century:, Global Inequality, Piketty, and the Transnational, Capitalist Class,

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By William I. Robinson


But that is precisely the rub. Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been
so well received by the academic, media, and political establishment precisely
because it converges with the reformist agenda of a rising number of
transnational elites and intelligentsia. These elites have become increasingly
concerned that the social conflicts and political turmoil sparked by such
egregious inequalities may destabilize global capitalism and threaten their
control. They seek to save capitalism from itself and from more radical projects
from below. Like Piketty, they call for mildly redistributive measures such
as increased taxes on corporations and the rich, a more progressive income
tax, the reintroduction of social welfare programs, and a “green capitalism.”
They are also alarmed that extreme levels of inequality will undermine the
prospects for growth and profit making. The Organization of economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD), the club of the 34 richest countries, for
instance, warned in a 2015 report that the “global inequality gap” has “reached
a turning point.” The report did not have much to say about the social injustice
that such inequality represents, nor about the mass suffering it brings about.
It did, however, highlight that “high inequality drags down growth” and 
recommend
raising taxes on the rich.




full: 
http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson/Assets/pdf/CapitalismInThe21stCentury.pdf

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[Marxism] Ukraine and the Empire of Capital

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Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign

Book Launch and Discussion

UKRAINE AND THE EMPIRE OF CAPITAL: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict
with Yuliya Yurchenko

Introductory speakers:

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Member of Parliament for Brighton Kemptown

Michael Calderbank, Red Pepper co-editor

Tuesday, 16 January 2018, 6:30  pm, Room 16, Palace of Westminster,

House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA

Hosted by Lloyd Russell-Moyle Member of Parliament

Since 1991, nominally independent Ukraine has been in turmoil, with the 
Orange Revolution and the Maidan protests marking its most critical moments.


Now, its borders are threatened and the civil unrest and armed conflict 
continue to destabilise the country.


In order to understand these dramatic events, Yuliya Yurchenko looks to 
the country's post-Soviet past in this ambitious analysis of 
contemporary Ukrainian political economy.


Providing distinctive and unexplored reflections on the origins of the 
conflict, Yurchenko unpacks the four central myths that underlie 
Ukraine's post-Soviet reality: the myth of transition, the myth of 
democracy, the myth of two Ukraines, and the myth of 'the other'.


In doing so, she sheds light on the current intensification of class 
rivalries in Ukraine, the kleptocracy, resource wars and analyses 
existing and potential dangers of the right-wing shift in Ukraine's 
polity, stressing a historic opportunity for change.Critiquing the 
concept of Ukraine as `transition space', she provides a sweeping 
analysis which includes the wider neo-liberal restructuring of global 
political economy since the 1970s, with particular focus on Ukraine's 
relations with the US, the EU and Russia.


This is a book for those wanting to understand the current conflict as a 
dangerous product of neo-liberalism, of the empire of capital.


Yuliya Yurchenko is an International Business and Economics Department 
of the University of Greenwich and researcher at the Public Services 
International Research Unit. She is the author of Ukraine and the Empire 
of Capital (Pluto, 2017) and a contributor to the Journal Spilna 
(Commons), a supporter of the ‘Sotsialʹnyy Rukh’ (Social Movement) in 
Ukraine.


Visit our website for information about Ukraine: 
ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org


Copies available from: www.plutobooks.com

Christopher  Ford

Ukraine Solidarity Campaign
LRC, c/o PO Box 2378,
London, E5 9QU





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[Marxism] Fwd: NOVA - Official Website | Black Hole Apocalypse

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Full program video with fascinating insights on gravitational waves, etc.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/black-hole-apocalypse.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Rising Concerns About Nuclear War as Trump Prepares to Loosen Constraints on Weapons | Common Dreams

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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/01/10/rising-concerns-about-nuclear-war-trump-prepares-loosen-constraints-weapons

Plus:

"We may very well be in the first … two-sided nuclear war any day: 
Tomorrow, or next week," Mr. Ellsberg tells The Globe and Mail over the 
phone from his Berkeley, Calif., home.


Referencing The Post's British release date, he adds: "I hope we're not 
at war by Jan. 19. We very well could be. I would say it's 50-50, at 
least, that we'll be at war before that."


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/former-military-analyst-daniel-ellsberg-warns-50-50-chance-of-nuclear-war-in-coming-weeks/article37510393/
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[Marxism] Wielding Data, Women Force a Reckoning Over Bias in the Economics Field

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NY Times, Jan. 11 2018
Wielding Data, Women Force a Reckoning Over Bias in the Economics Field
By JIM TANKERSLEY and NOAM SCHEIBER

PHILADELPHIA — It is not difficult to find an all-male panel at the 
annual January mega-gathering of American economists. They are as common 
as PowerPoint presentations and pie charts. One such panel this year met 
to sleepily critique President Trump’s economic policies, but it was 
overshadowed by another panel, two ballrooms away, that jolted a 
profession that prides itself on cool rationality.


That panel on Friday was stocked with women, each of whom presented new 
research that revealed a systemic bias in economics and presaged a move 
by the field’s leaders to promise to address some of those issues.


Paper after paper presented at the American Economic Association panel 
showed a pattern of gender discrimination, beginning with barriers women 
face in choosing to study economics and extending through the life cycle 
of their careers, including securing job opportunities, writing research 
papers, gaining access to top publications and earning proper credit for 
published work.


Economics departments have gradually increased their share of female 
faculty members over the past 20 years. But only one in five 
tenure-track economics professors is a woman, according to the American 
Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics 
Profession.


In many parts of the profession, gender progress stagnated over the last 
decade. About one in three new economics doctoral students was a woman 
in 2016, and fewer than one in three assistant professors were women. In 
both of those cases, the share of women was essentially unchanged from 2006.


A Shrinking Pipeline of Women in Economics Departments
A 2016 survey of 126 economics departments with doctoral programs found 
that while the female share of doctoral students and faculty has 
increased significantly since the 1970s, the representation of women 
drops at each step on the track to full, tenured professor.


The focus on gender bias in economics began simmering in August, when 
Alice Wu, an economist from the University of California, Berkeley, 
detailed in a research paper how the website Economics Job Market 
Rumors, a much-read, anonymous job-rumor forum and message board for 
economists, had become a hotbed of harassment, with female economists 
frequently described in often sexual and crude terms.


The bias creeps into the most popular introductory economics textbooks, 
which refer to men four times as often as they do women. Ninety percent 
of the economists cited in those textbooks are men, Betsey Stevenson, a 
University of Michigan economist, told the panel on gender issues in 
economics, based on a paper she is about to complete. When women are 
mentioned in textbook examples, they are more likely to be shopping or 
cleaning than running a company or making public policy.


Missing From Economics Textbooks: Women
An analysis presented at a January gathering of economists found that 
men make up the vast majority of people mentioned in economics 
textbooks, even dominating references to business leaders and policy makers.


The reckoning in economics comes amid a larger national examination of 
bias and abuse toward women in the work force, across industries 
including entertainment, manufacturing and journalism. But the existence 
of bias in the field of economics is rattling a profession that, at its 
core, functions through objective interpretation and extrapolation of 
data, statistics and evidence.


Leaders of the American Economic Association announced on Friday night 
that they would begin to address bias concerns more seriously, by 
setting up an alternative to the online jobs site and drafting a code of 
conduct for economists. But many economists said that those steps were 
late, and that they left much work to be done to ensure fairness for 
women in the field, where the rate of entry for women lags that of math, 
engineering and other hard sciences.


“The time had come for the organization to make a more proactive 
statement,” said Peter L. Rousseau, the chairman of the economics 
department at Vanderbilt University and the association’s 
secretary-treasurer. He cast the decision as responding to evidence in a 
way that was natural for the profession. “Economists, I think, are just 
very objective in their view of the world,” he said.


In interviews during and after the conference, prominent women in 
economics described how their profession throws barriers in their 
professional paths, and they criticized the male-dominated leadership in 
the field for

[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: The Value of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” | blogs.bookforum.com

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http://blogs.bookforum.com/review/2018/01/09/the-value-of-michael-wolffs-fire-and-fury/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Death Cult of Trumpism | The Nation

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By Greg Grandin:

But to get back to Trump’s psychic deregulation and Obama’s 
overregulation: Both are responses to what came before. Why now? Because 
the frontier is closed, the safety valve shut. Whatever metaphor one 
wants to use, the ongoing effects of the ruinous 2003 war in Iraq and 
the 2007–08 financial meltdown are just two indicators that the promise 
of endless growth can no longer help organize people’s aspirations, 
satisfy their demands, dilute the passions, contain the factions, or 
repress the extremes at the margins. We are entering the second “lost 
decade” of what Larry Summers calls “secular stagnation,” and soon we’ll 
be in the third decade of a war that Senator Lindsey Graham, among 
others, says will never end. Beyond these compounded catastrophes, there 
is a realization that the world is fragile and that we are trapped in an 
economic system that is well past sustainable or justifiable. As vast 
stretches of the West burn, as millions of trees die from 
global-warming-induced blight, as Houston and Puerto Rico flood, the 
oceans acidify, and bats and flying insects disappear in uncountable 
numbers, any given sentence from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road could be 
plucked and used as a newspaper headline. (“A Vast Landscape Charred, 
and a Sky Full of Soot” ran the headline for a New York Times report on 
California’s wildfires.)


full: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-death-cult-of-trumpism/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Economist James K. Galbraith isn’t celebrating Dow 25,000 - MarketWatch

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https://www.marketwatch.com/story/economist-james-k-galbraith-isnt-celebrating-dow-25000-2018-01-08
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trump blasted for insulting immigrants from 's--thole countries' - NY Daily News

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From NYC's working class tabloid.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-blasted-insulting-immigrants-s-thole-countries-article-1.3752001
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[Marxism] Fwd: Ex-Union Boss Calls Trump A 'Con Man' And 'Liar' As Carrier Lays Off 215 More Workers | HuffPost

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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-liar-carrier-layoffs_us_5a57e57ee4b0720dc4c59342
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[Marxism] Fwd: A CORRESPONDENCE AND READING PROJECT FOR 2018

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Over the next year I would like to engage with comrades in a 
correspondence that digests not only the book Black Marxism but also the 
sources that Robinson utilizes, particularly the writings of Du Bois, 
James, and Wright. What wisdom can be extracted from Black 
Reconstruction in regards to electoral politics as we move towards the 
2018 and 2020 elections? How does Wright’s critique of class respond and 
augment the popular notion of a ‘white working class’ that fled to the 
Trump candidacy from the Democratic Party in 2016? What can we make of 
the high esteem James places on spontaneity and particularly how it has 
continued to shape protest politics spanning from the 1999 WTO protests 
in Seattle to Occupy to the more radical elements of Black Lives 
Matter/Movement for Black Lives?


full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13925
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[Marxism] Fwd: Vivek Chibber's "Road to Power" Is Not | New Politics

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Vivek Chibber’s “Our Road to Power” published recently in Jacobin—oddly 
enough written as a commemoration of the Russian Revolution of October 
1917—codifies a strategy for what is one of the dominant tendencies in 
the American left today: social democracy. The principal argument of 
“Our Road to Power” (a title chosen by Jacobin’s editors, perhaps 
alluding to German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky’s The Road to Power) is 
that a “ruptural strategy” is off the agenda. By “ruptural strategy” 
Chibber means one that is predicated upon a crisis of the economic and 
political system leading to the breakdown or to the overthrow of the 
state. Chibber believes that since the power of the state is so great 
today—because of its legitimacy, its coercive power, and its power of 
surveillance—a revolutionary strategy is ruled out. It would be, he 
says, “hallucinatory” to think otherwise.


Since the power of the state is so great and we can expect no 
fundamental crisis of the capitalist system, then what we are dealing 
with today is not a crisis of capitalism itself, but rather a crisis of 
neoliberalism, says Chibber. Our task then, he suggests, is to organize 
to bring about social democratic reforms such as those achieved by the 
Nordic social democracies in the 1970s. This will be done by building 
strong labor unions, constructing a mass socialist party, and 
participating in elections. The strategy will be one of “non-reformist 
reforms, revolutionary reforms,” but “whatever you call it,” it will be 
“gradual.” The end goal of such a struggle will not be the revolutionary 
left’s historic objective of a democratically planned economy, but some 
sort of market socialism. So, Chibber writes, “precisely because a 
ruptural strategy isn’t on the table, we must start down the road to 
social democracy and then to market socialism.”


We have arrived it seems at classical social democracy. Or if we 
haven’t, then what does Chibber actually have in mind? What 
differentiates his position from social democracy? Nothing in this 
article would suggest that there is any difference.


full: http://newpol.org/content/vivek-chibbers-road-power-not
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[Marxism] Fwd: Bitter Money; Pow Wow | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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Later this month, Lincoln Plaza Cinema will be shutting down not because 
it could not sell tickets for its middle-of-the-road art movies but 
because Milstein Properties decided not to renew its lease. Milstein 
claims that after major construction repairs to the high-rise above the 
screening rooms in the basement are complete, the space will be reserved 
for another theater. It is likely that it will not be owned by Dan and 
Toby Talbot, the husband-and-wife team who founded Lincoln Plaza in 1981.


Dan Talbot, who died last month at the age of 91, was a vanguard figure 
in New York’s arthouse cinema. He founded the New Yorker theater on the 
Upper West Side in 1960 and it soon became a shrine to revivals of 
classic films like “Citizen Kane” or the latest Kurosawa or Fellini. 
After graduating NYU, his first gig in the film business was writing 
reviews for The Progressive, a pacifist magazine based in Wisconsin.


This is by no means a scientific finding but Googling “Louis Proyect” 
and “Lincoln Plaza” returns 879 links, nearly all to my reviews. At the 
top of the list is my article on “Lifta”, an Israeli film that broaches 
the possibility of reconciliation between Zionists and their Palestinian 
victims. I had never considered this before but my colleague in NYFCO 
Jordan Hoffman saw the theater as catering to the sensibilities of 
elderly liberal Jews on the Upper West Side in a Village Voice article 
about the closing of the theater:


	The concession stand sells popcorn and Milk Duds, but also smoked 
salmon sandwiches. This is the neighborhood of Zabar’s and Barney 
Greengrass and the JCC Manhattan and a block ceremonially named Isaac 
Bashevis Singer Boulevard. This Christmas, the neighborhood Jews, 
ordained as they are to go to the movies and then hit a Szechuan Palace 
after, included Lincoln Plaza in their ritual for the last time. A final 
congregation at the Ciné-gogue. It’s a Shanda [shame].


It is unlikely that anything like the New Yorker or Lincoln Plaza will 
ever be launched on the Upper West Side again because real estate has 
become prohibitively expensive in Manhattan. In an article on the 
closing of Lincoln Plaza in the New Yorker magazine, film critic Richard 
Brody said that new theaters will likely be found downtown where real 
estate is still relatively affordable. But even there, the prospects are 
guarded as evidenced by the closing of Landmark Sunshine at 139 East 
Houston St. this month, which was sold for $31.5 million to East End 
Capital and K Property Group, who will presumably turn it into condos up 
above and a CVS or health club on the street level. With the 
proliferation of health clubs in NY and the demise of arthouses like 
Lincoln Plaza, we will end up with 6-pack bellies galore and plunging 
literacy.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/12/bitter-money-pow-wow/
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Re: [Marxism] SA-Canada statement on Iran

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On 1/12/18 11:25 AM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:


Very good. And puzzling given their hatred for all the other struggles in
the region.
https://socialistaction.org/2018/01/09/solidarity-with-the-workers-of-iran/


WSWS.org also supports the protests as does hard-core Assadist Mike 
Whitney. I think to some extent this reflects an orientation to the 
Ahmadinejad faction of the Islamic Republic. I have distinct memories of 
the crackpot Yoshie Furuhashi fulminating against Rouhani soon after he 
was elected.

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

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I should add that under ordinary circumstances I would have written 
something about Chibber's article myself but the edgy graphics of 
Jacobin made it impossible to read. I have problems with Chibber's prose 
to begin with but with cataracts in both eyes, that was a bridge too far.

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[Marxism] Fwd: History From Below

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Neil Davidson on Trotsky's history of the Russian revolution.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/leon-trotsky-russian-revolution-stalin-lenin
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[Marxism] Outside Cuba’s Revolution, Looking In

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NY Times, Jan. 12, 2018
Outside Cuba’s Revolution, Looking In
By J. HOBERMAN

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s “Memories of Underdevelopment,” shot in Cuba some 
50 years ago and showing for a week at Film Forum in an excellent 4K 
digital restoration, is a first-rate movie and a remarkable document — 
not least for the reception it first received in the United States.


“Memories” was adapted from Edmundo Desnoes’s novel, published in 
English as “Inconsolable Memories.” An ambivalent account of life in 
Castro’s Cuba, written in the first person, Mr. Desnoes’s 
post-revolutionary novel has affinities to pre-revolutionary Russian 
literature. His protagonist, Sergio, a 38-year-old Havana native, is 
neither for nor against the revolution. An indolent bourgeois living off 
the rent from a building his father — gone to Miami — left behind, he is 
what Turgenev might call “a superfluous man.”


Sergio imagines himself European, and as played by the urbane Sergio 
Corrieri, Alea’s protagonist reminded some of European actors like 
Marcello Mastroianni and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Contemptuous of those 
who have fled Cuba and indifferent to the Castro supporters around him, 
Sergio indulges in erotic reveries, entertaining fantasies about his 
maid and memories of a high school sweetheart.


Drifting into an affair with a flighty teenager, Elena (Daisy Granados), 
Sergio equates her lack of education with Cuba’s underdevelopment, 
taking her to museums that, in a particularly sardonic sequence, include 
Ernest Hemingway’s villa. Late in the movie, reality crashes in — first 
with the arrival of Elena’s irate family and second in the form of the 
October 1962 missile crisis.


While closely adapted from Mr. Desnoes’s novel, Alea’s film is greatly 
enriched by interpolated newsreel material. Sergio’s alienation is 
placed in the context of pre-revolutionary poverty and 
post-revolutionary political trials, as well the aftermath of the failed 
Bay of Pigs invasion. “Memories” is a very much a new wave film in its 
freewheeling mix of cinéma vérité-style hand-held street scenes and 
playful freeze frames. It is also self-referential: Sergio attends a 
round table discussion on revolutionary art in which one participant is 
Mr. Desnoes. (“What are you doing up there with that cigar?” Sergio 
wonders to himself.)


“Memories of Underdevelopment” had its world premiere at the Pesaro Film 
Festival in 1968 but would not be seen here until it was included in the 
1972 edition of the New Directors/New Films series, presented by the 
Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A month 
later, the print was seized by federal agents before it could be shown 
at a festival of new Cuban films that had already been disrupted by 
anti-Castro exiles.


The movie finally opened at a small cinema in May 1973; it received 
glowing reviews, including one by the New York Times critic Vincent 
Canby, as well as an award from the National Society of Film Critics. 
The Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris, speaking at an awards ceremony 
that the United States government denied Alea a visa to attend, hailed 
the director as a courageous dissident.


That Alea, who made numerous films in Cuba before his death in 1996, 
could be simultaneously a dangerous alien and a free-speech hero is a 
perverse tribute to his film’s nuanced politics. “Memories” is not only 
shot in black and white but also composed in shades of gray.

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[Marxism] Fwd: Trump, “Shitholes,” and the Nature of “Us” | The New Yorker

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By Masha Gessen

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-shitholes-and-the-nature-of-us
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Moral Economy of the Iranian Protests

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/iranian-protests-revolution-rouhani-ahmadinejad
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[Marxism] Fwd: Why Do Auto Workers Union Drives Keep Failing? A Rank-and-File View | Labor Notes

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http://labornotes.org/blogs/2018/01/why-do-auto-workers-union-drives-keep-failing-rank-and-file-view
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk

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(This is absurd. It was only galling to NY Post readers. Most New 
Yorkers were either in support of lowering the flag to half-mast or 
indifferent. I have no idea how old the author of this article is but 
her photo suggests that she is probably in her 30s. I was here in NYC 
when the hardhats protested in support of Nixon and can tell you that 
this merely reflected the mindset of a racist craft union. I am all for 
having a class perspective but not one that tries to justify bad behavior.)



In fact, all of the hardhat actions of May 1970 should be read in the 
context of specific fights with New York’s mayor. For one, he had called 
for flags in the city to be held at half-staff that day. During the 
final weeks of his campaign for re-election the previous fall, Lindsay 
had also called for flags to be lowered during the National Moratorium 
against the war, and in doing so had caused uproar across the city — the 
President was in charge of such actions, and for a mayor to interject 
such symbolism on the side of war protesters rather than the soldiers 
themselves was galling to thousands of New Yorkers. Six months later, 
the construction workers on Wall Street hoisted their own flags, and 
reset those at City Hall to full-staff.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/09/the-myth-of-the-hardhat-hawk
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[Marxism] Fwd: “We Don’t Consider You a Legitimate Journalist” — How I Got Blacklisted by the Pentagon’s Africa Command

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By Nick Turse.

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/13/we-dont-consider-you-a-legitimate-journalist-how-i-got-blacklisted-by-the-pentagons-africa-command/
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[Marxism] Fwd: 2793. The Islamic Republic's Endgame: On the Recent Protests in Iran

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By Kamran Nayeri.

Street protests that began in the northeastern city of Mashhad (pop. 2.8 
million) in Iran (pop. 80 million) on December 28 and spread to some 80 
cities, towns, and some villages, have been suppressed or otherwise 
ended by January 3 when the Revolution Guards (incorrectly translated as 
the Revolutionary Guards) were sent to the remaining trouble spots in 
Isfahan, Hamadan, and Lorestan to quell any protest.  At least 21 
protestors were killed and according a member of parliament more than 
3,500 have been jailed. On January 3, the government also organized 
demonstrations of tens of thousands of supporters of the Islamic 
Republic to politically isolate the protesters.  Meanwhile Internet 
access for selected regions was disrupted and access of the social 
messing site Telegraph with 40 million subscribers in Iran was cut off. 
Still, the protests have captured the imagination of many Iranians and 
the international community.


In what follows, I will outline some basic facts about these protests in 
section 1. These are collected from news articles and commentaries about 
the protests. However, much of these fails to place the protests in 
their historical context which includes the rise and demise of the 1979 
revolution and the role of Shi'ite clergy in it.  Sections 2 will deal 
with the histroical context, inclduing the role of the Shi'ite clergy. 
Section 3, will outline the counter revolutionary role of Ayatollah 
Khomeini and the Islamic Republic that destoryed the 1979 revolurion 
against Shah's autocracy by imposing a theocratic capitalist regime in 
its place, now opposed even in the urabn poor and some rural population. 
 In section 4, I will argue that the recent protest mark the begining 
of the end of the theocratic capitalist regime and suggest a way forward 
for the radicalizing youth and working people in Iran drawing on the 
histroical experience of Iranian people as well as the current social 
and ecological crisis in Iran and the world.


full: 
https://forhumanliberation.blogspot.com/2018/01/2793-islamic-republics-endgame-on.html

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[Marxism] Fwd: The Real Winston Churchill

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By Richard Seymour

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/winston-churchill-british-empire-colonialism/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The total Marx and the total theory of literature | MR Online

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https://mronline.org/2018/01/14/the-total-marx-and-the-total-theory-of-literature/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Rise of the Leninist Right

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(A really nutty article by a Turkish sociologist at Berkeley that echoes 
Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed's hostility to "divisive" social 
movements. In many ways, it is the same crap heard from the CPUSA in the 
mid 60s that blamed Malcolm X for "dividing the working class". It is 
also the same thing heard from Columbia professor Mark Lilla who yearns 
for a new New Deal that will push "identity politics" to the side. I 
find all of this deeply conservative.)



What was left-liberalism’s project? Although global in its causes and 
manifestations, left-liberalism found its purest expressions in the 
United States and Britain. The catchword was inclusion, which came to 
replace equality. Inspired by sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, the 
new Anglophone center (New Labor and Clintonism) focused on including 
more people at the table. Over three decades, inclusion increased in 
terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation — but the table itself 
shrank. So yes, Black and Latino men and women, even Muslims, got 
prominent positions at institutions they could previously hardly dream 
of; but the Black and Latino prison population in the US increased, as 
did the number of Muslims bombed, embargoed and starved by the United 
States.


full: http://isa-global-dialogue.net/the-rise-of-the-leninist-right/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trolling with the Fisher King | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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Paul Pines’s “Trolling with the Fisher King: Reimagining the Wound” is a 
work of staggering erudition and deep spiritual insights. This twilight 
memoir incorporates a lifetime of engagement with a wide variety of 
thought and deeds. Terrence’s words kept occurring to me as I read it: 
“I am human, and I think nothing that is human is alien to me.” Paul (I 
will use his first name since he is a friend as well as a writer under 
purview) weaves together as if orchestrated by a master conductor:


The legend of Parsifal, and particularly the version known as Parzival 
written by Wolfram von Eschenbach over 700 years ago, informs this book. 
The eponymous Fisher King is Anfortas, who was charged with the duty of 
preserving the Holy Grail. Known also as the wounded king for a wound in 
his groin that defied a cure, he became a symbol of the damaged psyche 
of a humanity taking many forms for Paul, including the post-traumatic 
stress of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/14/trolling-with-the-fisher-king/
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Re: [Marxism] Review of Wollff book from Britain

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On 1/14/18 3:31 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:


https://rdln.wordpress.com/2018/01/14/in-review-fire-and-fury-inside-trumps-madhouse/


I am not a big Weekly Worker fan but this is fucking brilliant.
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[Marxism] Fwd: You Don’t Need a Telescope to Find a ‘Shithole Country’

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Chris Hedges on El Salvador.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/dont-need-telescope-find-shithole-country/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Hasidic Question - Los Angeles Review of Books

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Review of a new book on the ultra-orthodox sects.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-hasidic-question/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Donald Trump, fascism, and steel industry realities | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

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Six days from now will mark the first year of Trump’s presidency. Given 
that we have had a year to evaluate his regime, there have been few 
attempts to grapple with its character. Since many Marxists have viewed 
Donald Trump as imposing neo-fascism on the USA, there have to be 
questions about how he has failed to impose any kind of serious 
repressive measures on the country. When I was first starting out as a 
radical in the 1960s, I was targeted as part of the Cointelpro program 
in an effort to either get me fired from my first programming job or 
perhaps so spooked that I would resign from the SWP. Can you imagine 
what would happen if the FBI pulled this kind of crap today? Of course, 
they don’t have time for that given the job they have investigating 
Trump’s Russian ties.


When I was a new member in 1968, one of the big questions I had to deal 
with was Nazism. Coming from a Jewish family that raised money for 
Israel through Hadassah, I was fairly close to the holocaust 
chronologically and psychologically. In my little village in upstate NY, 
it was not uncommon to see men and women come into my father’s fruit 
store with tattoos on the arm from their time in concentration camps. We 
used to call them the “refugees”.


Part of becoming a Marxist involved rejecting Zionism. But additionally, 
it involved trying to understand how and why Hitler came to power. Among 
the books that helped me to clarify my thinking was Daniel Guerin’s 
“Fascism and Big Business”, a Pathfinder book that can be read on Libcom 
apparently in defiance of the cult’s white-shoe attorneys. At the core 
of Guerin’s analysis was the argument that Nazism was backed by heavy 
industry against the class interests of the Fertigindustrie (finished 
goods industry), particularly the electrical goods and chemical 
industries. He writes:


	After the war the antagonism was particularly violent between the two 
groups-Stinnes and Thyssen, magnates of heavy industry, versus Rathenau, 
president of the powerful AEG (the General Electric Association). The 
Fertigindustrie rose up against the overlordship of heavy industry, 
which forced it to pay cartel prices for the raw materials it needed. 
Rathenau publicly denounced the dictatorship of the great metal and 
mining industries: just as medieval nobles had scoffed at the German 
Emperor and divided Germany into Grand Duchies, the magnates of heavy 
industry were dividing Germany into economic duchies “where they think 
only of coal, iron, and steel, and neglect, or rather absorb, the other 
industries.”


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/15/donald-trump-fascism-and-steel-industry-realities/

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[Marxism] The Oriental Jew

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The Oriental Jew clearly represents a problematic entity for European 
hegemony in Israel. Although Zionism collapses the Sephardim and the 
Ashkenazim into the single category of "one people," at the same time 
the Sephardi's  Oriental "difference" threatens the European ideal-ego 
which phantasizes Israel  as a prolongation of Europe "in" the Middle 
East, but not "of' it. Ben Gurion,  we may recall, formulated his 
visionary utopia for Israel as that of a "Switzerland  of the Middle 
East," while Herzl called for a Western-style capitalist-democratic 
miniature state, to be made possible by the grace of imperial patrons 
such as  England or even Germany. The leitmotif of Zionist texts is the 
cry to form a  "normal civilized nation," without the myriad 
"distortions" and forms of pariahdom typical of the Diaspora. (Zionist 
revulsion for shtetl "abnormalities," as  some commentators have pointed 
out, is often strangely reminiscent of the very  anti-Semitism it 
presumably so abhors.) The Ostjuden, perenially marginalized by Europe, 
realized their desire of becoming Europe, ironically, in the Middle 
East, this time on the back of their own "Ostjuden," the Eastern Jews. 
Having  passed through their own "ordeal of "ordeal of civility," as the 
"blacks" of Europe, they now imposed their civilizing tests on their own 
“Blacks”.


Ella Shohat, Social Text, 1988
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[Marxism] Fwd: "I Am Not Your Negro" on PBS tonight (Monday)

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James Baldwin documentary

Independent Lens on PBS

screening at 9PM in NYC

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/i-am-not-your-negro/
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