Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sharpening class contradictions
On Tue, 22 Jan 2002 04:28:40 + [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: G'day all, I'd written, Or shall we wrap the old list up and slip her quietly into the dustbin? Well, I think the eloquent silence with which this was greeted can't be ignored. If no-one on the list nominates for the position of list moderator within the week, I shall have to let Hans know Thaxis is sans moderator and, very possibly, sans raison d'etre. That raises the issue lie this once thriving list has seemed to have slipped into senescence and may well be ready to die a natural death. Long time subscribers may recall that this list is a continuation of the old Marxism-2 list which was founded by Lisa Rogers in reaction to the takeover of the original Spoon Collective's Marxism List by Maoists in 1995. About a year later, the Spoon Collective decided to break up its Marxism space into several lists including a Marxism-International List, Marxism-Thaxis, and a Marxism-and- Sciences List, as well as a Marxism-General List, a Marxism- Feminism List and I think a Marxism-News List as well. This situation lasted until 1998 when the Spoon Collective decided that it no longer wished to host any of the Marxism lists and they were spun off to their respective moderators, who generally sought and obtained hosting privelages elsewhere. The fates of these various lists has been quite diverse. One of the then most active lists was the Marxism-International List which was turned over to Louis Godena (who was probably the most articulate and erudite of the Maoists that had originally invaded the old Marxism List back in 1995). For quite a while that list retained its original vitality, until Godena and his co-moderator Adolfo Olaechea began to purge it of various ideological opponents. As a result many of its most active and interesting participants, if not purged, left on their own accord. As a result two new lists were formed, Louis Proyect's Marxmail List, and Doug Henwood's LBO-Talk List both of which continue to thrive to this day. In the mean time other list were formed as well. Jerry Levy who used to be quite active on Thaxis created his own specialized list that is devoted mainly to rather abstruse discussions of value theory. There is also the Progressive Economists List, which retains a certain vitality. So what happened to this list? This one too used to be quite lively, and for a long time it seemed to carry on more or less in the original spirit of the Marxism-2 list but in more recent times, it has become evident that list traffic has gone way down, and the list simply seems rather lifeless now. Why? I suspect the reason is simply that so many of the people who used to participate here are now most active on the other lists that I have mentioned. Levy used to be quite active here. I can't remember when the last time he ever posted here. And the same is true for most of the other former regulars here. Would different moderators have made a difference? Possibly, Proyect for whatever else one might say about him has been quite aggressive about promoting his list with the result that it has several hundred subscribers. The same can be said about Henwood's LBO-Talk, which also had the advantage of being associated with Henwood's well-known (in leftist circles) newsletter Left Business Observer. And there is also the sad example of Marxism-International which continues with no discernable purpose since the only people who post on it now a days is Godena and Olaechea, and then only at very infrequent intervals. On the other hand it may be that there was little that any moderator or group of moderator could have done about this situation. Back when Thaxis was founded there were only a bare handful of Marxist or left-oriented lists in cyberspace, now there are literally dozens if not hundreds of such lists. This is of course a good thing, since it suggests that there has been indeed a revival of interest in Marxism (after having been declared dead and buried in 1991). At the same time this makes it harder for any one list to thrive since there is now so many competing lists to which people can now choose to participate in. Jim F. All the best to all, Rob. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Pierre Bourdieu dies
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has died of cancer. For French readers his obituary in Le Monde (http://www.lemonde.fr/) can be found at (http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3246--259825-,00.html). Jim Farmelant GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Sidney Hook
Page URL: http://www.nationalpost.com/tech/story.html?f=/stories/20011217/93.ht ml December 17, 2001 Embarrassing early books Authors change course: Hook embraced communism, then anti-Stalinism Jeet Heer National Post During the Reagan presidency, the philosopher Sidney Hook was often celebrated as the venerable sage of anti-communism. Government officials such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, the UN ambassador, and George Shultz, the secretary of state, regularly wrote Hook fan letters, while Reagan conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in 1985. Hook never hid the fact that his thinking on communism had undergone a dramatic change, and that as a young man he had befriended Leon Trotsky. But he was uncomfortable enough with his communist past that he did not want people to read one of his best books, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, which will soon be available for the first time in more than 60 years. Just as writers of fiction are sometimes embarrassed by their early work, academics often wish the public would forget about their juvenalia. This is especially true if they change their minds about important issues. In 1933, Hook published his second book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death. As the subtitle indicates, Hook wrote the book as a committed supporter of revolutionary socialism, although he had already engaged in a series of disputes with the Communist Party that would ultimately lead him to become one of the leading U.S. anti-Stalinist thinkers. While Hook's book was attacked in the communist press, his original attempt to draw parallels between Marx and the American intellectual tradition of pragmatism earned praise from a wide variety of thinkers ranging from Harold Laski to Trotsky. Indeed, Trotsky, who was already in exile from the Soviet Union, read Hook's book with interest, filling his copy with scribbled notes and engaging in a public debate with Hook on the meaning of dialectics. Hook found Trotsky more congenial than the purblind and dogmatic American Communist Party, and spent the next three years supporting a variety of Trotskyist parties. By the late 1930s, largely as a result of the horrors of Stalin's purges, Hook became completely disillusioned with revolutionary politics and abandoned Trotsky as well. He became an anti-communist socialist, exactly the position he had frequently mocked in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. As Hook's status as an American anti-communist grew, he understandably wanted to distance himself from his youthful writings. During his lifetime, Hook resisted frequent requests to bring out a new edition. According to biographer Christopher Phelps, author of Young Sidney Hook (Cornell University Press, 1997), despite this act of self-suppression, Hook's book continued to have an underground existence. In the late 1960s, the International Socialist published a mimeograph, bootlegged reprint of the book. According to Phelps, in the early 1990s, another guerrilla edition was released by some radical with a scanner. Hooks' book continued to be admired by leftists thinkers as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Russell Jacoby. As Jacoby notes, unlike Hook's later and more polemical work, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was a genuine original contribution to philosophy. Phelps agrees. As a full-length work of philosophy, Hook never did anything comparable again, he says. Now, nearly seven decades after its first publication, Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx will again be available in an over-the-counter edition. Prometheus Books, founded by long-time Hook disciple Paul Kurtz, plans to reissue the book, with a historical introduction by Phelps. Phelps believes the book will help revive Hook's reputation, not only as a Marxist activist but also as a philosopher who made an important contribution to pragmatism. Partially because Hook allowed Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx to fall out of print, his original work in trying to link pragmatism with continental philosophy has been forgotten. Thus in Louis Menand's recent book The Metaphysical Club, a voluminous history of pragmatism, Sidney Hook goes entirely unmentioned, even though he was one John Dewey's favorite students. Sidney Hook is not the only intellectual who has had to grapple with the issue of an embarrassing early work. In 1986, Michael Allen Fox, a philosopher at Queen's University, published The Case for Animal Experimentation, a book that drew on a variety of moral traditions to argue for maintaining the ethical distinction between humans and animals. Not surprisingly, the book was savaged by animal-rights activists. What was unexpected was the fact that Fox was won over by his hostile reviewers. The more I read of my critics, the more I came to the conclusion that the difference between humans and animals is of degrees, not kind, Fox now says. Speciesism is
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Debuting as moderator
The interesting thing will be see if the Argentinian crisis spills across its border, and spreads to the rest of Latin America. The US media has up to now been strongly insistant that this crisis is purely Argentinian, and that there is little danger of it spreading. I am far from being any sort of expert on Latin American economics, but that seems to strain credibility to me. After all the same bourgeois media, has up to now been just as strongly insistant upon the reality and importance of economic interdependence between countries, and certainly Argentina's economy is closely intertwined with that of her neighbors. And of course Argentina is hardly alone in being victimized by IMF policies which (with the connivance of her own economic and political elites) forced an agenda of privatization and marketization down the throats of the Argentinian masses. So why should we expect the crisis to remain confined within Argentina's borders? Jim F. On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 18:09:08 +1100 Rob Schaap [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: G'day all, So what's behind this. Where is Rob? Still here, comrade. Just too pressed to meet cyber-obligations is all. As for Jim's references to Argentina; I'm of the opinion the economy has been bled white. Gone are the public monopolies and cushioned middle class that might have afforded an economic and social stability that might survive the genuinely starvation-inducing policies needed to service debt and attract fdis. Gone is a fiscal base for government-sponsored recovery (and public debt stands at around $14 billion, anyway). Gone is faith in free market economics in general. Gone is faith in Uncle Sam. Gone is any residue of pan-Latin sentiment (Brazil's 1999 devaluation hit Argentina and its IMF-US$-pegged currency hard). Long gone is faith in the army (which has not spawned a wannabe saviour in any event). Look out for nationalist, corporatist, paternalist, isolationist, xenophobic, sentimentalist reaction, though. Unlike modern lefties, those people really know how to organise around opportunities like this. Which is seriously important, because Argentina is but one in a queue ... Cheers, Rob. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Israel peace lobby grows; defies expectations
Published on Sunday, February 17, 2002 in the Observer of London Israel's Growing Peace Lobby Widens Rifts in Sharon's Ranks by Graham Usher The peace movement in Israel is gathering momentum again in defiance of expectations. Thousands took part in a rally in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square last night to demand that the government withdraw from the occupied territories even as yet another explosion devastated a shopping centre in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank. The demonstration was the largest by Israel's peace movement since Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister a year ago. It represents another breach in the so-called 'consensus of fear' he has marshalled behind his military solutions for ending the Palestinian intifada. Last night Sari Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian official, told the rally of 20,000 that Yasser Arafat remained committed to the idea of a Palestinian state living in peace beside Israel. In January, 52 Israeli reserve officers publicly refused to serve in the occupied territories. Insisting that they were 'raised on Zionism and ready to serve in the defence of Israel', they vowed 'not to continue to fight beyond the Green Line [Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank and Gaza] for the purpose of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people'. A month later, their ranks have swelled to 231, with polls showing 26 per cent of the Israeli public supporting them, a colossally high figure in a political culture where the refusal to serve is often equated with treason. It is not difficult to fathom the cause of Sharon's decline in support. 'No Israeli seriously believed by electing Sharon it would bring peace. But they did believe he would deliver security. He hasn't,' said Lily Galili, who covers the Russian community for the liberal Haaretz . Instead, according to Israel's chief of police, Shlomo Aharonishky, he has brought 'a year of violence and terror the likes of which we have not seen in the history of the state'. Last week the Islamist Hamas movement fired two home-made rockets into Israel, despite warnings from Sharon that such an 'escalation' would be deemed 'an act of war'. He responded by dispatching F-16 fighter jets to drop 1,000lb bombs on Gaza City (home to about 500,000 Palestinians) and tanks to reconquer areas in the Gaza Strip controlled by the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, pledged that the army would stay until there was no more risk of rocket fire. But 24 hours later the forces left, with officers and politicians admitting the invasions had resulted in neither the capture of those who fired the missiles nor the disabling of their capacity to do so. On Thursday, Palestinian guerrillas killed three Israeli soldiers in Gaza by blowing up a tank with a roadside bomb, as 'sophisticated' and deadly as those once planted by Hizbollah against Israel in Lebanon, said army officials. In retaliation, Israeli aircraft bombed a Palestinian Authority police post and tanks entered Gaza's Bureij refugee camp, killing two Palestinians and leaving 33 injured, including a four-year-old girl. Within hours a Palestinian rocket was again fired from Gaza into Israel. Yesterday a leading Hamas activist was killed when his car exploded in the West Bank town of Jenin. Hamas said it was an Israeli assassination and vowed revenge. Hours later two Israelis died and 27 were injured when a suicide bomber exploded his device among diners in a pizza restaurant favoured by teenagers in the settlement of Karnei Shomron, 24 miles north-east of Tel Aviv. This endless cycle of armed combat is not the only reminder of Lebanon. Last week the Palestinian death toll from the intifada reached 1,000, 248 of whom have been children. The Israeli death toll reached 256. As Israeli analysts noted, this is the same number of Israelis who lost their lives during Israel's post-1985 occupation of southern Lebanon. The difference is the Lebanon war lasted 15 years, and most of the Israeli casualties were soldiers. The intifada has lasted 15 months, with the death toll including 164 Israeli civilians. If the 'national consensus' behind Sharon is starting to fracture, so too is the consensus of the Israeli peace camp. For years movements like Peace Now - which called last night's demonstration - made full withdrawal from the occupied territories conditional on a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But many among the protesting reservist officers - as well as new grassroots movements, like 'The Green Line - students for a border', are championing more unilateralist solutions. 'They believe the priority for Israel is to leave the occupied territories, with or without an agreement with the Palestinians,' said Arie Arnon, a leader of Peace Now. He said the call for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal was gaining ground within the peace movement and Israeli society, akin to the protest movement that helped pull Israel out of Lebanon. Noam
[Marxism-Thaxis] Alan Carling's reply
- Forwarded message -- From: Alan Carling [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jim Farmelant [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 18:30:04 + Subject: Re: Selectionism: Me, Popper, and Hayek Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: from mx6.boston.juno.com (mx6.boston.juno.com [64.136.24.38]) by m11.boston.juno.com with SMTP id AAA8DGWPXAZYQPLJ for [EMAIL PROTECTED] (sender [EMAIL PROTECTED]); Wed, 2 Jan 2002 13:30:13 -0500 (EST) Received: from hydrogen.cen.brad.ac.uk (hydrogen.cen.brad.ac.uk [143.53.238.3]) by mx6.boston.juno.com with SMTP id AAA8DGWPXAUHFBLJ for [EMAIL PROTECTED] (sender [EMAIL PROTECTED]); Wed, 2 Jan 2002 13:30:13 -0500 (EST) Received: from acarling.brad.ac.uk (max-33.dial.brad.ac.uk [143.53.239.33]) by hydrogen.cen.brad.ac.uk (8.11.3/8.11.3) with SMTP id g02IUBY05895 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 2 Jan 2002 18:30:11 GMT X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.6 (32) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-Path: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In-Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dear Jim, I was very pleased to receive your perceptive message, especially as it was apparently sent on Christmas morning (Maybe you were trying sensibly to escape from the festivities!). The questions you pose are very pertinent ones, to which I don't have any very satisfactory answers. As you will have gathered, I reached the position that the only plausible version of historical materialism is a selectionist one through an engagement with Jerry Cohen's work, and Analytical Marxism more generally. It was only subsequent to that realisation/discovery that I saw a parallel with the work of the 'bourgeois' social selectionists you mention. I think Dennett is wonderful on the general power of the selectionist paradigm, Dawkins is always interesting, and Blackmore is slightly derivative. The 'meme' idea I do not find especially persuasive however, and by far the most impressive of the bourgeois selectionists in my view is W.G.Runciman. I'm in the middle of writing a critique of his Treatise on Social Theory, and I'd be happy to send you a copy when it's finished if you are interested. Although I've obviously known about Popper and Hayek in general terms for a long time, I've only recently appreciated their direct relevance, and I don't know enough about them to answer your question. It may be that my gardening is not all that different from Popper's piecemeal social engineering, and I will no doubt have to give this issue serious attention in any book that appears. The final set of questions you pose seem to me the central ones for any 21st Century egalitarian. My worry is essentially this: if Competitive Primacy is true (as I now think may be the case), do there exist egalitarian alternatives to capitalism which are capable of competitive survival against it? If the answer to this question is 'No', then (successful) Marxist theory has (ironically, or tragically) ruled out Marxian politics, and the Marxist/socialist/enlightenment egalitarian project is dead in the water. So I have a considerable personal and intellectual investment in the answer being 'Yes', and I regard the various market socialist proposals as promising candidates in this respect. But even if one or other of these proposed solutions could survive in the globally-competitive environment created by contemporary capitalism, can it be brought into existence by intentional political action? My impression is that the exponents of market socialism do not generally engage with this crucial question of transition (which brings Popper back into the frame). The problem is that revolutionary socialists had (a few still have!) a dogmatically-held and ultimately indefensible (though personally sustaining) set of answers to this question, centred around the proletariat, the party apparatus, and their favourite version of Leninism (or Trotskyism). Analytical Marxists and others have rightly abandoned the dogmatism and Leninism, but they haven't elaborated any alternative theory of political agency. Neither have I, but this is the problem on which my sights are now set firmly. I would hope to say something useful about it in the book. The fundamental point is that the theory of political agency (whatever it is) must be woven from the same cloth as the theory of social evolution, since to act politically is to intervene in the reproduction of social structures. Perhaps I could close by asking some questions of you. You are obviously very knowledgeable about the debates. Do you work in an academic context? If so (or even if not), where are you located? And how did your own interest in all this arise? Happy New Year Alan PS. Do you know about the journal Imprints, in which these issues are debated from time to time? (www.imprints.org.uk
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Nash: A Beautiful Mind
On Sun, 03 Mar 2002 17:58:06 + Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Has any one seen any discussion around this film that might illuminate his attitude of mind here, or has anyone read the biography by Sylvia Nasar? I doubt very much that there was any conscious influence of marxism - rather the reverse - but his Nobel Prize appears to have been of a type that that was a forerunner of complexity theory - seeing more complicated patterns than common sense at first perceives, in the interaction of animals, birds, homo economicus. (In fact his contribution undermined the original crudities of purely selfish game theory in economics.) It should be noted that game theory that the Analytic Marxists, especially the economist John Roemer and the social scientist Jon Elster have attempted to use game theory for the purpose of elucidating certain Marxian concepts. For example, Roemer has sought to develop a theory of exploitation based on game theoretic concepts that would replace Marx's labor theory of value. Analytic Marxists have attempted to use game theory for understanding how and under what conditions class solidarity and class consciousness can develop. Even those Marxists of a more orthodox inclination (than the Analytic Marxists) have found game theory to be useful for such things as elucidating Marx's law of falling profit rates. Jim F. The idea of a scarcely visible crystalline architecture to the universe, and also of dramatic changes if we can only glimse it has something in common with marxism, and if you agree with the marxist analysis, the actual structure of the universe. It is also possibly consistent with Roy Bhaskar's theory of layering. The vulnerability of human beings to schizophrenic breakdowns may be linked among other things to an openness to these mysteries, which can also lead the individual to have a shaky hold on conventional social reality. Chris Burford London ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/; ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Home Page for Dr. Anwar Shaikh
http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/ Dr. Anwar Shaikh is a leading contemporary Marxist economist, who teaches at the New School. Much of his research has been concerned with such issues as the transformation problem in Marxist economics, empirical and theoretical studies of the law of falling profit rates, he has attempted to show how a Marxian-inspired model can provide a more powerful explanation of inflation than the standard neoclassical and Keynesian models. Dr. Shaikh is also noted for his studies of Marx as a classical economist in relation to Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Jim F. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Coup in Venezuela: an eyewitness account (posted on WSN)
Please spread the word far and wide and call your foreign ministry or the U.S. State Department and tell them not to recognize the new government of Venezuela. Chavez has not resigned! According to people I spoke to this morning, who work close to Chavez, he is being held against his will by the military, who are claiming he has resigned, when he has not. Isolate the new government of Venezuela, so as to support democracy everywhere! Coup in Venezuela: An Eyewitness Account By Gregory Wilpert The orchestration of the coup was impeccable and, in all likelihood, planned a long time ago. Hugo Chavez, the fascist communist dictator of Venezuela could not stand the truth and thus censored the media relentlessly. For his own personal gain and that of his henchmen (and henchwomen, since his cabinet had more women than any previous Venezuelan government's), he drove the country to the brink of economic ruin. In the end he proceeded to murder those who opposed him. So as to reestablish democracy, liberty, justice, and prosperity in Venezuela and so as to avoid more bloodshed, the chamber of commerce, the union federation, the church, the media, and the management of Venezuela's oil company, in short: civil society and the military decided that enough is enough--that Chavez had his chance and that his experiment of a 'peaceful democratic Bolivarian revolution' had to come to an immediate end. This is, of course, the version of events that the officials now in charge and thus also of the media, would like everyone to believe. So what really happened? Of course I don t know, but I'll try to represent the facts as I witnessed them. First of all, the military is saying that the main reason for the coup is what happened today, April 11. 'Civil society,' as the opposition here refers to itself, organized a massive demonstration of perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 people to march to the headquarters of Venezuela's oil company, PDVSA, in defense of its fired management. The day leading up to the march all private television stations broadcast advertisements for the demonstration, approximately once every ten minutes. It was a successful march, peaceful, and without government interference of any kind, even though the march illegally blocked the entire freeway, which is Caracas main artery of transportation, for several hours. Supposedly at the spur of the moment, the organizers decided to re-route the march to Miraflores, the president's office building, so as to confront the pro-government demonstration, which was called in the last minute. About 5,000 Chavez-supporters had gathered there by the time the anti-government demonstrators got there. In-between the two demonstrations were the city police, under the control of the oppositional mayor of Caracas, and the National Guard, under control of the president. All sides claim that they were there peacefully and did not want to provoke anyone. I got there just when the opposition demonstration and the National Guard began fighting each other. Who started the fight, which involved mostly stones and tear gas, is, as is so often the case in such situations, nearly impossible to tell. A little later, shots were fired into the crowds and I clearly saw that there were three parties involved in the shooting, the city police, Chavez supporters, and snipers from buildings above. Again, who shot first has become a moot and probably impossible to resolve question. At least ten people were killed and nearly 100 wounded in this gun battle--almost all of them demonstrators. One of the Television stations managed to film one of the three sides in this battle and broadcast the footage over and over again, making it look like the only ones shooting were Chavez supporters from within the demonstration at people beyond the view of the camera. The media over and over again showed the footage of the Chavez supporters and implied that they were shooting at an unarmed crowd. As it turns out, and as will probably never be reported by the media, most of the dead are Chavez supporters. Also, as will probably never be told, the snipers were members of an extreme opposition party, known as Bandera Roja. These last two facts, crucial as they are, will not be known because they do not fit with the new mythology, which is that Chavez armed and then ordered his supporters to shoot at the opposition demonstration. Perhaps my information is incorrect, but what is certain is that the local media here will never bother to investigate this information. And the international media will probably simply ape what the local media reports (which they are already doing). Chavez' biggest and perhaps only mistake of the day, which provided the last remaining proof his opposition needed for his anti-democratic credentials, was to order the black-out of the private television stations. They had been broadcasting the confrontations all afternoon and Chavez argued that these broadcasts were exacerbating the situation
[Marxism-Thaxis] Chavez did not resign
AFP. 12 April 2002. Chavez did not resign, his last education minister, daughter say. CARACAS -- Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez did not resign but was taken prisoner, his last education minister said Friday. Chavez told the military staff he was not resigning, that they could go ahead with their coup and take responsibility for it, said Aristobulo Isturiz, who was with Chavez at the Miraflores presidential palace until he was taken to Fort Tiuna base, just hours after the elected leftist president's government collapsed. They took him away under arrest, Isturiz said, denying press reports Chavez was in hiding and that authorities were searching for him. Meanwhile Chavez's daughter Maria Gabriela Chavez told Cuban television from Caracas that her father at no time has resigned, at no time has he signed a presidential decree dismissing vice president Diosdado Cabello, much less resigned himself; some military staff simply went and arrested him. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Venezuelan officials charge Chavez ousted in coup.
AFP. 12 April 2002. Venezuelan officials charge Chavez ousted in coup. CARACAS -- Venezuela's comptroller general and attorney general Friday charged president Hugo Chavez was pressured out of power in a coup d'etat. We are in a situation of a coup d'etat that has taken place in Venezuela. Constitutional order has been interrupted, comptroller Clodosvaldo Russian, still on the job, told reporters at a press conference in his office. Under the country's constitution, if the president resigns he is supposed to be replaced by the vice president or if that is impossible, the speaker of the National Assembly, which has not taken place. Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez said the president has not resigned, we have not seen any clear evidence of any such resignation, and President Chavez continues to be the president of Venezuela. Rodriguez complained that Chavex was being held incomunicado and that his office has not been permitted to contact Chavez. This is a situation in which there is a total and absolute violation of the inter-American Human Rights Convention, he said. If he is being deprived of his personal freedom, what crimes did he commit? Is the resignation a crime... and if he resigned, and that is a crime, why is it that my office is not being permitted to interview him, in violation of his civil rights, the attorney general asked. Chavez told the military staff he was not resigning, that they could go ahead with their coup and take responsibility for it, said Aristobulo Isturiz, the education minister who was with Chavez at the Miraflores presidential palace until he was taken to Fort Tiuna base, just hours after his government collapsed. They took him away under arrest, Isturiz said, denying press reports the elected leftist former paratrooper was in hiding and that authorities were searching for him. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Coup in Venezuela:
On Fri, 12 Apr 2002 19:52:11 +0100 Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: At 12/04/02 11:29 -0400, you wrote: Coup in Venezuela: It sounds as if by yesterday the battle was lost. How could the risk of this fall have been avoided? I am not sure that there is much that Chavez or his supporters could have done about it. One could cite a whole list of mistakes that Chavez made while in power, but I suspect that even if he had governed flawlessly, the coup would still have happened, sooner or later, since his regime was one which challenged US hegemony in Latin America, and that is something that the US government will simply not tolerate. WIth the fall of the Soviet Union, there is simply no great power that is able and willing to lend support to populist-nationalist regimes like that of Chavez. Castro's regime in Cuba was able to consolidate itself and survive because it had the USSR there backing it up with military and economic aid. The Sandanistas too in the 1980s had at least for a while Soviet (as well as Cuban) aid but by then the Soviet Union was already turning capitalist, and eventually the Soviets betrayed Nicaragua for the sake of better relations with the US. When that happened, the Sandanistas were doomed. Now there is only Cuba that is willing to put itself on a limb to support anti-hegemonic regimes like Chavez's. But Cuba by itself it simply too poor and weak to buck the US. Reportedly, the European Union is upset over the overthrow of Chavez, but it seems most unlikely that they would go to the mat with the US over this. Jim F. Chris Burford ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] (Fwd) Risk reduction policies
Posted on the A-List --- Forwarded message follows --- From: Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Risk reduction policies Date sent: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 01:21:02 -0300 The only way to reduce the risk of imperialist coups is, from the point of view of someone in London, to organize in order to forestall the coup from within the belly of the beast. I can't give you a recipe, Chris. Nor to anyone. But this general truth is the only valid answer short of requesting that you overthrow your bourgeois governments as soon as possible. And, keep an eye on Argentinean elections, which will take place on 2003 if not earlier. There is a good probability that we give you still another reason to clog the war machines there. Hope so. --- End of forwarded message --- Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Compañeros del exercito de los Andes. ...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos: sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres, y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios: seamos libres, y lo demás no importa nada... Jose de San Martín, 27 de julio de 1819. * GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Venezuelan Slums Seethe at Chavez's Overthrow.
- Forwarded message -- Reuters 13 April 2002 Venezuelan Slums Seethe at Chavez's Overthrow. CARACAS -- The sprawling slums of Venezuela's capital seethed with rage on Saturday at the military coup that toppled populist President Hugo Chavez as his political backers struggled to regroup and organize protests. A wildly gesticulating group surrounded a Reuters crew at a market in the grimy working-class neighborhood of Petare, shouting that they would fight back. There's going to be a civil war here. The people are going to rise up, yelled Antonio Orellana, 65. With the fiery former paratrooper in military custody, his supporters said they would try to take their seats in the National Assembly for a scheduled session on Monday even though the new military-backed interim government has decreed the parliament's abolition. We say this is a coup d'etat and that it is a lie that Chavez has resigned, said Willian Lara, who had been president of the National Assembly, talking to Reuters by telephone from a hiding place. He said he feared for his safety and that he had narrowly escaped arrest. There has been no word whether Chavez has been charged with a crime, but he was arrested and taken to a Caracas military base on Friday and has been kept incommunicado. Lara said he had since been transferred to the Caribbean island of La Orchila, but no military spokesman confirmed this. The United States, which had long been irritated by Chavez's friendship with Cuba and worried about his control of the world's fourth-largest oil-exporting nation, has said that it does not consider his overthrow a coup. Instead it blamed his government for triggering its own downfall by ordering gunmen to fire on Thursday's protest. Venezuela is now a deeply divided country. Those who toppled him are thinking, decent people. It's the will of the people which was legitimized by the military action, said Adolfo Freites, a 49-year-old lawyer, speaking to Reuters in an elegant square in Caracas' upscale Altamira district, an anti-Chavez bastion. But in the slums surrounding Caracas, spreading over dusty hillsides, Chavez is more of a hero than ever. Local news media, which are passionately anti-Chavez, have largely ignored the reaction of Venezuela's poor majority. What's going to happen to us humble, poor people? President Chavez helped us. The country is divided between rich and poor, said Jose Delgado, a 45-year-old cobbler. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] question
On Sat, 13 Apr 2002 13:25:49 -0400 Gail Rowe [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: source of the revolution won't be televised? From the song by Gil-Scott Heron, a great rap song before hip-hop even started. Also, one of the best political songs of the last forty years. Jim F. __ Gil Scott-Heron's Lyrics to Revolution Will Not Be Televised You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother. There will be no pictures of you and Willie May pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run, or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance. NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process. There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving For just the proper occasion. Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be right back after a message bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live. - --- GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Interim Venezuelan president seeks protection in military fort: official.
AFP (with additional material by Reuters). 13 April 2002. Interim Venezuelan president seeks protection in military fort: official. CARACAS -- Venezuela's interim president, Pedro Carmona, opted for the protection of a military fort in Caracas Saturday, leaving the presidential palace, which was surrounded by thousands of protesting supporters of ousted president Hugo Chavez, the administration spokesman said. (Carmona) is protected within Fort Tiuna, Jesus Briceno told Union Radio from the presidental palace. That is the same fort where Chavez was held Friday. Earlier, several dozen Venezuelan soldiers at a barracks opposite Miraflores presidential palace raised their weapons and berets and hailed a crowd backing overthrown President Hugo Chavez as provisional government ministers fled the palace on Saturday. A Reuters journalist inside the palace accompanied a minister of the government which took power after Friday's coup as officials fled through a tunnel. The newly appointed transitional president, Pedro Carmona, was at military headquarters elsewhere in Caracas, officials said. The group of soldiers visible at balconies and windows at the barracks waved as the crowd of several thousand pro-Chavez protesters shouted Victory, victory for the people! Two soldiers standing guard at the palace gates also waved to the crowd. At one point a group of about six soldiers left the barracks and posted a Venezuelan flag outside, drawing wild cheers from the crowd. Meanwhile, Chavez was taken Saturday to the Caribbean island of La Orchila, off Venezuela's coast, his daughter Maria Gabriela Chavez told a Cuban television station by telephone. Speaking from Venezuela and citing very good sources, Chavez said they are harassing him, treating him badly. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Vice president will lead Venezuela; assembly head
AFP. 13 April 2002. Vice president will lead Venezuela; assembly head. CARACAS -- The president of Venezuela's newly-restored National Assembly, William Lara, said vice president Diosdado Cabello will become interim president until ousted leader Hugo Chavez can officially resign before the legislature. Earlier, the current interim leader, business executive Pedro Carmona, reinstated the legislature after Venezuela's army commander said that was a condition of the army's support for his regime. It was not immediately clear what Lara's announcement would mean for Carmona, who left the Miraflores presidential palace for a refuge in the Fort Tiuna military base after the palace was surrounded by thousands of Chavez supporters. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Chavez supporters negotiating his release so he can return to office: assembly president
AFP. 13 April 2002. Chavez supporters negotiating his release so he can return to office: assembly president. CARACAS -- Ousted president Hugo Chavez is being held prisoner at Turiamo naval base outside Caracas, and supporters are negotiating his release so he can return to office, William Lara, the president of Venezuela's newly-restored National Assembly, said Saturday. We are waiting for Vice President Diosdado Cabello to come to the Miraflores presidential palace, which should happen as soon as possible, so that he can assume the functions of president temporarily. This interval of time will be used for negotiations with the group of military officeers who are holding Chavez prisoner, to gain his liberty, Lara said on YVKE World radio. Lara said he was at the palace together with ministers from Chavez's cabinet, after tens of thousands of Chavez supporters surrounded the palace and interim president Pedro Carmona sought protection at a military fort. At least 200,000 people have come spontaneously to demand Chavez's liberation, Lara said of the gathering outside the palace. The legitimacy of the national institutions usurped by Pedro Carmona has been re-established, he added. Carmona earlier reinstituted the assembly and said Chavez could leave the country for the destination of his choice, after military leaders set those steps as two of 12 conditions for their support of Carmona's government. In a few moments or in a few hours he will leave the country as he desires, Carmona told the US news network CNN. In Havana, the Cuban government offered to give Chavez refuge. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Control of Venezuela's government in doubt.
AFP. 13 April 2002. Control of Venezuela's government in doubt. CARACAS -- With supporters of ousted president Hugo Chavez in control of the presidential palace and the interim leader who replaced him under military protection, it was unclear who was running Venezuela late Saturday even as three people died in violent protests. Interim leader Pedro Carmona sought refuge in a military fort as tens of thousands of angry Chavez supporters marched on the Miraflores palace. Carmona then reinstated the National Assembly, just a day after dissolving it, as military leaders made that a condition of their continued support and the Organization of American States threatened sanctions to punish what most hemispheric leaders called a coup. The assembly's president, William Lara, then announced that Chavez supporters were negotiating his return to office. We are waiting for Vice President Diosdado Cabello to come to the Miraflores presidential palace, which should happen as soon as possible, so that he can assume the functions of president temporarily. This interval of time will be used for negotiations with the group of military officers who are holding Chavez prisoner, to gain his liberty, Lara said on YVKE World radio. Lara, speaking from the presidential palace where he was with ministers from Chavez's cabinet, said Chavez was being held prisoner at Turiamo naval base outside Caracas. Carmona, for his part, said Chavez would be free to leave the country for the destination of his choice, another of the 12 conditions set by military leaders in exchange for their continued support. As Chavez supporters across Venezuela voiced their outrage at his ouster, near-anarchy reigned in some sectors, eyewitnesses said. At least three people were shot dead in Caracas, and at least eighteen people were wounded, doctors and humanitarian workers said. Among the wounded were Chavez supporters who said they were shot at while demonstrating near the Miraflores presidential palace. At least 200,000 people have come spontaneously to demand Chavez's liberation, Lara said of the gathering outside the palace. The legitimacy of the national institutions usurped by Pedro Carmona has been re-established. Continued disturbances were feared as armed Chavez supporters roamed the streets of Caracas and other cities, especially Maracay, 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the west, and Guarenas, 30 kilometers (20 miles) to the east. Army Commander General Efrain Vasquez, claiming to speak for other military leaders, read reporters a 12-point list of conditions the Carmona government would have to meet if it desired the military's continued backing. Restoration of democratic institutions and constitutional civil guarantees topped the list, followed by security for Chavez and his family and permission for them to leave Venezuela as soon as possible. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Collapsing coup?
Regardless of how the Venezuelan coup eventually plays out, today's events are certainly going to provide much grist for our analytic mills. Doesn't the following reming people of the events of 1945 in Argentina when elements of the military attempted to oust Juan Peron from his cabinet posts but was restored to power following days of massive protests by labor groups? Jim Farmelant --- Reuters. 13 April 2002. Chavez Deputy Says Assumes Venezuelan Presidency. CARACAS -- As Venezuela's one-day old interim government struggled to keep its grip on power on Saturday, the former deputy of ousted leader Hugo Chavez said he was temporarily assuming the country's presidency. I, Diosdado Cabello, am assuming the presidency until such time as the president of the republic, Hugo Chavez Frias, appears, Cabello, who served as vice president until Chavez was overthrown in a military coup on Friday, told local Union Radio. Institutional order will be restored and is being restored at this moment, he said. GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Karl Popper and Analytical Marxism
The following is an e-mail that I sent to Alan Carling of Bradford University. I haven't received any response from him as of yet, but maybe people on this list might wish to comment. Jim Farmelant - Alan, I have recently been reading Malachi Hacohen's book *Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945* and that has led me to ponder a bit the influence of Popper on Analytic Marxism. Some of the key texts of AM such as Jerry Cohen's *Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence* and Jon Elster's *Making Sense of Marx* have no references to Popper in them but one cannot help thinking that these books were written directly or indirectly in response to Popper's criticisms of Marxism. In particular Elster's book with its espousal of methodological individualism and its contention that much of what is worthwhile in Marx stems from his use of a methodological individualism seems very Popperian in character. In fact, one cannot help thinking that perhaps Elster was attempting to create a kind of Marxism that would have been acceptable to Popper. Jerry Cohen likewise makes no reference to Popper ( he does refer to the logical positivists, to whom Popper was opposed) in his book, but it would appear that he was among other things attempting to recast historical materialism in such a form as to rebut Popper's charge that it could not be branded as unfalsifiable and hence unscientific or pseudoscientific. It is also noteworthy that many of the Analytical Marxists have seemed to share views concerning dialectics that were similar to the ones that Popper espoused in his essay What is Dialectic? Like Popper, they are skeptical of the dialectics of nature, and indeed of most Hegelian or Hegelianized formulations of dialectics and its relations with formal logic, history, and the natural sciences. And Popper's contention that most of what is valid and uselful in dialectics can be reduced to the method of trial and error, that is to what we can call selectionism, looks a great deal like your own viewpoint. And indeed over time Popper became increasingly committed to expanding reliance upon selectionist explanatory models, so that his selectionism not only encompassed his philosophy of science (conjecture refutation model), but also his epistemology (which became known as evolutionary epistemology), his political philosophy (the open society allows selectionism to operate at the social and political levels in a non-lethal, non-violent manner), his philosophy of history (he seems to have held a selectionist evolutionist view of history, similar to Hayek's), and even to his cosmology. Jim Farmelant Dear Jim As you will have gathered, I reached the position that the only plausible version of historical materialism is a selectionist one through an engagement with Jerry Cohen's work, and Analytical Marxism more generally. It was only subsequent to that realisation/discovery that I saw a parallel with the work of the 'bourgeois' social selectionists you mention. I am a bit surprised by that since I had read Dawkins' *The Selfish Gene* long before I say your SCIENCE SOCIETY article back in 1993, and I had read one or two books (whose titles now escape me) on social evolutionism which approached it from a selectionist standpoint. And I was also familiar with BF Skinner's radical behaviorism which attempted to develop a selectionist account of operant learning. Skinner also BTW proposed a selectionist account of social evolutionism too - see his 1981 paper - Selection by Consequences. Science, 213, 501-504. Also see online (http://www.psych.nwu.edu/~garea/table.html http://www.bfsr.org/element1.html). And I had a slight familiarity with Popper's evolutionary epistemology which is selectionist. So I was (and am) a bit surprised that none of these people got mentioned at least in passing in your 1993 article. Thanks for the Skinner reference. I suppose it is a bit surprising that I was so ignorant, but this sadly is the truth of the matter. I am sure that the fact that evolutionary ideas were in the air in the 70s and 80s had an impact on the way Cohen formulated his ideas, and thus on my reception of Marxist theory. But you must remember that the Selfish Gene was off-limits for any self-respecting leftist and/or social scientist at that time (at least in any circles with which I had contact. Your intellectual environment sounds more balanced). It was simply assumed (without adequate justification, of course) that sociobiology and all its works was both facile and dangerous. I didn't actually open the Selfish Gene until the 90s, and when I did, I was intrigued that it wasn't nearly as bad as I had imagined, and contained that fascinating final 'meme' chapter which says a lot of the things that social scientists would want to say against reductionist sociobiology
[Marxism-Thaxis] Sam Pawlett on Confessions of a Philosopher
- Forwarded message -- From: Sam Pawlett [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 10:40:45 -0700 Subject: Confessions of a Philosopher Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.502p1997 This is an intellectual autobiography written by one of the best and most well known philosophers working outside the academy. A better title may have been My Philosophical Development as the book contains little autobiography understood in the traditional sense and a lot of exegesis and some original thinking on Magee's favorite philosophers (mostly Kant, Schopenhauer and Popperhis own philosophy a confused amalgam of these three as well as with Fabian Socialism) Magee can lay claim to being one of the last professional public philosophers left in the world, trying desperately to revive or continue a tradition that has over the course of history produced the best philosophers with the exception of Kant and a few others. The fact that Magee never earned a doctorate yet has been a fellow of Yale, Cambridge and Oxford universities speaks for his abilities (or for his social circle). Readers may find Magee arrogant, elitist and self-absorbed but much of this goes with the genre of autobiography. The title of this book is an interesting one, for Confessions was the name of St. Augustine's masterpiece. August company indeed. The book is touted as an introduction to the major dozen or so philosophers of the Western tradition as well as some of the trends within analytic philosophy such as logical positivism and linguistic philosophy, the two traditions that Magee was educated in and has subsequently rebelled against. Given the genre Magee is writing in, his treatments of these philosophers is necessarily incomplete containing many omissions including some of their major doctrines and arguments. Magee writes about what interests him, which is fine in autobiography but inexcusable if one is trying to present an introduction to philosophy for the layman. Magee focusses heavily on metaphysics and epistemology with little attention to aesthetics and philosophy of science and no attention to ethics and moral/political philosophy. Magee considers these latter fields boring'. Philosophy ,in his opinion, can shed no light on ethical questions. This is unfortunate because the greatest philosophers in history were mostly system builders who spent a lot of time and words on ethical, political and aesthetic questions. Magee has authored the definitive English language study/exegesis of Schopenhauer, a brilliant, powerful and enigmatic yet extremely reactionary philosopher. However, Magee in this book spends two chapters explaining Schopenhauer's metaphysics and epistemology with scarcely a mention of his philosophy of pessimism, his doctrine of the will or his extremely offensive views on women, race and politics in general. Magee spends an almost equal amount of time on Kant and his first Critique. His is a decent interpretation placing Kant into an overall context showing that Kant's goals were something more than the standard interpretation that states Kant was only interested in answering questions like is synthetic a priori knowledge possible'. Readers with no background in either thinker will find these parts of the book tough going. Although Magee rightly considers Marx one of the greatest thinkers of history, he offers up no exegesis or consideration of Marx's work or subsequent writers working in the Marxist tradition. Magee merely, over and over, refers readers to Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies for the definitive intellectual refutation of Marx and Marxism. The unsavoury nature of the USSR and other so-called socialist or Marxist states is ,for Magee, the empirical refutation of Marx(ism). Generally, Popper's criticisms are considered to be off mark, attacking a straw man relying on the problem of induction to refute the historical laws that Marx was purported to have come with. This sets standards too high as the problem of induction is probably intractable. While Magee is right that a lot of Marxist work is of poor quality, he should at least consider G.A. Cohen, a leading academic philosopher who has written a tightly argued book reconstructing the second international Marxism that Magee takes to be definitive as Marxism. Further, Magee should consider that , the only philosopher bashed and misunderstood more than Marx is Popper himself. Indeed Popper bashing has to some degree taken over from Marx bashing, as an excellent and highly lucrative career choice among prospective academics. Many of these so-called critics are as wrong about Popper as they were and are about Marx. Magee's confession contains a good deal of critical commentary on the state and nature of academic philosophy. This is one of the most enjoyable parts of the book (aside from his account of his quite close personal relationships
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson and Israel
Actually, Einstein did call himself a Zionist but his brand of Zionism which was shared with such people like Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Hebrew University founder Judah Magnes embraced the notion of a secular bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs would be equals. Einstein feared that if Palestine was partitioned (as the UN proposed in 1948 into separate Jewish and Arab states) then the resulting Jewish state would fall prey to a narrow chauvinist nationalism which would betray fundamental Jewis ideals. I'd dare say that history has vindicated Einstein on these points. Now a days when someone like Noam Chomsky embraces what was essentially the position of Einstein, Arendt, Buber etc., he gets slammed as an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew. On Fri, 10 May 2002 09:45:09 -0400 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson and Israel By William Loren Katz At a moment when so much of the world decries the shockingly senseless, destructive militarism of the Israeli state and demands protection of the sacred human rights of Palestinian people, the historic relationship between Jewish people and Zionism requires re-examination. Even when most popular immediately after World War II, Zionist ideas never enjoyed unanimous support from the world Jewish community. In the United States where he had taken refuge from Hitlers Germany, the greatest scientific genius of the century and noted world philosopher, Dr. Albert Einstein, favored not a Zionist state but one in which Jews and Arabs shared political power. As the most admired Jewish American of the day, Einstein did not hesitate to express his political views. On the contrary, he tended to be an outspoken foe of fascism and racial discrimination, and he had struck up a friendship with Paul Robeson, African American peace and justice advocate and activist, a foe of fascism and anti-Semitism. In 1946 Robeson and Einstein served as co-chairs of a nationwide anti-lynching petition campaign, and Robeson delivered their collected petitions to President Harry Truman at the White House. Two years later Einstein and Robeson united to support Henry Wallace's Progressive party that opposed US government cold war policies that tolerated violations of civil liberties and repression of dissenters. Master of more than a dozen languages, Robesons musical concerts and records celebrated the gallant contributions of African Americans and other minorities, the heroism of union organizers such as Joe Hill, and paid homage to those who bravely fought fascism -- as in his powerful Yiddish rendition of the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1948 Einstein publicly announced his political preference for a socialist over capitalist system in the United States.* By then Robeson had been the worlds most admired American for more than ten years, surpassing even President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in 1952 though the fanatical anti-Communists of the McCarthy era hesitated to challenge Einstein, they waged a war against Robeson. His career was upended by government-sponsored hysteria: he was blacklisted, denied concert appearances, his income fell by 90%, the state department lifted his passport so he could neither leave the country nor make a living abroad, FBI agents tracked him and vacuumed his life. In a stinging public rebuke to this Cold War era mentality, in October, 1952 Dr. Albert Einstein asked his old friend to visit him at Princeton University. Robeson brought along a young friend, writer Lloyd Brown, who vividly remembers the meeting.** It was a momentous time for Einstein because he had been invited to serve as president for the new state of Israel. The request weighed heavily on his mind when Robeson and Brown sat down to talk at his home. Einstein told them that while he had seen some merit in Zionism and wished the new state good luck, he had long opposed a Zionist state. Instead, he had always favored a reasonable agreement between Palestinians and Jews to share power in any state carved out of British-controlled Palestine. He brought out his book, Out of My Later Years [New York: Philosophical Library, 1950] and read aloud from an article he wrote in 1938 that asked that power be divided between the two peoples. Einstein was worried that once in their own state his people, like others, would abandon their idealism and spirituality, slavishly follow a narrow nationalism, and capitulate to a state apparatus concerned with its borders, building an army, demanding conformity and exerting repressive power. He could not encourage this course, so Einstein denied the new state his enormous prestige and declined its presidential office. In the course of the conversation Einstein told Robeson he would love to attend any concert he gave near Princeton. Brown pointed out that Robeson was getting few
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Stephen Jay Gould is dead
NY Times, May 20, 2002 Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60 By CAROL KAESUK YOON Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist at Harvard University whose lectures, research and prolific output of essays helped to reinvigorate the field of paleontology, died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old. The cause was adenocarcinoma, his wife, Rhonda Roland Schearer, said. Perhaps the most influential and best known evolutionary biologist since Charles Darwin, Dr. Gould touched off numerous debates by challenging scientists to rethink evolutionary patterns and processes. He is credited with bringing a forsaken paleontological perspective to the evolutionary mainstream. Dr. Gould achieved a fame unprecedented among modern evolutionary biologists. The closest thing to a household name in the field, he became part of mainstream iconography when he was depicted in cartoon form on The Simpsons. Renovations of his SoHo loft in Manhattan were featured in a glowing article in Architectural Digest. Famed for both brilliance and arrogance, Dr. Gould was the object of admiration and jealousy, both revered and reviled by colleagues. Outside the academy, Dr. Gould was almost universally adored. In his column in Natural History magazine, he employed a voice that was a successful combination of learned Harvard professor and baseball-loving everyman. The Cal Ripken of essayists, he produced a meditation for each of 300 consecutive issues starting in 1974 and ending in 2001. Many were collected into books like Bully for Brontosaurus. Born on Sept. 10, 1941 in New York City, Dr. Gould took his first steps toward a career in paleontology as a 5-year-old when he visited the American Museum of Natural History with his father, a court stenographer. I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me, he once wrote. In an upbringing filled with fossils and the Yankees, he attended P.S. 26 and Jamaica High School. He then studied geology at Antioch College in Ohio. In 1967 he received a doctorate in paleontology from Columbia University and went on to teach at Harvard where he would spend the rest of his career. But it was in graduate school that Dr. Gould and a fellow graduate student, Dr. Niles Eldredge, now a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, began sowing the seeds for the most famous of the still-roiling debates that he is credited with helping to start. When studying the fossil record, the two students could not find the gradual, continuous change in fossil forms they were taught was the stuff of evolution. Instead, they found sudden appearances of new fossil forms (sudden, that is, on the achingly slow geological time scale) followed by long periods in which these organisms changed little. Evolutionary biologists had always ascribed such difficulties to the famous incompleteness of the fossil record. Then in 1972, the two proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which suggested that both the sudden appearances and lack of change were, in fact, real. According to the theory, there are long periods of time, sometimes millions of years, during which species change little, if at all. Intermittently, new species arise and there is rapid evolutionary change on a geological time scale (still interminably slow on human time scales) resulting in the sudden appearance of new forms in the fossil record. (This creates punctuations of rapid change against a backdrop of steady equilibrium, hence the name.) Thirty years later, scientists are still arguing over how often the fossil record shows a punctuated pattern and how such a pattern might arise. Many credit punctuated equilibrium with helping to promote the flowering of the field of macroevolution in which researchers study large-scale evolutionary changes often in a geological time frame. In 1977, Dr. Gould's book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, drew biologists' attention to the long-ignored relationship between how organisms develop that is, how an adult gets built from the starting plans of an egg and how they evolve. Gould has given biologists a new way to see the organisms they study, wrote Dr. Stan Rachootin, an evolutionary biologist at Mount Holyoke College. Many credit the book with helping to inspire the new field of evo-devo, or the study of evolution and development. Dr. Gould and Dr. Richard Lewontin, also at Harvard, soon elaborated on the importance of how organisms are built, or their architecture, in a famous paper about a feature of buildings known as a spandrel. Spandrels, the spaces in the corners above an arch, exist as a necessary outcome of building with arches. In the same way, they argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result of how an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned, should refrain
[Marxism-Thaxis] Stephen Jay Gould, punctuationalism, and dialectics
in various areas of research. Jim Farmelant GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Times (London) on Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-303790,00.html Stephen Jay Gould Evolutionary biologist who challenged the orthodox thinking on Darwinism and had few rivals as a populariser of science Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most gifted evolutionary scientists of his generation. Following the publication of many eloquently written articles and books, together with numerous public lectures, he acquired a reputation as an outstanding science populariser. In the research field of evolutionary biology his reputation was more controversial because of his persistent challenging of what he saw as the conventional reductionism of the orthodoxy, with its great emphasis on Darwinian adaptation as the predominant factor in evolution. He was born in New York, of second-generation East European Jewish emigre parents, and took his first degree in geology from Antioch College, Ohio. Four years of study at Columbia University, involving research on the biometrics and evolutionary history of Bermudan Pleistocene land snails, was rewarded with a doctorate, and in 1967 he was appointed assistant professor in invertebrate palaeonotology at Harvard, and assistant curator in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Four years later he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1974 he became a full professor at the unusually early age of 33. After moving his principal domicile to New York following his second marriage, he took up the post of visiting research professor of biology at New York University in 1996, while maintaining his position at Harvard. A longstanding interest in organic growth and form, inspired by the classic work of D'Arcy Thompson, led to the publication of Ontogeny and Phylogeny, a scholarly treatment of the relationship between the growth of individual organisms and their evolutionary history. But Gould caused a much greater stir in evolutionary circles when he and Niles Eldredge propounded the hypothesis of punctuated equilibria, which postulates that, contrary to conventional Darwinian theory, species exhibit morphological stasis over long periods of time, and give rise to descendent species by means of comparatively sudden transformations. Just how big a change in evolutionary thought was required to account for punctuated equilibria has proved debatable but, at the very least, the hypothesis directed attention once again to the relevance of the fossil record to the study of evolution, at a time when genetics and molecular biology were making most of the running. In the 1980s Gould went on to promote the idea of species selection to account for evolutionary trends recognised in the fossil record, and a consequent decoupling of macroevolution (evolution above the species level) from microevolution, as studied by conventional thinkers who, following Darwin, accept only selection at the level of the individual. Species selection, although theoretically possible, was not well received by biologists, and does not receive much empirical support from the fossil record; accordingly, it is now generally disregarded. With more success Gould challenged other aspects of neo-Darwinism, such as the predominance of adaptive, as opposed to constructional and historical, explanations of organic form. A major theme of his writings in the later 1980s and 1990s was the key role of historical contingencies in evolution, and the lack of evident progress in general, although he was obliged to acknowledge an increase in the complexity of neural systems, culminating in our own species. Nevertheless, he considered that human beings might not have evolved but for the chance survival of a primitive chordate ancestor in the Cambrian period. In other words, there was no historic inevitability about our emergence. This is certainly a view that challenges popular wisdom, and it was popularised in his book Wonderful Life. The widespread recognition during this time of deep homologies in the animal world, recognisable at the molecular level, lends support to his belief that internal constraints and channels are significant causes of evolutionary change in their own right, operating to some extent independent of the power of external selection. Whatever the dispute that remains about his role as an innovative thinker in evolutionary research, there can be no question about Gould's success as a populariser of science, as recognised by numerous literary awards and honorary degrees, to say nothing of a large income derived from this source, which dwarfed his salary as a Harvard professor. In his abundant writings he demonstrated great verbal felicity, a rich vocabulary and capacity for lucid and racy exposition, enlivened by anecdotes, similes and metaphors from fields of experience as diverse as baseball and Wagnerian opera. These talents were put to effective use for more than a quarter of a century in a series of monthly essays in the magazine Natural
[Marxism-Thaxis] Virus Alert!!
If you receive a message on Thaxis with subject title: Agreement, from address marxism-news [EMAIL PROTECTED] please delete right away because it has an attachment with a W32/Klez-G worm. Jim Farmelant GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Moderator's Note
Hello Thaxists, Hans Ehrbar has kindly moved Thaxis and a number of other lists to a faster computer. On the other hand, in the process of transferring these lists, some of the subscription settings for individual subscribers, may not have all been transferred. If anyone here is having problems with their subscriber settings (i.e. if your subscriber setting is supposed to be set to No Mail and now you are receiving posts) please contact me off-list. Jim Farmelant Thaxis - Moderator GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Sidney Hook
Chronicles of Higher Education, July 12, 2002 Left Hook, Right Hook: the Rules of Engagement By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS It is August, a brilliant, sunny California morning. I am seated at a table reading correspondence from the Marxist years of the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook. My surroundings, incongruous given the folders of revolutionary socialist meditations spread before me, are the quarters of the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University. Named after the Republican president, the institution is a top conservative think tank. Hook held a fellowship there for the last 15 years of his life. Its archives hold 185 boxes of his papers, immaculately organized. Born to immigrants in Brooklyn, Hook was a scrappy radical from an early age. A high-school Socialist, he adopted Communist sympathies in the 1920s and early 1930s before courageously opposing authoritarianism in the Communist movement at a time when most radicals looked upon the Soviet Union uncritically. For five or six years, he preserved his revolutionary Marxism as an anti-Stalinist radical, writing his two best books, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1936). Just before World War II, Hook began to expound an increasingly hardened anti-Communist liberalism, and by the time of the cold war, he was famous for his unending stream of writings against Communism. Immersed in Hook's letters, I experience a historian's daydream. Trotsky is alive in Mexico. The Spanish Civil War is raging, the Moscow purges are wiping out the Old Bolsheviks, and sit-down strikes are sweeping the United States. I am brought back abruptly into the present by a bustle of student workers in front of me. The Hoover building that houses the archives features a wall of glass that looks out onto a large courtyard. Today, the courtyard is being transformed into a luncheon site. Elegant china and silverware are laid out. I return to my work, and I drift away again, borne by obscure eddies of socialisms past. Finishing a file, I glance up. There, not 15 feet away from me, sits a familiar figure, conversing happily. Poof! If you ever want to dispel a radical reverie, few apparitions are better suited for the job than Newt Gingrich. That episode, which actually took place last summer, conveys the vast divergence between Hook's youthful politics and his final surroundings. It helps to suggest the history behind the Hook controversy that has erupted over the past few weeks. I refer, of course, to the withdrawal of the historians John Patrick Diggins and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the essayist Irving Kristol, and the art critic Hilton Kramer from a conference to be held in October at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York in commemoration of what would have been Hook's 100th birthday. The bone of contention is the participation of the black-studies scholar Cornel West, who the neoconservatives reportedly said was not enough of a scholar. Diggins later said he had changed his mind, will attend, and will encourage the others to do so. Perhaps the conference will come off as planned, after all. full: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i44/44b01301.htm GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] New York Times review of Terry Eagleton's autobiography
The Gatekeeper': A Hymn to Intellectual Thought August 11, 2002 By JENNY TURNER One morning, when Terry Eagleton is a boy, he makes a hole with his spoon in his bowl of porridge. He expects a telling off for it -- ''It was not a household in which one did anything without a point, unless prayer is to be included in that category'' -- and is tentatively delighted when the telling off doesn't come. Instead, his mother encourages him to make the hole bigger, then takes the milk and pours it in. To Terry's lifelong disappointment. ''The hole was just a convenient way of pouring milk on my porridge. The playful turned out to be pragmatic after all. There had been no Proustian epiphany. My porridge was not my madeleine.'' Eagleton was born in 1943 in Salford, the famous ''dirty old town'' by Manchester in the industrial northwest of England, into a family of poor Irish Catholics. His family he remembers as ''cowed, daunted''; both his brothers died as infants, and he himself suffered from chronic asthma. Young Terry went on to get into secondary school, then Cambridge, where he took high honors in English, and thence became a top professor and prolific author, the closest thing the Brits have to a crowd-pulling academic star. But this memoir is not an ''Angela's Ashes''-type wallow in blarney-oiled tales of poverty, nor does it sing the stereotyped, triumphalist old ballad of the scholarship boy. It's cleverer, more witty and also very much more preachy. It's an apologia pro vita sua from one of Britain's most unapologetic old New Left thinkers. And it's a hymn to the enduring power and pleasure of intellectual thought. Among scholars, Eagleton is known for being preternaturally quick and productive, and as an enthusiastic, possibly compulsive, communicator. Marxism is his thing, as a philosophy and as a critical method. In his best work, and especially in his classic ''Literary Theory: An Introduction'' (1983), still an efficient and entertaining primer to structuralism and poststructuralism, Freudianism and post-Freudianism and so on, he has a way of grabbing difficult abstract concepts by the throat, as it were, forcing them to explain themselves in vivid concrete images. There are jokes, some of them Wildean (Eagleton is a great Wilde fan), some of them sophomoric. There's an irascible, attractive hothead radicalism, and an overall sense of bounding warmth. Eagleton brings all these qualities to ''The Gatekeeper,'' at the same time that the historical materialist in him is using the memoir form, as he might put it, to explore the conditions of their very existence. In other words, ''The Gatekeeper'' represents Eagleton attempting to explain in his own way why he is the way he is; and if that sounds a little paradoxical, well, that's just how autobiography works. Eagleton himself calls ''The Gatekeeper'' an ''anti-autobiography,'' and quickly the reader will come to see what he means. Instead of the usual bildungsroman sense of a life as a single arc, Eagleton does his as interlinked short hops. There are seven chapters, called ''Lifers,'' ''Catholics,'' ''Thinkers,'' ''Politicos,'' ''Losers,'' ''Dons'' and ''Aristos.'' Within this structure, Eagleton's gregarious banter develops a series of oppositions, the fundamental arguments that have come to shape his life: radicalism versus liberalism; the honest misery of home versus the flyblown ease of Cambridge; the aesthetically opposite approaches to life he encapsulates as ''the battle between the good and the fine'': ''The good are aware that they must sacrifice such superfluous beauties as wit and style to a greater cause. . . . The fine, for their part, know that despite their magnificence they are unreliable in a crisis.'' Therefore, ''it is the good who will enter the kingdom, but the fine who make life worth living in the meanwhile.'' The book's other organizing drama is eschatological. As a boy of 10, Eagleton was gatekeeper at the local Carmelite convent, negotiating the revolving doors, hatches, secret compartments and cupboards accessible from both sides that the order used to keep itself completely separate from the world. When a novice, a young woman of 19 or 20, was ready, young Terence it was who escorted her weeping parents from the convent parlor, never to see their daughter in this life again. ''These women . . . acknowledged in their own eccentric way the wretchedness of human history, which they would no doubt have called the sinfulness of the world.'' As Eagleton tells it, it was in the Carmelites that he first encountered the radical's sense that the world can change, and does change, and indeed must change, because it is intolerable as it is. Young Terry took this discovery with him to Cambridge, into the left Catholic movement of the 1960's. Then, as his faith left him, he took it into left-wing politics, into his teaching and his books. Many, many times as I was reading, I found myself gasping out loud at Eagleton's acuity
[Marxism-Thaxis] In war, some facts less factual (FWD: Christian Science Monitor)
from the September 06, 2002 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html In war, some facts less factual Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious. By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor MOSCOW - When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in midSeptember that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier. But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border just empty desert. It was a pretty serious fib, says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story. The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week. But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action. My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence, says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise, Mr. Hamilton says. I think we have to be skeptical about it. Examining the evidence Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis. That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist, Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong. The official response: Trust us. To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified. After the war, the House Armed Services Committee issued a report on lessons learned from the Persian Gulf War. It did not specifically look at the early stages of the Iraqi troop buildup in the fall, when the Bush administration was making its case to send American forces. But it did conclude that at the start of the ground war in February, the US faced only 183,000 Iraqi troops, less than half the Pentagon estimate. In 1996, Gen. Colin Powell, who is secretary of state today, told the PBS documentary program Frontline: The Iraqis may not have been as strong as we thought they were...but that doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me. We put in place a force that would deal with it whether they were 300,000, or 500,000. John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda. These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago, Mr. MacArthur says. They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way. On Iraq, analysts note that little evidence so far of an imminent threat from Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been made public. Critics, including some former United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, say no such evidence exists. Mr. Bush says he will make his decision to go to war based on the best intelligence. You have to wonder about the quality of that intelligence, says Mr. Hamilton at Woodrow Wilson. This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq, says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be
[Marxism-Thaxis] Why Hobsbawm remained a Communist
New Statesman, September 16, 2002 The day when heaven was falling; Eric Hobsbawm saw the October revolution as the central reference point of the political universe. In this exclusive extract from his memoirs, he explains why, even when the crimes of Stalin were exposed, he could not bring himself to break with the Communist Party Eric Hobsbawm I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what used to be the USSR who have actually seen Stalin in the flesh. Admittedly, he was no longer alive but in a glass case in the great mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square: a small man who seemed even smaller than he actually was (about 5ft 3ins), by contrast with the awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that surrounded him even in death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, Stalin was displayed only from his death in 1953 until 1961. When I saw him in December 1954, he still towered over his country and the world communist movement. As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev, who inaugurated 'destalinisation' not many months later, was already occupying the post of general secretary and getting ready to elbow his rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in Moscow. 'We' were four members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the Christmas vacation of 1954-55: Christopher Hill, already well known as a historian of the English revolution; the Byzantinist Robert Browning; myself; and the freelance scholar Leslie (A L) Morton, whose People's History of England enjoyed the official imprimatur of the Soviet authorities. Two of us knew Russian - Hill, who had spent a year in the USSR in the mid-1930s and had friends there, and the apparently almost accentless Browning. Nevertheless, the USSR was not then a place given to informal communication with foreigners. Outside buildings, our feet were barely allowed to touch the ground. As intellectual VIPs, we were treated to more culture than most visiting foreigners, as well as to an embarrassing share of products and privileges in a visibly impoverished country. We would, for instance, be whisked straight off the famous Red Arrow Moscow-Leningrad overnight train, to a matinee children's performance of Swan Lake at the Kirov, where we were installed in the director's box. After the performance, the prima ballerina - I think it was Alla Shelest - was brought straight from the stage, still sweating, to be presented to us, four foreigners of no particular importance who found themselves momentarily in the location of power. Almost half a century later, I still feel a sense of curious shame at the memory of her curtsy to us, as the children of Leningrad prepared to go home and the (overwhelmingly Jewish) musicians filed out of the orchestra pit. It was not a good advertisement for communism. But of Russia and Russian life we saw little except the middle-aged women, presumably war widows, hauling stones and clearing rubble from the wintry streets. What is more, even the intellectual's basic resource, 'looking it up', was not available. There were no telephone directories, no maps, no public timetables, no basic means of everyday reference. One was struck by the sheer impracticality of a society in which an almost paranoiac fear of espionage turned the information needed for everyday life into a state secret. In short, there was not much to be learned about Russia by visiting it in 1954 that could not have been learned outside. Still, there was something. There was the evident arbitrariness and unpredictability of its arrangements. There was the astonishing achievement of the Moscow metro, built in the iron era of the 1930s under one of the legendary 'hard men' of Stalinism, Lazar Kaganovich; a dream of a future city of palaces for a hungry and pauperised present, but a modern underground which worked - and, I am told, still does - like clockwork. There was the basic difference between the Russians who took decisions and the ones who did not - as we joked among ourselves, they could be recognised by their hair. The ones who took action had hair that stood up on their heads, or had fallen out with the effort; the ones who didn't could be recognised by the lankness above their foreheads. There was the extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society barely a generation from the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year's Eve party at the scientists' club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone suggested a contest in remembering proverbs - not just any old saws, but proverbs or phrases about sharp things, such as 'a stitch in time saves nine' (needles) or 'burying the hatchet'. The joint resources of Britain were soon exhausted, but the Russian contestants, all of them established research scientists, went on confronting each other with village wisdom
[Marxism-Thaxis] Mechanists versus Dialecticians in early Soviet philosophy
Probably the most important debate that drew the attention of Soviet philosophers during the early years of the USSR was the debate between the mechanists and the dialecticians or Deborinists. This debate at first began as a discussion within the philosophy of science but over time came to encompass most aspects of philosophy. Furthermore, despite the fact it was formally settled in 1929, the issues underlying the debate never went away, and recurred in different forms over time. Indeed, since the issues at hand were among the most important ones concerning Marxist philosophy, they in fact have never really went away. By the early 1920s Soviet philosophers were debating what conception of materialism provided the best philosophical basis for Marxism. One school held that a mechanistic conception of materialism was acceptable. Most of the advocates of this view either came straight out of the natural sciences, or they were philosophers who had been closely associated with natural science in some way. Among the leading advocates of this school were A.K. Timartizev, Timianski, Axelrod, and Stepanov. These people were staunch empiricists. They did not deny the validity of dialectics but maintained that dialectics must limit itself to what was observable and verifiable by the methods of natural science. Dialectics must follow science, and not pretend to be able to lead it. Materialism for these people meat a strict and thorough reliance upon the methods and findings of the natural sciences. These philosophers embraced the label of mechanists as a designation for their school of thought, and they insisted that a mechanistic outlook was valid not only for the natural sciences but also for the philosophy of history and of society as well. For these people, a Marxist philosophy therefore had to root itself in the natural sciences and to follow the findings of natural science. In their view, it was illegitimate to posit a Marxist philosophy that would attempt to dictate to the sciences. Closely allied to the mechanists, though not entirely agreeing with them was the prominent Bolshevik, N.I. Bukharin. Thus Bukharin in his *Historical Materialism* embraced a positivist interpretation of Marx's materialist conception of history, emphasizing that the goal was to develop causal explanations of history, which would take the place of teleological explanations. Furthermore, Bukharin argued that It is quite possible to transcribe the 'mystical' (as Marx put it) language of Hegelian dialectics into the language of modern mechanics. Bukharin thus maintained that Marx's materialist conception of history should over time lead to the development of a positive science of society that would be mechanistic in character and in which the concept of equilibrium would play a central role. The mechanists maintained that the dialectical conception of nature, properly understood, was the mechanist conception. Indeed, Stepanov once wrote an article bearing the title The Dialectical Understanding of Nature is the Mechanistic Understanding in case anyone should be confused about his position. As the mechanists saw it, Soviet philosophy was torn by a debate between those who maintained that dialectical method was one to be used insomuch as it was fruitful for revealing new facts about nature and society, versus those who looked to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel to provide themselves with ready-made solutions to problems. The mechanists charged their opponents (i.e. the dialecticians) with offering a priori solutions to problems in the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of history. Opposing the mechanists were the so-called dialecticians or Deborinists. These people had a much higher regard for Hegel than did the mechanists. Furthermore, they maintained that the mechanists misunderstood how Marx Engels had reconstructed Hegelian dialectics on a materialist basis. Th dialecticians were vigorous defenders of what Marxists call the dialectics of nature. They maintain that the laws of dialectics as described by Engels in such works as *Anti-Duhring* and The Dialectics of Nature* are actually found in nature. Dialectics reflects the natural world. The dialecticians argued that the mechanists were positing a narrow, rigid, and lifeless conception of nature. Whereas, the mechanists tended to be either natural scientists or philosophers close to the natural sciences, the dialecticians tended to be professional philosophers with a strong background in Hegelian philosophy. The leading dialectician was the philosopher Deborin, who had been a protoge of Plekhanov (the father of Russian Marxism). Like, his mentor, Deborin had been prior to the October Revolution a Menshevik. Deborin and his followers hit hard against the mechanists, arguing that their conception of science could not adequately make sense out of the new developments in physics like relativity and quantum mechanics, nor was mechanism, in
[Marxism-Thaxis] Decline of American Power?
* Is the American empire already over? By DOUG SAUNDERS Saturday, October 5, 2002 - Page F3 ...The United States has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this decline. So says Immanuel Wallerstein, the Yale University political scientistIn a forthcoming book, to be titled Decline of American Power,he describes his country as a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control. In his view, America gave up the ghost in 1974, when it admitted defeat in Vietnam and discovered that the conflict had more or less exhausted the gold reserves, crippling its ability to remain a major economic power. It has remained the focus of the world's attention partly for lack of any serious challenger to the greenback for the world's savings, and because it has kept attracting foreign investments at a rate of $1.2-billion (U.S.) per day. But if it comes to a crunch, the United States can no longer prevail either economically or -- here is the most controversial statement -- militarily. In Mr. Wallerstein's calculus, of the three major wars the United States has fought since the Second World War, one was a defeat and two (Korea and the Gulf War) were draws. Iraq, he told me recently, would be an end game. The policy of the U.S. government, which all administrations have been following since the seventies, has been to slow down the decline by pushing on all fronts. The hawks currently in power have to work very, very hard twisting arms very, very tightly to get the minimal legal justification for Iraq that they want now. This kind of thing, they used to get with a snap of the fingers. You don't have to agree with Mr. Wallerstein's hyperbolic view to be a member of the Over camp -- and many do disagree: When he first brought it up in the journal Foreign Policy this summer, half a dozen editorial writers in the United States attacked him. But more moderate thinkers have joined the club, including Charles Kupchan at Georgetown University, whose forthcoming book The End of the American Era makes a similar point in more subtle terms. Joseph Nye at Harvard, a friend of Henry Kissinger's, argues in his new book The Paradox of American Power that world politics is changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone -- a tacit acknowledgment of Mr. Wallerstein's thesis. This is how great powers end: Not by suddenly collapsing, but by quietly becoming Just Another Country. This happened to England around 1873, but it wasn't until 1945 that anyone there noticed. Outsiders do notice. Spend some time talking to a currency trader or a foreign financier, and you'll glimpse the end of the almighty dollar: Right now, about 70 per cent of the world's savings are in greenbacks, while America contributes about 30 per cent of the world's production -- an imbalance that has been maintained for the past 30 years only because Japan collapsed and Europe took too long to get its house together. A Japanese CEO told me this in blunt terms the other day: It was Clinton's sole great success that he kept the world economy in dollars for 10 years longer than anyone thought he would. But nobody's staying in dollars any more. There are other signs: The middling liberals, who in the 1960s would have sided with the left in opposing U.S. imperialism, are today begging for an empire. Michael Ignatieff, the liberal scholar, argued at length recently that the United States ought to become an imperial force -- on humanitarian grounds. Would this argument be necessary if the United States actually dominated the world? I'm not sure whether to fully believe the refreshing arguments of Mr. Wallerstein and his friends, but they do have history on their side. In their times, Portugal, Holland, Spain, France and England all woke up to discover, far after the fact, that they were no longer the big global powers, but Just Another Country [EMAIL PROTECTED] * -- GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Red, Black, and Jewish
Monday, October 28 6:30 pm BOOK PARTY/FORUM At the Tamiment Library 170 Washington Square South Red, Black, and Jewish Communist Cultural Workers and Identity Politics Alan Wald Along with his presentation, Alan Wald will be discussing his new book, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Alan Wald teaches English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is author of, among other books, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. This event is sponsored by and will take place at the Tamiment Library, 10th floor of Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, New York, New York 10012 For more information call: (212) 998-2630 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.brechtforum.org/octdec2002/10-28.htm ~~~ PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message. Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] New Left Review
NEW LEFT REVIEW A full-spectrum internationalist critique of contemporary politics, economics and culture. Published every two months from London, the 160-page journal carries articles, interviews, polemics and book reviews. ONLINE ARTICLES FROM THE LATEST ISSUE OF NLR Force and Consent As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? Perry Anderson analyses the changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world. http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR25101.shtml Racking Argentina David Rock on Meltdown and pauperisation in what was once Latin America^s wealthiest economy; the worst casualty of doctrinal neoliberalism to date. http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR25104.shtml Secrecy and Publicity Sven Ltticken asks whether the legacies of the avant-garde can be renewed for postmodern conditions. http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR25108.shtml Grass-Roots Globalism An alternative look at Porto Alegre. Tom Mertes replies to Michael Hardt. http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR25106.shtml Saffron Gastronomy Susan Watkins on D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow. The gastronomic legends and taboos of India^s modern Hindu chauvinism. http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR25110.shtml Beyond Civil Society Emir Sader gives a Brazilian view of the World Social Forum, in its regional and international context. How the landscape of the world^s Left has changed, and whether the ideologies of non-governmental organization and civil society are capable of resisting what they criticize. http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR25105.shtml IN THE PRINT VERSION Sebastian Budgen on the collapse of the Centre Left In France and the electoral debacle; Victoria Brittain on Cuban assistance to African insurgencies; Donald Sassoon on Cultural Markets; Gabriel Piterburg on Daniel Monk's An Aesthetic Occupation NEW SUBSCRIBERS CAN CHOOSE A FREE VERSO BOOK AND HAVE IMMEDIATE ACCESS TO THE ONLINE ARCHIVE www.newleftreview.org Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Edward Said: Europe vs America
Europe vs. America By Edward Said The Black World Today November 23, 2002 http://athena.tbwt.com/content/article.asp?articleid=1969 Although I have visited England dozens of times, I have never spent more than one or two weeks at a single stretch. This year, for the first time, I am in residence for almost two months at Cambridge University, where I am the guest of a college and giving a series of l ectures on humanism at the university. The first thing to be said is that life here is far less stressed and hectic than it is in New York, at my university, Columbia. Perhaps this slightly relaxed pace is due in part to the fact that Great Britain is no longer a world power, but also to the salutary idea that the ancient universities here are places of reflection and study rather than economic centres for producing experts and technocrats who will serve the corporations and the state. So the post-imperial setting is a welcome environment for me, especially since the US is now in the middle of a war fever that is absolutely repellent as well as overwhelming. If you sit in Washington and have some connection to the country's power elites, the rest of the world is spread out before you like a map, inviting intervention anywhere and at any time. The tone in Europe is not only more moderate and thoughtful: it is also less abstract, more human, more complex and subtle. Certainly Europe generally and Britain in particular have a much larger and more demographically significant Muslim population, whose views are part of the debate about war in the Middle East and against terrorism. So discussion of the upcoming war against Iraq tends to reflect their opinions and their reservations a great deal more than in America, where Muslims and Arabs are already considered to be on the other side, whatever that may mean. And being on the other side means no less than supporting Saddam Hussein and being un-American. Both of these ideas are abhorrent t o Arab and Muslim-Americans, but the idea that to be an Arab or Muslim means blind support of Saddam and Al-Qa'eda persists nonetheless. (Incidentally, I know no other country where the adjective un is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No one says unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all love our country. How can one actually love something so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?). The second major difference I have noticed between America and Europe is that religion and ideology play a far greater role in the former than in the latter. A recent poll taken in the United States reveals that 86 per cent of the American population believes that God loves them. There's been a lot of ranting and complaining about fanatical Islam and violent jihadists, who are thought to be a universal scourge. Of course they are, as are any fanatics who claim to do God's will and to fight his battles in his name. But what is most odd is the vast number of Christian fanatics in the US, who form the core of George Bush's support and at 60 million strong represent the single most powerful voting block in US history. Whereas church attendance is down dramatically in England it has never been higher in the United States whose strange fundamentalist Christian sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush's government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty. It is the coincidence between the Christian Right and the so-called neo-conservatives in America that fuel the drive towards unilateralism, bullying, and a sense of divine mission. The neo-conservative movement began in the 70s as an anti-communist formation whose ideology was undying enmity to communism and American supremacy. American values, now so casually trotted out as a phrase to hector the world, was invented then by people like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and others who had once been Marxists and had converted completely (and religiously) to the other side. For all of them the unquestioning defense of Israel as a bulwark of Western democracy and civilisation against Islam and communism was a central article of faith. Many though not all the major neo-cons (as they are called) are Jewish, but under the Bush presidency they have welcomed the extra support of the Christian Right which, while i t is rabidly pro-Israel, is also deeply anti-Semitic (ie these Christians -- many of them Southern Baptists -- believe that all the Jews of the world must gather in Israel so that the Messiah can come again; those Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved, the rest will be doomed to eternal perdition). It is the next generation of neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld who are behind the push to war against
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Re: [marxistphilosophy] Einstein revisited
From Ralph Dumain's MarxistPhilosophy list, see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxistphilosophy/ On Sat, 25 Jan 2003 15:47:21 -0500 Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Speaking of science, yesterday I made a pilgrimage to see the Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Einstein was my boyhood hero, and I've been a consumer of Einstein lore ever since, when it comes my way. So, while there's not much likely to surprise, I can take note of changes in the presentation of Einstein to the public, if nothing else. The only real advantage of going to the exhibit personally is to see certain artifacts up close: official documents, family heirlooms (teacups emblazoned with photos of child Albert and his sister), Einstein's pipes, diaries, correspondence, famous documents (letter to Roosevelt proposing atomic research, letter to Bertrand Russell on peace movement, letter declining the presidency of Israel, etc.), manuscripts or facsimiles thereof on relativity, photos, a statue, etc., and a short documentary film with some adorable Einstein film footage. There are also interactive exhibits on gravitation, black holes, etc. Otherwise, you can get the gist of it by visiting the web site: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/. What has changed in the presentation of Einstein the man since days of yore? Well, there's a lot more publicity on Einstein's love affairs, including the extramarital ones. I don't remember anyone publicizing this stuff 30-40 years ago, but here you get to read a few of his love letters. Certainly, none of the older biographies of Einstein made any mention of his love life and his womanizing. Now a days, it would seem that hardly anyone can avoid mentioning the subject when they write about Einstein's life. While Einstein's pacificism has been always well-known and to a lesser extent his opposition to McCarthyism, the political Einstein gets much wider coverage now. There is more on McCarthyism, on Einstein's advocacy of resistance, and now information on Einstein's thick FBI file and the government's distrust of him as a left-winger. Also on display is the original manuscript in German of Einstein's essay Why Socialism? for the _Monthly Review_ in 1949. BTW available online at http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm While Einstein's support of the establishment of Israel is well-known, less well-known is his particular conception of what he hoped for, including amicable relations between Jews and Arabs. Einstein's Zionism embraced the idea of a secular, bi-national, Jewish-Arab state. This sort of Zionism was shared with certain other intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Judah B. Magnes. His long time conception of Zionism was represented in this statement which appears in his book *From Out of My Later Years*: I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from the practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight without a Jewish state. Einstein with the greatest of reluctance endorsed the UN's plan for splitting up the Palestinian Mandate into two separate states(one Jewish and one Arab). An issue that might be worth investigating would Einstein's real reasons for turning down the presidency of Israel. At the time he said that he turned it down because he felt unqualified for the job. I suspect that there was much more to it than that, that he probably felt very conflicted about Israel's policies towards the Palestinian Arabs, but I would like to see this issue investigated more deeply than I have seen it thus far. There are some hints here of the nuances of Einstein's position, e.g. that he might have to tell Israelis things they don't want to hear. I suspect that had a lot to do with his refusal of the Israeli presidency. Einstein still seems excessively idealistic in his conception of a Jewish state, ironic given his distrust of all governments. One does get an idea of the tensions that Einstein had to negotiate within his own world view, i.e. his cosmopolitanism and aversion to all nationalism, and his support of the Jewish state as the only means of self-defense against persecution. We should keep in mind that he didn't become a Zionist after WW I. Indeed, it was not until then, that he even publicly identify himself as a Jew until then. He was the son of freethinking parents, and after a brief period of religiosity (around the age of 12 or so),
[Marxism-Thaxis] Edmund Wilson�s adventure with Communism. (The New Yorker)
New Yorker Magazine, 03/24/2003 THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE by LOUIS MENAND Edmund Wilsons adventure with Communism. The idea for To the Finland Station came to Edmund Wilson while he was walking down a street in the East Fifties one day, in the depths of the Great Depression. Wilson was in his late thirties. He had established himself as a critic and reporter with the publication of Axels Castle, a study of modernist writers, in 1931, and The American Jitters, a collection of pieces based on visits he made to mines and factories, in 1932. His ambition, though, was to write a novel. (An early effort, I Thought of Daisy, had appeared in 1929; it was not a success.) So he was a little surprised to find himself contemplating an ambitious history of socialist and communist thought, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. But he plainly saw something novelistic in the subject. I found myself excited by the challenge, he said later, and there rang through my head the words of Dedalus at the end of Joyces 'Portrait'I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. He took the title from a novel, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Wilson had been witness to the condition of workers in Appalachia and Detroitafter bringing relief supplies to striking miners in Pineville, Kentucky, he was run out of town by the local authoritiesand although he was suspicious of the Communist Party, he welcomed the Crash as a portent of the death of capitalism, and he embraced Marxism. He voted for the Communist candidate, William Z. Foster, in the 1932 presidential election; the same year, he signed a manifesto calling for a temporary dictatorship of the class-conscious workers. He was never a Communist, but he did believe that only the Communists were genuinely trying to help the working class. In 1935, after he began work on To the Finland Station, he tried to persuade his friend John Dos Passos, whose radicalism had begun to cool, that Stalin was a true Marxist, working for socialism in Russia. full: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030324crat_atlarge Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: URGENT: Keep the Inspectors in Iraq
This is going out through Not In Our Name. Please forward and act today! Please write or call the Honorable Kofi Annan and various ambassadors to the U.N and demand that the inspectors STAGE A REVOLT against any order or request from the United States/Bush Administration/Pentagon for them to get out of Iraq. Can the US start dropping bombs with the inspectors still in Iraq and doing their duty as mandated by Sec. Res 1441...as *that* would be absolute political suicide for Bush. The inspection team is possibly our last best hope, something which would carry the weight to actually stop the bombs from falling. Here's a sample letter: --- Dear Honorable __ Please ask your inspectors in Iraq to remain to do their duty as mandated by Sec. Res 1441. Please announce that the US has no authority to evict the inspectors because they are United Nations employees. Furthermore, you should not withdraw the inspectors from Iraq without an order from the UN Security Council. If the inspectors remain, the US cannot start bombing. This is the last chance we have before the US proceeds with its Shock and Awe invasion of Iraq. If the US proceeds with its plan to pre-emptively strike Iraq in an aggressive war, the US is acting illegally and making an attempt to weaken the effectiveness of the United Nations. This sets a bad precedent, is damaging to the international situation, and will most likely provoke, not stop, future terrorist acts. The inspectors are the last best hope for the world. --- Addresses of the various UN ambassadors: The Hon. Kofi Annan Secretary General of the United Nations [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] FRANCE S.E. Ambassador M. Jean-Marc de LA Sabliere [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 207-9765 RUSSIA H.E. Ambassador Mr. Sergey Lavrov [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 628-0252 UK H.E. Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 745-9316 CHINA H.E. Ambassador Wang Yingfan [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 634-7626 ANGOLA S.E. Ambassador Dr. Ismael Gaspar Martins [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 861-9295 BULGARIA H.E. Ambassador Mr. Stefan Tafrov [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 472-9865 CAMEROON S.E. Ambassador Martin Belinga Eboutou [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 249-0533 CHILE S.E. Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdes [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 832-0236 GERMANY H.E. Ambassador Dr. Gunter Pleuger [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 940-0402 GUINEA H.E. Ambassador M. Francois Lonseny Fall [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 687-8248 MEXICO S. E. Embajador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 688-8862 PAKISTAN H.E. Ambassador Munir Akram [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 744-7348 SYRIA H.E. Ambassador Dr. Mikha'il Wahbi [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 983-4439 SPAIN H.E. Ambassador Inocencio F. Arias [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 682-4460 -- In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. - President Dwight Eisenhower, January 1961 __ Not In Our Name - Santa Barbara P.O. Box 91536 Santa Barbara, CA 93190-1536 WEB:http://www.nion-sb.org EMAIL: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~ PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message. Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war
The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news078.htm Jim F. -- War in Iraq - fighting the people March 25, 2003 www.iraqwar.ru The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports. March 25, 2003, 1230hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - As of the morning March 25 the situation on Iraqi fronts remains quiet. Both sides are actively preparing for future engagements. Exhausted in combat the US 3rd Motorized Infantry Division is now being reinforced with fresh units from Kuwait (presumably with up to 1 Marine brigade and 1 tank brigade from the 1st Armored Division (all coming from the coalition command reserves) and elements of the British 7th Tank Brigade from the area of Umm Qasr. The troops have a stringent requirement to regroup and, after conducting additional reconnaissance, to capture An-Nasiriya within two days. The Iraqis have reinforced the An-Nasiriya garrison with several artillery battalions and a large number of anti-tank weapons. Additionally, the Iraqis are actively deploying landmines along the approaches to their positions. However, currently all combat has nearly ceased due to the sand storm raging over the region. Weather forecasts anticipate the storm's end by noon of March 26. According to intercepted radio communications the coalition advance will be tied to the end of the sand storm and is planned to take place during the night of March 26-27. The coalition command believes that a night attack will allow its forces to achieve the element of surprise and to use its advantage in specialized night fighting equipment. There have been no reports of any losses resulting from direct combat in the past 10 hours. However, there is information about two coalition combat vehicles destroyed by landmines. Three US soldiers were wounded in one of these incidents. Positional warfare continues near Basra. The coalition forces in this area are clearly insufficient for continuing the attack and the main emphasis is being placed on artillery and aviation. The city is under constant bombardment but so far this had little impact on the combat readiness of the Iraqi units. Thus, last night an Iraqi battalion reinforced with tanks swung around the coalition positions in the area of Basra airport and attacked the coalition forces in the flanks. As the result of this attack the US forces have been thrown back 1.5-2 kilometers leaving the airport and the nearby structures in the hands of the Iraqis. Two APCs and one tank were destroyed in this encounter. According to radio intelligence at least two US soldiers were killed and no less than six US soldiers were wounded. The coalition forces are still unable to completely capture the small town of Umm Qasr. By the end of yesterday coalition units were controlling only the strategic roads going through the town, but fierce fighting continued in the residential districts. At least two British servicemen were killed by sniper fire in Umm Qasr during the past 24 hours. The coalition command is extremely concerned with growing resistance movement in the rear of the advancing forces. During a meeting at the coalition command headquarters it was reported that up to 20 Iraqi reconnaissance units are active behind the coalition rear. The Iraqis attack lightly armed supply units; they deploy landmines and conduct reconnaissance. Additionally, captured villages have active armed resistance that is conducting reconnaissance in the interests of the Iraqi command and is organizing attacks against coalition troops. During the past 24 hours more than 30 coalition wheeled and armored vehicles have been lost to such attacks. Some 7 coalition servicemen are missing, 3 soldiers are dead and 10 are wounded. The coalition commander Gen. Tommy Franks ordered his forces to clear coalition rears from Iraqi diversionary units and partisans in the shortest possible time. The British side will be responsible for fulfilling these orders. A unit from the 22nd SAS regiment supported by the US 1st, 5th and 10th Special Operations Groups will carry out this operation. Each of these groups has up to 1 2 units numbering 12-15 troops each. All of these units have some Asian or Arabic Americans. The groups also have guides and translators from among local Iraqi collaborators, who went through rapid training at specialized centers in the Czech Republic and in the UK. The sand storms turned out to be the main enemy of the American military equipment. Just the 3rd Motorized Infantry Division had more than 100 vehicles disabled. This is causing serious concern on the
[Marxism-Thaxis] Some of Hussein's Arab Foes Admire His Fight (FWD: NY Times)
Some of Hussein's Arab Foes Admire His Fight March 26, 2003 By NEIL MacFARQUHAR DAMASCUS, Syria, March 25 - Normally the appearance of Saddam Hussein on television prompts catcalls, curses and prayers for his demise from a regular gathering of about 20 Saudi businessmen and intellectuals, but Monday night was different. When he appeared, they prayed that God would preserve him for a few more weeks. They want Saddam Hussein to go and they expect him to go eventually, but they want him to hold on a little longer because they want to teach the Americans a lesson, said Khaled M. Batarfi, the managing editor of the newspaper Al Madina, describing the scene in a sprawling living room in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. Arab pride is at stake here, he added, describing a sentiment sweeping the region from Algeria to Yemen. American propaganda said it was going to be so quick and easy, meaning we Arabs are weak and unable to fight. Now it is like a Mike Tyson fight against some weak guy. They don't want the weak guy knocked out in the first 40 seconds. From the outset, there has been a certain ambivalence in the Arab world toward the war in Iraq, an ambivalence tipping toward outright hostility as Baghdad, the fabled capital of The Arabian Nights, shudders under American bombing. The region's governments, edgy about the idea of a United States-inspired change of government in Iraq, have been trying to placate Washington and siphon the anger off their streets, although they have permitted larger demonstrations than usual. The Middle East's educated elite, seeking deliverance from repressive governments, hope Washington wants to create a model for the region in Iraq, but the United States lacks a credible track record. The public recognizes that leaders like Mr. Hussein abuse their people, but the suspicion that the United States is embarking on a modern crusade against Islam tends to overwhelm other considerations. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, followed by repeated military setbacks, Arabs have felt a certain humiliation in their own neighborhood. The supposed benefits of breaking free of colonialism proved a lie - they could choose neither their neighbors nor their own governments. Fed on rhetoric about lost Arab glory, they have long waited for some kind of savior. The Iraqi leader sought to fill that role, gaining vast public support in 1990 by contending that the road to Jerusalem led through Kuwait. Nobody believes him any more, but the yearning remains. This week it seemed that the Iraqi people, or whoever exactly was fighting America, might win that role. If Saddam's regime is going to fall, it's better for our future, for our self-confidence and for our image that it falls fighting, said Sadik Jalal al-Azam, a Syrian author and academic. People are not defending Saddam or his regime, but they are willing to put Saddam aside for a much greater issue. Arab governments opposed the war in Iraq from the outset. They shared no great love for Mr. Hussein, but replacing him by force seemed a bad precedent. If they do not like 100 regimes around the world, are they going to change all 100? asked Buthaina Shaaban, a spokeswoman for the Syrian Foreign Ministry, reciting a familiar argument used by opponents of the Bush administration's policy. That prospect is unnerving for Middle Eastern governments for a variety of reasons. In Syria, which is controlled by a rival branch of Iraq's Baath Party, overthrowing the Baathists next door comes uncomfortably close to a scary preview of what might happen there. Nobody knows who will be next, said Georges Jabbour, a Syrian law professor and member of Parliament. Longtime rulers have begun making noises about reform. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt recently announced a series of minor changes lightening the government's repressive hand, including abolishing the special state security courts for ordinary crimes. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia also started publicly addressing the issue of reform, although that seems more inspired by the post-Sept. 11 discovery of widespread sympathy for Osama bin Laden rather than concern that democracy in Iraq might destabilize the kingdom. Frankly, we would prefer being attacked by missiles of Jeffersonian democracy to facing Scuds and other missiles, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said earlier this month. Educated elites across the region once cherished the idea that the United States would push governments in the area to become more democratic, but they gradually abandoned hope. Promises for Iraq have rekindled that hope, although the Bush administration's changing justifications for invading Iraq - from concerns about weapons of mass destruction to the need for a new government - have cast doubt on its sincerity. The U.S. has always supported the dictators who rule our countries, said Haitham Maleh, the 72-year-old lawyer who is head of the Human Rights Association of Syria.
[Marxism-Thaxis] Stan Goff's War Bulletin
MILITARY MATTERS War Bulletin #2 Visions Revisions March 28, 2003 Stan Goff There have been two predictable aspects of Bush's war, one political and one related to the actual conduct of the war. These are not separable. The political destruction of Bush and his clique was stamped and waiting for delivery before the first tank rolled across the line of departure in Kuwait. And the Law of Unintended Consequences is operating with a vengeance on the ground. The rest is unpredictable. The junta's diplomatic vandalism had systematically alienated the masses around the world, a force they underestimated wholly, and the underlying intent of the Bush cabal - a military solution for economic war - was understood clearly by the northern capitalist metropoles, by Russia, and by China. The Latin American supra-colony, already in a process of break-up and rebellion, had inaugurated its second big wave of anti-colonial struggle, as others from the global south watched. The hegemon was breaking up, and war was seen by the Bush faction as its best, last chance. Even America's former multilateralist partners - stung by disrespect and alarmed by the bright-eyed bellicosity of Bush, et al - had begun to thirst for US humiliation. Now they are being slaked. The depth of US bourgeois (and therefore generalized cultural) decadence has been on display for months, as impunity and falsehood characterized political discourse, and the last crumbs of American journalism were lapped up into the maw of the media-military nexus. Half the US population had accepted one central and demonstrably idiotic assertion, that Iraqi leadership played some facilitative role in the September 11th attacks. Now enough of American-society-in-denial - especially white society - had its rationalization. The international legal framework that took six decades to assemble was ripped apart and shipped to the same landfill as the detritus of US bourgeois democracy - similarly cast off in 2000. The entire adventure we are witnessing was conceived from a really-existing condition of weakness http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_5_overreach.html. I have said that for some time. Even progressive forces have been intimidated by the raw power of the US military machine and the demonstrated willingness to use it. There was the sense that it was a juggernaut. That's how bullies http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_4_victoriesover.html operate; through intimidation. But they miscalculated. I miscalculated, too. We learn most from our errors, and it is through examining errors we refine our analysis and get closer to the truth of things. Now is a good time to critique what was written just as the war began in earnest. In Rolling Start http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_12_rollingstart.html , I identified several variables that would complicate the conduct of the war for the US; the loss of the Turkish front, the last minute changes in the plans growing out of that loss, the canalization of the ground attack along a single south-north axis and corresponding vulnerability of supply lines, and the terrific impact of weather. We are still waiting to see if my dire prognostications related to Kurdistan materialize. But I made two very significant errors. I underestimated the quality of Iraqi resistance, and I overestimated the scope of the initial air campaign. I stated: The Iraqi military won't prevail because they can't. They are weak, under-resourced, poorly led, and demoralized. What the delays mean is that the US will depend on sustaining the initiative and momentum through brutal, incessant bombing designed to destroy every soldier, every installation, every vehicle, every field kitchen in the Iraqi military. What I did not know, which is becoming very apparent, is that while Donald Rumsfeld was imposing his vaunted Revolution in Military Affairs, his crackpot theory of network centric warfare that substitutes technology for leadership (against fierce resistance from the Army and Marines) on the US armed forces, there was another revolution in military affairs going on inside Iraq. The Iraqi military was reorganizing from the ground up for an agile, decentralized, urban-based warfighting capability, that abandoned Soviet-style conventional armor-centric doctrine for something more akin to doctrine that was taught but seldom practiced by Special Operations forces in the US during the Cold War, particularly stay-behind disruption of enemy lines of communications, once the primary mission of 10th Special Forces in the event of a general conflict with the Warsaw Pact. And the massive bombing. It remains to be seen, but it was not used as I thought it would be, probably for two reasons; political pressure to paint a humanitarian face on the invasion, and reluctance - given the ongoing economic crisis in the US - to impose too high a cost on post-invasion infrastructure repairs. I am reminded now of T. S. Eliot's poem, The Love
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (March 30)
The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/ Jim F. -- March 30, 2003, 2042hrs MSK (GMT +4 DST), Moscow - No significant changes have been reported during March 29-30 on the Iraqi-US front. Positional combat, sporadic exchange of fire and active search and reconnaissance operations by both sides continue along the entire line of the front. American troops continue massing near Karabela. As was mentioned in the previous update, the US group of forces in this area numbers up to 30,000 troops, up to 200 tanks and up to 230 helicopters. Latest photos of this area suggest that the [US] troops are busy servicing and repairing their equipment and setting up the support infrastructure. According to radio intercepts, the coalition commander Gen. Tommy Franks has visited the US forces near Karabela. He personally inspected the troops and had a meeting with the unit commanders. Currently no information is available about the topics discussed during the meeting. However, it is believed that the [coalition] commander listened to the reports prepared by the field commanders and formulated the main objectives for the next 2-3 days. The current technical shape of the coalition forces was discussed during the meeting at the coalition central headquarters. During a personal phone conversation with another serviceman in the US one participant of this meeting called this technical state depressing. According to him ...a third of our equipment can be dragged to a junk yard right now. We are holding up only thanks to the round-the-clock maintenance. The real heroes on the front lines are not the Marines but the ants from the repair units. If it wasn't for them we'd be riding camels by now... [Reverse-translated from Russian] Based on the intercepted radio communications, reports from both sides and other intelligence data, since the beginning of the war the coalition lost 15-20 tanks, around 40 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, more than 50 military trucks and up to 10 helicopters. In addition to that there have been at least 40 more disabled tanks, about the same number of disabled APCs and IFVs, about 100 disabled wheeled vehicles of all types and around 40 disabled helicopters. These numbers are based on the analysis of non-classified technical reports received daily by the Pentagon. During the attack last night up to two US Marine battalions attempted to push the Iraqis out of their defensive positions near An-Najaf. Despite of the preliminary 4-hour-long artillery and aerial bombardment once they approached the Iraqi positions the US troops were met with heavy machine-gun and RPG fire and were forced to return to their original positions. One US tanks was destroyed by a landmine and two APCs were hit during this night attack. Radio intercepts show that 2 Marines were killed and 5 were wounded. The latest attempt by the US troops to improve their positions on the left bank of the Euphrates near An-Nasiriya was also a failure. Despite of all the precautions taken to ensure the tactical surprise the US forces were met with heavy fire and returned to the original positions. According to the reports by the [US] field commanders, three Marines were missing in action and four were wounded in this engagement. These failed attacked have once again confirmed the fears of the coalition command that the Iraqi forces were much better technically equipped than was believed before the war. In particular, the DIA [US Defense Intelligence Agency] intelligence report from February 2003 insisted that the Iraqi army practically had no night vision equipment except for those systems installed on some tanks and serviceability of even that equipment was questioned. In reality, however, the coalition troops have learned that the Iraqis have an adequate number of night vision surveillance systems and targeting sights even at the squadron level and they know how to properly use this equipment. A particular point of concern [for the coalition] is the fact that most Iraqi night vision systems captured by the coalition are the latest models manufactured in the US and Japan. After analyzing the origins of this equipment the US begun talking about the Syrian connection. In this regard, the US military experts have analyzed Syria's weapons imports for the past two years and have concluded that in the future fighting [in Iraq] the coalition troops may have to deal with the latest Russian-made anti-tank systems, latest radars and radio reconnaissance systems resistant to the effects electronic counter measures. In the same area [An-Najaf] a coalition checkpoint manned by the US Marines was attacked by a suicide bomber - an Iraqi soldier - who detonated a passenger car loaded with explosives next to the US troops. At least 5 of them were killed. In a closed
[Marxism-Thaxis] Venik answers some questions concerning www.iraqwar.ru and other matters
Answering some questions I would like to thank everyone for visiting my site and commenting on my translations of the Russian military intelligence reports published by www.iraqwar.ru I am happy to say that during the past week or so I received close to 2,000 e-mails from people visiting my site who thank me for the translations. (I also got two e-mails with negative comments, but, I guess, one can't make everyone happy.) I appreciate all feedback - positive and negative - and I am sorry for not being able to respond to most of the e-mails in a timely manner. To remedy the situation I will answer some of the most frequent questions I receive. Naturally, most people are wondering where these Russian military intelligence do reports come from and why does the GRU allow such materials to be published. My answer to both questions is: I don't know. The GRU is a huge and complex organization with tens of thousands people working there. This military intelligence agency does not report directly to the Russian government. The agency's activities are dictated by national security interests as perceived by the Russian Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. The daily GRU reports you see on www.iraqwar.ru come from an anonymous source. At first I had my doubts as to the origin and accuracy of these reports. But I found them to be very detailed and technically accurate, especially against the background of near-complete information blackout in the mainstream media. Several days into the war these GRU reports proved to be extremely accurate in their analysis of the current situation in Iraq and predictions for the near future. In my mind this, at the very least, confirms that this information is based on actual intelligence data coming from the combat zone and analyzed by professional military experts. As to who, where, why and how - your guess is as good mine. Another question I frequently receive is why these GRU reports concentrate so much on the coalition side of the conflict, while providing only limited insight into the Iraqi tactics and situation. A possible war between Russia and Iraq is not very high on the Russian military's list of concerns. A war between Russia and the US, on the other hand, has been more than just a possibility for well over fifty years. Naturally, the Russian military intelligence is concentrating on its most powerful, even if not the most likely, potential enemy. Many people would like to know what the Iraqi Air Force is doing. And so do me. So far there hasnt been a single word in the news about any actions by the Iraqi combat aviation. What I find even more surprising, however, is the absence of any coalition claims of destroyed Iraqi aircraft. During the first Gulf War and all the subsequent US and British attacks against Iraq Pentagon claimed destroyed Iraqi aircraft and damaged airfields. Previously we have seen many images of such attacks but now there is a near-complete silence in this regard. Based on Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence reports just prior to the war, Iraqi combat aircraft - namely the MiG-25 long-range supersonic interceptors - were frequently testing the coalition anti-aircraft defenses by probing the no-fly zones. No Iraqi plane has been shot down in these incidents. Numerous attempts by the US Air Force to intercept the fast-flying Iraqi Foxbats have failed. Western military analysts believe that the Iraqi Air Force still has about 50-75 fully-operational fixed-wing aircraft, including MiG-25 and MiG-29 fighters as well as Su-25 and Mirage F1 attack planes. And in Iraq's case, as we've found out, Western analysts have a tendency to underestimate A similar interesting situation is observed with the Iraqi air defenses: while the skies over Baghdad light up every day with dense anti-aircraft artillery fire, SAM launches have been extremely rare. At the same time we know that during the past two years Iraq has been constantly launching SAMs at the US and British aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones over Iraq. In 1999 Pentagon sources reported that Iraq had around 445 SAM missile launchers of all types a nd about 2,000 hand-held anti-aircraft missiles, plus some 6,000 anti-aircraft guns. Since then the US and British warplanes attacked a number of suspected Iraqi SAM sites. However, considering the unimpressive performance of the NATO air force against Yugoslav air defenses in the spring of 1999, one can conclude that Iraq's air defense potential in 2003 was close to the numbers cited by Pentagon in 1999. According to the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, just during the first quarter of 2002 Iraq fired more several hundred SAMs against the US and British aircraft. Westerner military analysts noted that these remarkably ineffective SAM launches might have been intended to mislead Pentagon as to the true potential of the Iraqi air
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war (April 3)
The English translation, that appears below comes from http://www2.iraqwar.ru/index.php?userlang=en Jim F. -- During the last and today early morning the coalition continued its advance toward Baghdad that it had begun three days ago. Units of the 3rd mechanized Infantry Division, failing to quickly capture the town of Al-Khindiya, blockaded it with a part of their forces and moved around the town from the east to reach Al-Iskanderiya by the morning. It is not clear right now whether the US troops were able to take the town of Al-Musaib or if they went around it as well. The overall [coalition] progress in this direction was about 25 kilometers during the past 24 hours. This thrust came as a surprise to the Iraqi command. The Iraqi defense headquarters around Karabela remained deep behind the forward lines of the advancing US brigades. Due to the intensive aerial and artillery strikes the Iraqi headquarters [in Karabela] lost most of its communication facilities and has partially lost control of the troops. As the result the Iraqi defense units in the line of the coalition attack became disorganized and were unable to offer effective resistance. During the night fighting the Iraqi forces in this area were pushed from their defensive positions and withdrew toward Baghdad. The Iraqi losses were up to 100 killed and up to 300 captured. The US troops destroyed or captured up to 70 Iraqi tanks and APCs. Currently the Iraqi command is rushing to create a new line of defense 20-30 kilometers south of Baghdad. The US losses in this attack were 3 armored vehicles, up to 8 killed and wounded. Late night on April 2 east of Karabela a unit from the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division went off-course and ran into an artillery ambush after moving too close to the Iraqi positions. In the resulting firefight the US forces have lost no less than 8 armored vehicles and, according to the Iraqi reports, at least 25 US troops were killed or wounded. In the town of Al-Kut US Marine units were able to capture a bridge across the Tigris; but they were unable to capture the entire town and currently fighting is continuing in the residential districts. No fewer than 3 US soldiers were killed and up to 12 were wounded in this area during the past 24 hours. The US troops are reporting 50 killed and 120 captured Iraqi soldiers. The coalition was able to make serious progress to the south of Al-Kut. After quickly taking the town of An-nu-Manyah the US forces have set up a bridge across the Tigris and immediately proceeded to transfer the Marine units to the left bank. There is a highway going from An-nu-Manyah to Baghdad along the left bank of the Tigris. No more large populated areas are located along the highway and the attacking forces may be able to come within 15-20 kilometers of Baghdad as early as tonight. The blockade of An-Najaf is continuing. Numerous attempts by the [coalition] troops to reach the center of the town have failed after being met by Iraqi fire. At least fire [coalition] soldiers have been wounded and one is missing. The situation around An-Divania remains unclear. Heavy fighting in this area is continuing since yesterday. The US field commanders have requested artillery and aviation support on several occasions and have reported strong counterattacks by the enemy. It has been determined that by the evening of April 2 the command of the US 101st Airborne Division ordered its troops to withdraw from the town in order to create some space between its forces and the Iraqis to allow for artillery and aerial strikes. The overall US losses in this area during the past two days are up to 15 killed and around 35 wounded. At the same time the US commanders are reporting hundreds of killed Iraqis; about 50 Iraqis - some of them wearing civilian clothes - have been captured by the coalition. There has been a report of another [coalition] helicopter loss in this area. Resistance is also continuing in An-Nasiriya. The town's garrison has been fighting for the past ten days and continues to hold its positions on the left bank of the Euphrates. During the past day there has been a reduction in the intensity of the Iraqi resistance. However, the US commanders at the coalition headquarters believe that this is due to the Iraqis trying to preserve their ammunition, which is by no means unlimited. According to one of the US officers at the coalition headquarters elements of the [Iraqi] 11th Infantry Division remain in control on the left bank of the Euphrates. ...Resilience of this unquestionably brave enemy is worth respect. Four time we offered them to lay down their arms and surrender, but they continue resisting like fanatics... [Reverse-translated from Russian] During the past night 1 US soldier was killed and 2 more were wounded in firefights in this area. Another attempt by the
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (April 1)
The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/ Jim F. -- April 1, 2003, 1404hrs MSK (GMT +4 DST), Moscow - As of the morning of April 1 active combat operations continued along the entire US-Iraqi front. The town of Karabela one of the key points in the Iraqi defense is subjected to a continuing artillery barrage. The town outskirts are being attacked by the coalition aviation. However, so far the US forces made no attempts to enter the town. Available information suggests that after evaluating Karabelas defenses the US command made a decision to delay storming the town. Orders were issued to the coalition troops to move around the town from the east and to take control of the strategic Al-Hillah, Al-Khindiya, and Al-Iskanderiya region. Several largest highways are intersecting in this area, which also contains the three strategic bridges across the Euphrates. Gaining control of this triangle will finally open the way for the coalition troops into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates and the route to the Babylon-Baghdad highway. Yesterday and today early morning most heated combat continued in this area. During a night attack the US forces were able to reach the center of Al-Khindiya by 0800hrs and to move to the right bank of the Euphrates. However, their further advance was stopped by heavy fire from the Iraqi positions across the river. Al-Khindiya is being defended by up to 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and militia armed with up to 20 tanks and around 250 anti-tank weapons of various types. During this battle one US soldier was killed, 2 were missing in action and seven were wounded. For now it is impossible to determine the Iraqi losses. Throughout the night the US field commanders have reported at least 100 killed and 30 captured Iraqi soldiers and militia members. However, by morning the number of captured was revised down to less than 15. The [coalition] effort to capture Al-Hillah was unsuccessful. All attempts by the US troops to enter the town during the night have failed. Every time they were met with heavy Iraqi fire near the town. Intercepted radio communications show that one US APC was destroyed and at least 5 soldiers were killed and wounded. Fighting is continuing near An-Najaf. The town is currently surrounded from three sides by the US Marines, who are still unable to enter the town. The Iraqi positions are being subjected to artillery and aerial bombardment. No information is available about any losses in this area. Since 0700hrs reports are coming about large-scale attacks by the US Marines and infantry units against An-Nasiriya. As was previously expected, up to two Marine battalions deployed on the left bank of the river to the north of the town have begun advancing on An-Nasiriya from the north and are now trying to break the Iraqi defenses and to capture this strategic town. More than a hundred of aerial strikes have been delivered against the Iraqi positions [at An-Nasiriya] just during todays morning. There is a continuing artillery barrage. All this indicates the US Marines are determined to fulfill their orders and take the town. However, so far neither Marines nor the paratroopers were able to widen their staging area or to break through Iraqi defenses. Radio surveillance indicates that during the morning hours of today there were 5 medevac helicopter flights to this area. At least 3 US soldiers were killed. Another US combat convoy crossed to the left bank of the Euphrates and by todays morning reached the outskirts of the town of Ash-Shatra located 40 kilometers north of An-Nasiriya. This unit is now engaged in combat. For now there is no additional information about this convoys losses or movements. Localized fighting is continuing near Basra. Throughout the last night and todays early morning the British forces were making attempt to capture the neighboring villages of As-Zubair and Suk-al-Shujuh, but, despite of overwhelming artillery and aviation support, the British were forced to return to their original positions. During these battles 1 British soldier was killed, 1 is missing and up to 5 were wounded. No information is available about the Iraqi losses. According to the reports by the British, at least 200 Iraqi troops were killed and no less than 50 were captured. However, only under 10 captured Iraqis were delivered to the British camp and only 4 of them were in military uniform. This was reported by one of the US journalist located in this area during a phone conversation with the editor. Active combat reconnaissance operations by both sides are continuing in the north of Iraq. There have been reports of an attack launched by an Iraqi battalion against the positions of a US combat unit from the 82nd Airborne Division. It was reported that during the night the Iraqis moved
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (April 4)
The English translation, that appears below comes from http://www2.iraqwar.ru/index.php?userlang=en Jim F. -- April 4, 2003, 1507hrs MSK (GMT +4 DST), Moscow - By the morning of April 4 the situation on the US-Iraqi front showed a tendency toward stabilization. As the forward coalition units reach Baghdad they fulfill their primary orders outlined by the coalition command. During the four days of the advance elements of the US 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division have bypassed from the east the Iraqi defenses at Karabela and, without encountering any resistance, advanced around 140 kilometers along the Karabela-Baghdad highway and reached the Iraqi capital. However, the goals of this attack will be fully achieved only when the US Marine brigades, now advancing along the left bank of the Tigris, reach the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad. All indications are that the breakthrough by the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division toward the Baghdad international airport, although a significant thrust forward, did not come as a surprise to the Iraqi command. The US units occupying the airport area did not encounter here any significant resistance (the airport was guarded by no more than 2-3 Iraqi companies without any heavy weapons) nor did they see any indication that the Iraqis were even planning on defending the airport. Except for the line of trenches along the airport's perimeter the US troops found no other defensive structures. The airport was clear from all aircraft with the exception of a few old fuselages and a passenger plane (possible belonging to a Jordanian airline company), which did not have time to leave the airport before the flight restrictions were announced by the coalition with the beginning of the war. Currently the coalition group of forces in the airport area number up to 4,000 troops, up to 80 tanks and about 50 artillery systems. It should be expected that several helicopter squadrons from the 101st Airborne Division will be deployed here in the next several hours. According to electronic surveillance the coalition command in Qatar order the attacking US forces to halt on at least three occasions. The command ordered additional reconnaissance to be done in the airport area fearing there may carefully concealed Iraqi units and extensive defenses. The coalition command issued the final order to capture the airport only until the coalition reconnaissance units contacted the command headquarters directly from the airport terminal. The Iraqi forces protecting the airport offered little resistance and after a few exchanges of fire withdrew toward the city. Communication was lost with one of the coalition units protecting the flanks of the advancing column. It is still being determined whether this unit got lost or if it encountered an ambush. Around 0800hrs the US positions [in the airport area] were attacked by the militia forces probably from among the local population. The militia was dispersed by tank and APC fire. The 2nd brigade of the [3rd Mechanized Infantry] Division reached the southern outskirts of Baghdad and is currently located near the intersection of the Baghdad-Amman and Baghdad-Karabela highways. The coalition claims of completely destroying the Media (Al Madina al Munavvara) and the Hammurali Republican Guard divisions of the 2nd Republican Guard Corps received no confirmation. No more than 80 destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles were found along the coalition's route of advance, which corresponds to about 20% of a single standard Iraqi Republican Guard division. It has been determined that only a few forward elements of the Hammurali Division participated in combat while the entire division withdrew toward Baghdad. A single brigade of the Medina division was involved in combat. The brigade was split in two groups during fighting and withdrew toward Baghdad and toward Karabela to join the main forces of the [Medina] division. Equally unimpressive are the numbers of the Iraqis captured by the coalition. In four days of advance the US troops captured just over 1,000 people only half of whom, according to the reports by the US field commander, can be considered regular troops of the Iraqi army. There are virtually no abandoned or captured Iraqi combat vehicles. All of this indicates that so far there has been no breakthrough for the coalition; Iraqi troops are not demoralized and the Iraqi command is still in control of its forces. No significant changes occurred at other Iraqi resistance areas. Fighting is continuing at An-Nasiriya where the US troops are still unable to capture the part of the town on the left side of the river. Despite of the announcement by the US command about the near complete control of the city, exchanges of fire are continuing and just during the last day the US forces sustained one killed and no fewer than three wounded. The US troops are no longer trying to storm
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (April 5)
The English translation, that appears below comes from http://www2.iraqwar.ru/index.php?userlang=en Jim F. -- Russian military intel update: War in Iraq, April 5 05.04.2003 [22:07] The situation on the US-Iraqi front is characterized by gradual reduction of American offensive activity. After the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division tank forces had marched towards Baghdad and its vanguards reached the city from south and south-west, engineering fortification of their positions began, which indicates the end of the current stage of the campaign as well as the loss of offensive potential of American forces and necessity to rest and regroup. It is supposed that during the next two days the American command will attempt local strikes in order to improve and extend their positions on the south and, especially, south-west approaches to Baghdad (crossing the Baghdad Samarra roadway) and begin bringing fresh forces from Kuwait. As we supposed, during the last night Americans were moving 101st Airborne Division troops to help the 1st Mechanized Division that captured the airport of Baghdad yesterday morning. About 80 strike and transport helicopters and 500 marines were deployed there. But all the efforts to reinforce the brigade with heavy armor failed as Iraqi started powerful artillery strikes at the transport routes and organized mobile firing groups on the roads. After reports about losing 3 tanks and 5 APCs on the route the American command had to pause the movement of the reinforcements by land. Yesterdays estimates of the forces concentrated here were overstated. After analysis of intercepted radio communications and reports of American commanders it was specified that at the airport there were only parts of the 1st brigade troops, up to 2 enforced battalions with the help of a self-propelled artillery division 3 thousand soldiers and officers strong, 60 tanks and about 20 guns. Another battalion enforced with artillery crossed the Baghdad-Amman roadway and came into position at the crossroads to the south of the airport, near Abu-Harraib. Soldiers of the 1st Mechanized Brigade spent almost all the last night in chemical protection suits, waiting for Iraqi to use their untraditional weapons. Apart from that, their positions were constantly shot with artillery and machine gun fire. The brigade commanders report that the soldiers are ultimately dead-beat, and are constantly requesting reinforcements. About 10 armored units including 4 tanks were lost in this area yesterday. Up to 9 men were killed, about 20 wounded, at least 25 reported missing. Moreover, the status of a patrol group that didnt arrive at the airport remains unclear. It is supposed that it either moved away towards Khan-Azad and took defense there or got under an ambush and was eliminated. It is now being searched for. The losses of Iraqi were up to 40 men killed, about 200 captured (including the airport technical personnel), 4 guns and 3 tanks. Currently American reconnaissance squadrons are trying to dissect the suburban defenses with local sallies. At the same time, marine troops are approaching the south-east borders of Baghdad. Their vanguard units reached the outskirts of Al-Jessir and immediately tried to capture the bridge over a feeder of the Tigris, the Divala river, but were met with fire and stopped. Commander of the 1st Expeditionary Marine Squadron colonel Joe Dowdy was deposed yesterday morning. As was revealed, the colonel was deposed for utmost hesitation and loss of the initiative during the storm of An-Nasiriya . This way the coalition command in Qatar found an excuse for their military faults by that town. The guilt of the colonel was in his refusing to enter the town for almost 3 days and trying to suppress Iraqi resistance with artillery and aviation, trying to avoid losses. As a result, the command additionally had to move the 15th squadron of colonel Tomas Worldhouser there, who had to storm the ferriages for almost 6 days, with about 20 of his soldiers killed, 130 wounded and 4 missing. The 1st Expeditionary Squadron lost no men at An-Nasiriya, but 3 marines died, as were reported, by inadvertency and about 20 soldiers got wounded. Despite the fact that marines were able to capture one of the bridges at the south outskirt of An-Nasiriya, the ferriage across the Euphrates is still risky. Fights in the city are going on. The American command has to cover the ferriage with a company of marines enforced with tanks and artillery, up to 400 soldiers and officers strong. Every column passing across the bridge gets shot by Iraqis from the left bank and the marines have to cover it by setting smoke screens and delivering constant fire. A brigade group of the 101st Airborne Division is engaged in the combat but is unable to break the Iraqi resistance. Throughout the day 3 men were wounded, 1 soldier reported missing. In An-Najaf,
[Marxism-Thaxis] Henry Liu, The war that may end the age of superpower
The war that may end the age of superpower 05.04.2003 [06:51] The United States, like ancient Rome, is beginning to be plagued by the limits of power. This fact is tactically acknowledged by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard B Myers that the war plan should not be criticized by the press because it has been framed in a diplomatic and political context, not merely pure military considerations in a vacuum. They say that it is the best possible war plan politically, though it may be far from full utilization of US military potential. America's top soldier has criticized the uniformed officer corps for expressing dissent that seriously undermines the war effort. Such criticism is characterized by Myers as bearing no resemblance to the truth, counterproductive and harmful to US troops in the field. Only time will tell who will have the last laugh. The US Central Command (Centcom) has announced that the next phase with an additional 120,000 reinforcements will not begin until the end of April. That is three times the duration of the war so far. In Vietnam, the refrain of all is going as planned was heard every few weeks with self-comforting announcements that another 50,000 more troops would finish the job quickly. There is no doubt the US will prevail over Iraq in the long run. It is merely a question of at what cost in lives, money and time. Thus far, a lot of pre-war estimates have had to be readjusted and a lot of pre-war myths about popular support for US liberation within Iraq have had to be re-evaluated. Time is not on America's side, and the cost is not merely financial. America's superpower status is at stake. This war highlights once again that military power is but a tool for achieving political objectives. The pretense of this war was to disarm Iraq of weapons of massive destruction (WMD), although recent emphasis has shifted to liberating the Iraqi people from an alleged oppressive regime. At the end of the war, the US still needs to produce indisputable evidence of Iraqi WMD to justify a war that was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. Overwhelming force is counterproductive when applied against popular resistance because it inevitably increases the very resolve of popular resistance it aims to awe into submission. To dismiss widespread national resistance against foreign invasion as the handiwork of coercive units of a repressive regime insults the intelligence of neutral observers. All military organizations operate on the doctrine of psychological coercion. No-one will voluntarily place him/herself in harm's way unless they are more apprehensive of what would appen were they to do nothing. Only when a nation is already occupied by a foreign power can the theme of liberation by another foreign power be regarded with credibility. A foreign power liberating a nation from its nationalist government is a very hard sell. The US manipulates its reason for invading Iraq like a magician pulling color scarves out a breast pocket. First it was self defense against terrorism, then it was to disarm Iraq of WMD, now it invades to liberate the Iraqi people form their demonic leader. Soon it will be to bring prosperity to the Iraqi people by taking control of their oil, or to save them from their tragic fate of belonging to a malignant civilization. There is no point in winning the war to lose the peace. Military power cannot be used without political constraint, which limits its indiscriminate application. The objective of war is not merely to kill, but to impose political control by force. Therein lies the weakest part of the US war plan to date. The plan lacks a focus of what political control it aims to establish. The US has not informed the world of its end game regarding Iraq, beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein. The idea of a US occupational governor was and is a laughable non-starter. Guerilla resistance will not end even after the Iraqi government is toppled and its army destroyed. Drawing upon British experiences in Malaysia and Rhodesia, the force ratio of army forces to guerilla forces needed for merely containing guerilla resistance, let alone defeating a guerilla force, is about 20 to 1. US estimates of the size of Iraq's guerilla force stands at 100,000 for the time being. This means the US would need a force of 2 million to contain the situation even if it already controls the country. At the current rate of war expenditure at $2.5 billion a day, the war budget of $75 billion will be exhausted after 30 days, or until April 20, ten days before the projected arrival of all reinforcements to the front. Nobody has asked how a doubling of forces will win a guerilla war in Iraq. The US is having difficulty supplying 120,000 troops now, how will doubling the supply load over a 300 miles supply line help against an enemy that refuses to engage
[Marxism-Thaxis] Robert Fisk in Baghdad
Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the food queues? Where were the empty streets? Robert Fisk in Baghdad 05 April 2003 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=394169 A kind of fraudulent, nonchalant mood clogged Baghdad yesterday. There appeared to be no attempt to block the main highway into the city. Save for a few soldiers on the streets and a squad car of police, you might have thought this a holiday. All day yesterday, I asked myself the same question: where was the supposed American assault on Baghdad? Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the food queues? Where were the empty streets? And what exactly were the Americans doing? They were surrounding the city, every foreign radio and television service insisted, but travellers still arrived from Amman. The city authorities have put more of their Chinese double-decker buses back on the streets normal service, as they say, has been resumed and the railway company claimed its trains were still leaving for northern Iraq. Then, just before midday yesterday, a low buzzing sound insinuated its way into the consciousness of all those on the streets of central Baghdad, a long, monotonous, slightly wavering sound, a cross between a distant lawnmower and a purring cat. And when I followed the pointed arms of a dozen shoppers and policemen in Jumhurriyah Street, I at last caught sight of the fly-like machine slowly moving up the grey, hot skies over the city. The Americans had sent their first drone over Baghdad, the very first pilotless reconnaissance aircraft anyone here had seen in this war, flying so slowly that, unlike the supersonic jets that eagle their way down on the city to drop bombs, it was easy to follow. It buzzed westwards towards the largest and most bombed of the presidential palaces and then wobbled southwards. It seemed so fragile a creature, so tiny a presence in the black, angry sky, that it was possible to forget the all-seeing eye in its belly, the pictures it was showing to the Americans outside the city perimeter, the choices it was helping to make about which suburbs were to be bombed. At the Yarmouk Hospital yesterday, the soldier was in agony, his comrade in Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen militia weeping in sympathy as his friend writhed in pain. The American bullets had hit him in the legs and a woman doctor was slowly, with infinite care, trying to ease his right boot from his foot. He refused to cry out, refused to show his own suffering although his eyes were clenched tight shut as the woman worked at the boot, pulling the laces apart, fearing to cut the trouser leg for what she would find underneath. We are the Fedayeen, we are proud men, his friend said, brow drenched in sweat, shaking from the battle outside Saddam international airport. We were confronting the Americans and we were holding them off. The Americans were scattering. Then an officer told my comrade to go and get food and rations for the men. It was when he got back that the bullets came and wounded him. In one corridor at the Yarmouk, a middle-aged, white-haired soldier wearing a colonel's uniform hobbled past me on a crutch. But he stood erect in the hallway, brushing the dust from his shoulders with their gold braid and epaulettes. So where are the Americans? Only 18 hours earlier, I had prowled the empty departure lounges of Saddam airport, mooched through the abandoned customs department, chatted to the seven armed militia guards, met the airport director and stood by the runways where two dust-covered Iraqi Airways passenger jets an old 727 and an even more elderly Antonov stood forlornly on the Tarmac not far from an equally decrepit military helicopter. And all I could hear was the distant whisper of high-flying jets and the chatter of the flocks of birds that have nested near the airport car park on this, the first day of real summer in Baghdad. There was new evidence yesterday of the use of cluster bombs, on Baghdad itself this time, not just in the villages outside. From Furad, in the Doura district and Hay al-Ama and other areas west of Baghdad, civilians were arriving in emergency wards with the usual terrible wounds multiple and severely deep gashes made by shrapnel released by bombs that explode in the air. The death toll at Furud alone was said to be more than 80. One central hospital received 39 wounded, four of whom died in surgery. One young man had run for his life when he saw white canisters dropping from the sky but he was hit as he tried to run through his own front door. Another was a motorist who saw the clusters of tiny bomblets, each packed with star-shaped steel shrapnel, falling like small stones from the sky. His feet were bathed in blood and the familiar tiny, jagged holes of metal fragments could be found in his chest and arms. There was a change in the clientele at the city's restaurants. On Thursday, I
[Marxism-Thaxis] Troops Attacked in Baghdad in Fresh Signs of Resistance (NY Times)
NY Times, June 2, 2003 Troops Attacked in Baghdad in Fresh Signs of Resistance By PATRICK E. TYLER BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 1 Gunmen firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles attacked an American military convoy late today in the neighborhood where Saddam Hussein made his last public appearance on April 9, the day the capital fell to allied forces. At least one American soldier was wounded and one Iraqi civilian was killed in the firefight that erupted on the busy square in front of the Abu Hanifa mosque, according to an Iraqi hospital official who treated the wounded. Other medical workers said three Iraqi civilians were also injured. This is just the beginning! shouted a woman who identified herself as Shahrezad, a bank manager. You are our enemy. You entered Iraq searching for weapons, but where are the weapons? she asked, referring to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Some residents cheered the attack, and said they longed for the return of Mr. Hussein. But others in the crowd said they were happy Mr. Hussein was gone, and blamed hard-line supporters of his Baath Party for firing on American forces. The assault followed an early morning mortar attack on an American base on the outskirts of the city that slightly wounded one soldier. Three mortar rounds were fired on the encampment of the Second Battalion, 70th Armor, of the First Armored Division. It was the first mortar attack in Baghdad since the end of the war, according to a military intelligence officer at the scene. The attacks came as the American military was preparing to send significant forces west of Baghdad to quell pockets of resistance in several cities. [Page A10.] The strikes indicate there is still armed resistance to the allied occupation within the capital, especially in the Adhamiya neighborhood where Mr. Hussein had climbed atop a vehicle and exhorted a crowd to resist American forces before he went into hiding. The attacks occurred on the first day of an amnesty period for Iraqis to turn in heavy weapons to allied forces, an offer that few Baghdad residents seemed to have acted on today. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/international/worldspecial/02IRAQ.html Sacked Iraqi Troops Threaten to Attack U.S. Forces By Huda Majeed Saleh and Michael Georgy Reuters Monday, June 2, 2003; 7:21 AM BAGHDAD-- Thousands of sacked Iraqi soldiers marched on the U.S.-led administration on Monday and threatened to launch suicide attacks on American troops in Baghdad unless they were paid wages and compensation. More than 3,000 angry soldiers from the disbanded Iraqi army massed outside the administration headquarters, in a presidential palace, shouting slogans and vowing a wave of attacks on U.S. troops unless they got their money. All of us will become suicide bombers, said Khairi Jassim, a former warrant officer. I will turn my six daughters into bombs to kill the Americans. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator for Iraq, dissolved Saddam Hussein's armed forces, several security bodies and the defence ministry last month, firing 400,000 people. Many protestors said they could no longer feed their families. I have only 750 dinars (60 U.S. cents) in my pocket. How can I feed my family? I have a crippled child who needs medicines, said Sabah Abdullah, also a former warrant officer. Many demonstrators demanded that the Americans leave Iraq. Anger towards U.S. troops has boiled over into violence in parts of Iraq, which has descended into anarchy since the war ended with widespread looting and violence as well as power shortages. By early afternoon around 300 angry protesters were still outside the palace, a line of U.S. soldiers blocking their advance. We will carry out attacks on the Americans and we will declare a jihad if our rights are not respected, said Mohan Qahtan, another former soldier. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2309-2003Jun2.html The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Re: John Holloway debate/McLaren
On Wed, 04 Jun 2003 09:08:34 -0400 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Mervyn Hartwig wrote: the capitalist state. As for 'scientistic', I think James Daly has argued on this list before, persuasively in my view, that the marxist tradition in the West has indeed tended to operate within the scientistic paradigm of the bourgeois enlightenment with its emphasis on controlling and getting and having rather than seeking to move beyond it to a new paradigm of being and sharing and caring. I'll probably get into this in more depth when I file my critique, but Holloway's comments on Marxist scientism depends heavily on the standard misinterpretation of Engels. As most comrades are aware, Engels became a kind of bogeyman for Western Marxists since his claims for Marxism as a kind of universal and unified social and physical science supposedly serve as an inspiration for orthodox Dialectical Materialism in the USSR. So you get a kind of dotted line between The Dialectics of Nature and the gulags. Back in the 1970s the Italian philogist, Sebastiano Timpanaro wrote *On Materialism*, which among other things provided a strong defense of Engels, against the criticisms of the Western Marxists, and even upheld the value of a natural science materialism and a biological materialism for Marxism. It is also interesting in this regard to note that the American philosopher, Roy Wood Sellars took both Engels and Lenin quite seriously as philosophers, even though he was not himself a Marxist. As a critical realist, and an avowed materialist, he thought that both Engels and Lenin were essentially on the right track, and he had praise for Lenin's notion of reflection, even though he thought that Lenin had failed to completely work out an adequate theory of reflection. Also, it is interesting to note that Sellars was not unaware of the Western Marxists and of their criticisms of Engels, criticisms which he himself, seemed to think were misguided. Thus he wrote in regards to the young Sidney Hook in his essay Reflections on Dialectical materialism: Now I first became cognizant of the Marxist theory of praxis as Hook interpreted it along the lines of pragmatism. So taken, practice became at one and the same time an added criterion of truth of ideas and a constitutive element in the meaning of truth. As is well known, for the pragmatist, knowledge is equated with the process of the validation of ideas within experience. The context is always that of solving problems and establishing firm bases for the future. For the realist, on the other hand, propositions that are validated are to be considered cases of knowledge about things and events other than themselves. He then went on to say: As I read more fully in Marxist literature I became convinced that Hook's pragmatic interpretation of praxis did not do justice to what Engels and Lenin had in mind. I take both of them to be realists and materialists. Praxis, accordingly, was directed against agnosticism and was used to confirm the belief we humans in general have that we do achieve knowledge about the world around us, knowledge being here taken in a realistic sense. And it is quite clearly the opinion of Lenin that this achievement is one of degrees, so that our concepts of matter become more adequate to their goal by a process of cultural approximation. . . Sellars then went on to write: While Lenin was acquainted only with the early forms of pragmatism, he saw that its affiliation was with experientialism. In fact, he sensed its logical connection with positivism. In *Materialism and Emirio-Criticism* , he writes: 'Pragmatism ridicules the metaphysics of idealism and materialism, extols experience, and recognizes practice as the only criterion of truth. . . The difference between Machism and pragmatism is as insignificant and subisdiary from the viewpoint of materialism as is the distinction between empirio-criticism and empirio-monism.' In another passage he pays his respects to those who believe that by means of the word experience they are able to overcome the 'obsolete' distinction between materialism and idealism. Roy Wood Sellar, also BTW edited with Marvin Farber, the 1949 anthology *Philosophy for the Future: The Quest of Modern Materialism* which brought together writings from both Marxist and non-Marxist materialists, in an attempt to elaborate materialism as a synoptic philosophy. BTW Ralp Dumain has some excepts from that book posted on his web site at http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/philfuture.html. Jim F. Part of Holloway's problem appears his unfamiliarity with the broader scope of Marxist scholarship, including the work of Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin that defies such stereotypes. Basically Holloway reduces Marxist thinking around these questions to a kind of Cartesian dualism involving subject and object. It also involves a kind of
[Marxism-Thaxis] Born in the eye of the FBI (The Guardian)
Born in the eye of the FBI It is 50 years since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed as spies. Their son Robert was just one of the 'red diaper' babies - children of communists, targets of McCarthy. Gary Younge tracks them down Thursday June 05 2003 The Guardian On the evening of June 19 1953, Robert Meeropol was sent out to play while his parents were being executed. He was six years' old, and while he had only a vague idea of what was happening, he knew that whatever was going on did not bode well for his future. We were watching a ball game at a friend's house when this newsflash crawled across the bottom of the screen, says Meeropol, but I didn't know what it said. His brother Michael, however, who was 10, knew only too well what it meant and what was about to happen: That's it, goodbye, goodbye, he said. With the whole drama unfolding on the cusp of his infant consciousness, Robert's experience was more impressionistic. I didn't know what was going on, but I must have sensed the essence of Michael's reaction, says Meeropol, now 56, who was adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, friends of his parents, after the execution. The only way to get away from it was to be sent outside to play ball. It was never difficult to get me to go outside and play ball, or to get adults to distract me, because I wanted to be distracted. I wanted to get away from whatever was causing the trouble. When it got too dark, they called us in. They sent me to bed and I went to sleep. I wanted to avoid the situation. More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,970822,00.html The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House
Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House Influence on Bush aides: Bolshevik's writings supported the idea of pre-emptive war Jeet Heer National Post Saturday, June 07, 2003 (snip) As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International. In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is known to veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth International. When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant. Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group. To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as the old man and L.D. (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D, he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman. I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this, Schwartz notes. We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware. The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right. To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon. Throughout the 1930s, Shachtman loyally hewed to the Trotsky line that the Soviet Union as a state deserved to be defended even though Stalin's leadership had to be overthrown. However, when the Soviet Union forged an alliance with Hitler and invaded Finland, Shachtman moved to a politics of total opposition, eventually known as the third camp position. Shachtman argued in the 1940s and 1950s that socialists should oppose both capitalism and Soviet communism, both Washington and Moscow. Yet as the Cold War wore on, Shachtman became increasingly convinced Soviet Communism was the greater and more dangerous enemy. There was a way on the third camp left that anti-Stalinism was so deeply ingrained that it obscured everything else, says Christopher Phelps, whose introduction to the new book Race and Revolution details the Trotskyist debate on racial politics. Phelps is an eloquent advocate for the position that the best portion of Shachtman's legacy still belongs to the left. By the early 1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the strongly anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson. Shachtman had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to the Trotskyism; their mentor was Albert Wohlstetter, a defence intellectual who had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s. full: http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=EC4AD553-8A1D-4324-8 D37-A99B2DFF9F85 The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit
[Marxism-Thaxis] Security, Secrecy and a Bush Brother, by Margie Burns (FWD)
Security, Secrecy and a Bush Brother By Margie Burns A company that provided security at the World Trade Center, Washington D.C.'s Dulles International Airport and United Airlines between 1995 and 2001 was backed by a private Kuwaiti-American investment firm whose records were not open to full public disclosure, with ties to the Bush family. Marvin P. Bush, a younger brother of George W. Bush, was a principal in the company from 1993 to 2000, when most of the work on the big projects was done. But White House responses to 9/11 have not publicly disclosed the company's part in providing security to any of the named facilities. Public records indicate that the firm, formerly named Securacom, had Bush on its board of directors. He was also listed as a significant shareholder. The firm, which is now named Stratesec, Inc., is located in Sterling, Va., a D.C. suburb, and emphasizes federal clients. Bush is no longer on the board. Bush has not responded to repeated telephoned and emailed requests for comment. The American Stock Exchange delisted Stratesec's stock in October 2002. (Securacom also had a contract to provide security at Los Alamos National Laboratories, notorious for its security breach.) According to its present CEO, Barry McDaniel, the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center up to the day the buildings fell down. Yet instead of being investigated, the company and companies involved with it have benefited from legislation pushed by the Bush White House and rubber-stamped by Congressional Republicans. Stratesec, its backer KuwAm, and their corporate officers stand to benefit from limitations on liability and national-security protections from investigation provided in bills since 9/11. HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc., a reinsurance corporation on whose board Marvin Bush sat as director until November 2002, similarly benefits from terrorism insurance protections. (Bush's first year on the board at HCC coincided with his last year on the board at Stratesec.) HCC, formerly Houston Casualty Company, carried some of the insurance for the World Trade Center. It posted a loss for the quarter after the attacks of Sept. 11 and dropped participation in worker's compensation as a result. Bush remains an adviser to the chairman and the Board of Directors, as well as a member of the company's investment committee. The former CEO of Stratesec is Wirt D. Walker III, who is still chairman of the board. Although he has also been the managing director of KuwAm for several years, Walker states definitively in phone interviews that there was no exchange of talent between Stratesec and KuwAm during the WTC and other projects. As Walker put it, I'm an investment banker. He continued, We just owned some stock. The investment company was not involved in any way in the work or day-to-day operations of the security company. He explained clearly and pleasantly that there was no sharing of information or of personnel between the two companies. In December 2000 endash;- when the presidential election was determined -- Stratesec added a Government Division, providing the same full range of security systems services as the Commercial Division, in the company's words. Stratesec now has an open-ended contract with the General Services Administration (GSA) and a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with the agency that allows the government to purchase materials and services from the Company without having to go through a full competition. The company lists as government clients the US Army, US Navy, US Air force, and the Department of Justice, in projects that often require state-of-the-art security solutions for classified or high-risk government sites. In 2000, the US Army accounted for 29% of the company's earned revenues, or about $6.9 million. The White House opposed an independent commission to investigate 9/11 until after the terrorism insurance protections and protections for security companies had safely passed Congress. It has also quietly intervened in lawsuits against United Airlines in New York, brought by relatives of the victims. Marvin Bush joined Securacom's Board of Directors in 1993, as part of new management hired when the company separated from engineering firm Burns and Roe. The new team was capitalized by KuwAm, the D.C.-based Kuwaiti- American investment company. Bush also served on the Board of Directors at KuwAm, along with Mishal Yousef Saud al-Sabah, Chairman of KuwAm and also a Director on Securacom's (Stratesec's) board. The World Trade Center and the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority -- which operates Dulles -- were two of Securacom's three biggest clients in 1996 and 1997. (The third was MCI, now WorldCom.) Stratesec (Securacom) differs from other security companies which separate the function of consultant from that of service provider. The company defines itself as a single-source provider of
[Marxism-Thaxis] The 'Left-Wing Media? (Monthly Review - June 2003)
The 'Left-Wing' Media? by Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster http://www.monthlyreview.org/0603editr.htm This article is a version of material that will appear in the authors' The Big Picture: Understanding Media through Political Economy, to be published by Monthly Review Press in December 2003. Citations for this piece will be available there. If we learn nothing else from the war on Iraq and its subsequent occupation, it is that the U.S. ruling class has learned to make ideological warfare as important to its operations as military and economic warfare. A crucial component of this ideological war has been the campaign against left-wing media bias, with the objective of reducing or eliminating the prospect that mainstream U.S. journalism might be at all critical toward elite interests or the system set up to serve those interests. In 2001 and 2002, no less than three books purporting to demonstrate the media's leftward tilt rested high atop the bestseller list. Such charges have already influenced media content, pushing journalists to be less critical of right-wing politics. The result has been to reinforce the corporate and rightist bias already built into the media system. The main target of this propaganda campaign is television network news programs, but the campaign has also extended into radio broadcasting, newspapers, and other media. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which controls broadcasting outlets and newspapers throughout the world, launched the Fox News Channel in the 1990s as a more conservative rival to CNN and the news programs of ABC, NBC, and CBS. According to the New York Times (April 7, 2003), In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's creation of the Fox News Channel has shifted the entire spectrum of American cable news to the right. Convinced that many people found CNN and the major broadcast networks too liberal, Mr. Murdoch and the former Republican political consultant Roger Ailes chartered Fox to be more conservativeor, from their point of view, more centrist. Last January, Fox became the top-rated cable network and it now draws more than 2 million viewers in prime timeFrom the start, the network displayed an American flag waving on its screen. Its newscasters speak of American and British troops as we, ours, and liberators. After other networks reported setbacks to American and British forces [during the invasion of Iraq], the Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly denounced its competitors as liberal weenies who were exaggerating the difficulties of the fight and underestimating the American public's toleration for casualties. The current attack on media content is presented as an attempt to counter the alleged bias of media elites. In reality, however, it is designed to shrink still furtherto the point of oblivionthe space for critical analysis in journalism. In order to understand the form and content of the conservative onslaught on the media it is necessary to have some comprehension of the role played by professional journalism beginning in the early twentieth century. Prior to 1900, the editorial position of a newspaper invariably reflected the political views of the owner, and the politics were explicit throughout the paper. Partisan journalism became problematic when newspapers became increasingly commercial enterprises and when newspaper markets became predominantly monopolistic. During the Progressive Eraas was chronicled in these pages a year agoU.S. journalism came under withering attack for being a tool of its capitalist owners to propagate anti-labor propaganda.* With profit-making in the driver's seat, partisan journalism became bad for business as it turned off parts of the potential readership and that displeased advertisers. Professional journalism was born from the revolutionary idea that the link between owner and editor could be broken. The news would be determined by trained professionals and the politics of owners and advertisers would be apparent only on the editorial page. Journalists would be given considerable autonomy to control the news using their professional judgment. Among other things, they would be trained to establish their political neutrality. Monopoly control over the news in particular markets was not especially importantso the argument went since, whether or not there were multiple newspapers, trained professionals would provide similar reports, to the extent that they were well trained. There emerged a professional code that, following The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovack and Tom Rosenstiel, might be reduced in its most ideal form to nine principles: 1. .Journalism's first obligation is to the truth. 2. Its first loyalty is to citizens. 3. Its essence is a discipline of verification. 4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: [Admin] Fwd: Adolfo Olaechea extradited to Peru
I am taking the considerable liberty of forwarding this to list administrators at marxism-administration, since marxism-psych is essentially a dead letter. But many of the lists here at Utah have some historical continuity with the marxism-unmoderated list, on which Adolfo Olaechea was a signficant figure, and you may wish to decide what of this you wish to pass on. Also if you accept my argument, although many people have had their differences with him, his arrest, and eager repatration are of potentially great significance in the growing trends towards global law, in world in which imperialism is even more dominant than before. Chris Burford Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 13:54:39 +0100 To: PEN-L From: Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Adolfo Olaechea extradited to Peru Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From Chris Burford I first picked this announcement from Louis Godena up today from marxism-international e-mail list but I see Louis Proyect has already, quite rightly, posted it on Marxmail. Adolfo Olaechea has been a significant figure in the development of marxism-space and its relevance in the imperialist world. Each person who has been involved in an overlapping number of lists will remember this from their own experience. I do not claim to be objective. But Adolfo Olaechea participated vigorously in the later 90's a very high volume list called marxism unmoderated hosted by the Spoons collective. He championed the cause of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP) associated with Sendero Luminoso, Shining Path, and denounced liberal criticisms of what he defended as its revolutionary Peoples War. He also robustly criticised Trotskyists, and of course was criticised in turn, in a way that would not be tolerated on PEN-L. At one stage a flame war between self-declared champions of the PCP in London and New York broke out which appeared to be potentially much more than this, with accusations and real possibilities of people being agents provocateurs deliberately or objectively. Although I always thought that marxism-unmoderated was more viable than many did, the bulk of the volume went to a new list marxism-international, moderated by 4 people. Around the same time as the moderation subsequently passed to Louis Godena and Adolfo Olaechea many people left the list. My impression was that the bulk were inherited by Doug Henwood's LBO-talk and Louis Proyect's Marxmail, but there were other moderated lists, a number of which were hosted out of Utah. Marxism-international contracted to several posts per month. I was a number of subscribers who did not challenge the new moderator policy, although it is not close to my more liberal views, as I wanted to continue to subscribe to and receive information on Peru and similar perspectives. While marxism-international declined in volume (as some lists do anyway) Adolfo Olaechea and others set up an organisation with a wider radical democratic global perspective, called Justice International of which he is the general secretary. Much of this preamble, might be disputed at least in its emphasis but I think we need to set a context. Although I have had my ownbruising encounters with Adolfo Olaechea, as many have, I suggest this development is much more than a story of one man being vicitimised. Indeed the readiness of Adolfo Olaechea to go directly to Peru, to my mind suggests that in the spirit that Lenin urged, he is fully intending to defend himself vigorously in court, and very probably has anticipated this possibility for some time. I am not sure how broad a campaign could be built around this. My experience was one of solidarity with the ANC which involved working with churches, and liberals. Certainly it might include compromises with organisations like Amnesty International, of which Adolfo Olaechea has been very critical in the past. However as far as he is concerned as an individual, if anyone can do a Georgi Dimitrov at the Reichstag Trial, and put his accusers in the dock, it is Adolfo Olaechea. His scorn is withering. His political perspective cannot easily be dismissed in the context of Peru, if not the wider world. What adds to the potential significance is the whole theme of how Empire is imposing its own model of global justice, Guantanamo Bay style, or Pinochet house arrest style. The Peruvian Government has just decided to renew its call of last year to Japan, to extradite Alberto Fujimori for crimes against humanity during his ten year presidency. It is likely that Japan will continue to refuse on the grounds that Fujimori has dual nationality, because of his Japanese parents. http://dev.amatechtel.com/news/wed/cg/Qperu-japan-fujimori.RIgT_DuR.asp Meanwhile Adolfo Olaechea has accepted the challenge of his extradition. While there is perhaps still scope for people's war in some countries, I think this development is part of the trend on a world scale to try to impose
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Adolfo Olachea arrested in Spain
Spain extradites Maoist rebel suspect to Peru 08 August 2003 LIMA: Peruvian police began interrogating a 60-year-old self-declared Maoist today after he was extradited from Spain to face charges that he spent much of the last 30 years in Europe promoting the Shining Path rebel group. Adolfo Olaechea arrived on a commercial flight and was escorted in a bullet-proof vest to Interpol's Lima offices for questioning, witnesses said. He waved and smiled to reporters. Police cordoned off several blocks around the building and sharpshooters watched from nearby roofs. Olaechea has lived in Britain since leaving Peru in the early 1970s but was arrested in July during a vacation in Almeria, Spain. He will face trial for defending terrorism, the charge on which he was extradited, but he is facing other charges in Peru, Deputy Justice Minister Adolfo Solf said. Olaechea denies being a member of the Shining Path but identifies himself as a Maoist, according to statements he made to the press over the last decade. Full: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2621760a12,00.html The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are copies of FRAME 1-3 available?
On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 21:15:43 -0400 Robert Cymbala [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I could use some help locating the first three FRAMEs of that old 1997 thread. The archives have FRAME FOUR onward. Searching Google.com for: frame four panic finds the marxism-thaxis post. But these do not: frame one panic frame two panic frame three panic Where are they? Write back: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Did you try checking this link? http://tinyurl.com/po30 On that page you should see posts for those other threads. Jim Farmelant -- Robert Cymbala Co-Director, Lenin Internet Archive www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ Co-Janitor, Marxists Internet Archive www.marxists.org/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Are copies of FRAME 1-3 available?
On Sat, 4 Oct 2003 19:07:08 -0400 Robert Cymbala [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 22:18:12 -0400 Did you try checking this link? http://tinyurl.com/po30 On that page you should see posts for those other threads. Jim Farmelant All that is, is a fancy way of getting to http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1997-April/ and, no, I don't see posts for threads FRAME ONE through FRAME THREE because (if you had bothered to look) that page begins with FRAME FOUR. Are you sure those were posted to Thaxis? I just went through the archives for 1997, and I don't see any posts for FRAME ONE to FRAME THREE. As I recall weren't there posts from the Revolutionary Marxist Collective at SUNY-Buffalo to other lists such as Marxism-International at that time on the same subjects? Jim Farmelant -RjC The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Revolt in Bolivia
From Indymedia website BOLIVIA: CARLOS MESA, THE NEW PRISONER OF PAL[ace] Econoticiasbolivia (Translated by: Latinsol) (18/10/2003 05:54) After bringing down with stones and wooden sticks the government of millionaire Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the rebellion of the poor and excluded has demanded from the new President Mesa to not export the gas, to industrialize it in the country and recover it from transnational hands. Huge task for a man without a party nor social support, sustained only by the U.S embassy and a demoralized army. BOLIVIA: CARLOS MESA, THE NEW PRISONER OF PALACE Econoticiasbolivia Translated by: Latinsol La Paz, October 17, 2003 (hrs. 21:00).- The new President of Bolivia, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, was until recently, a declared fan of Goni, a fervent admirer of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. He admired Goni's intelligence, his political ability, his capacity to invent and recreate neoliberal policies. Today, he must administer the disaster left by the millionaire, who after attempting to drawn the protest of the poor on blood, has escaped on a helicopter from the fury of the greatest civil up-rising of South America. It is not a happy day for him, despite being minutes from the Congress of the Republic placing the presidential sash on him. He seems overwhelmed. He is very lonely, has no political party nor a social movement to support him. In the end, nobody trusts him. Nor even the United States Embassy, which only at the last minute and with much reticence has given him the ok to govern or, at least, enough support so that he does not fall right away. David Greenlee, the Ambassador, had an emergency meeting with him last night, after being convinced that keeping Goni would be to loose it all. With apprehension has accepted Mesa, but it hurts him that Mesa is so weak, so easy to be intimidated, so inexperienced. Mesa has been a successful journalist and historian. He has made a fortune with his TV channel. He is a millionaire who admirers neoliberalism. Before the Auditor General's office has declared that he has at 53 years of age a fortune of one and a half million dollars, much too much, in a country where a third of the population goes hungry and another third barely has for the most essential diet. In popular areas he [n]either has followers nor sympathizers. His unfulfilled promises about effectively fighting the extensive public corruption and his silence before the massacre of so many Bolivians (over 70) has cost him to loose the scarce support he had before the people, especially in the unions and the poorest of the population. Many believe, they are sure, that there is not a great difference between him and Goni. For now, on political terms, he only has the support of the neoliberal parties fallen in disgrace, who hide and seek refuge behind him so as not to lose everything, as Sanchez de Lozada. It is a very weak support, even uneasy for the new Mandatary who wants them on a second row, invisible, for thus he has began to turn his eyes towards the middle class. There, within the most accommodated, in the high bureaucracy, among the personalities and the business sectors lays his only hope. There, is where he wants to generate a social base to sustain and preserve him from the popular up-rising, the up-rising of the poor, from the social revolution. Many of his new friends have already began to get organized. They have contributed to the hunger strike of the middle classes that isolated Goni even more and now want to harvest the triumph fertilized with the blood of others, in search for the institutional continuity, with a few reforms but that it would not look any where near a social revolution, nothing that would inconvenience Mr. Ambassador. Mesa and his friends, many of them in the big media, want to form a government of national unity, to unite the middle classes and to convince the workers and the most poor residents that Mesa is very different than Goni. A failed attempt, for now. The popular assembly of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), the power of the street, the other power, has already spoken and has ordered the new President what he has to do: Stop the exporting of gas nor from Chile, or Peru, to industrialize it in Bolivia and recover the gas and oil for Bolivians. Huge task for a lonely man, prisoner of the up-raised masses. If he does not comply with these demands, a popular Assembly, auto-convoked and conformed by workers, unions and popular representatives will assume the task of taking the gas and oil away from transnational hands, says the leader of COB, the miner Jaime Solares. The yelling and wooden sticks of the loud multitude confirm the warning. The certainty within the rebels is that the popular up-rising has brought down Sanchez de Lozada with stones and wooden sticks, but it still has not accomplished anything about the gas, the oil, the land and territory, the coca and other social demands oriented to destroy neoliberalism. And that is
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Hold On to Your Humanity (by Stan Goff)
Hold On to Your Humanity: An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq by Stan Goff (US Army Retired) Dear American serviceperson in Iraq, I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you--some more extreme than others--are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed. In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all. The essence of all this shit was that we had to stay the course in Vietnam, and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt. When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me. When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote. What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and commiting rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me--just in country--and the people who had done those things to them. What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children. My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids. So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight. And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong. But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we stated to ask is who put us in this position? In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue and caviar. They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped. That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water. We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story. I changed over
[Marxism-Thaxis] Ralp Dumain on Harry Wells on the History of Logic
A former student of the Marxist philosopher Harry Wells sent me a paper Wells distributed in his course, before McCarthyism caught up to Wells: Wells, Harry K. Historical Origins of the Logic of Classification and the Logic of Genesis. Oneonta, New York, Dept. of Philosophy, Hartwick College. October 1961. 53 pp. Based on chapters 6 7 of the author's 1950 dissertation Process and Unreality. Contents: Introduction: Stages in the Science of Logic Chapter 1: Logical and Ontological Principles: Laws of Thought and Laws of Being Chapter 2: Plato and Heraclitus Chapter 3: Aristotle's Logic of Classification Chapter 4: Hegel and Aristotle Chapter 5: Hegel's Logic of Genesis Conclusion: The Logic of Genesis and the Twentieth Century Crisis in Thought This is my capsule review. (1) First, I'm impressed with the distinction between laws of being (ontological view) and laws of thought (propositional view), and the historical relation posited between them. It is interesting to see the views of Jevons and Cohen and Nagel. My own position on formal logic has always been propositional, not ontological, but apparently this is at variance with many other philosophers throughout history. Wells poses the question, whether one can maintain ontological and propositional perspectives at variance with one another (p. 9-10). He seems to think that this won't work. I don't know. (2) It's interesting that he identifies the logic of genesis with Marxism and Existentialism, both philosophies exiled from mainstream western philosophy. I don't know what else to say about this, though. (3) The chapter on the ancient Greeks is fascinating, particularly the war of Plato against Heraclitus and Plato' dubious ontological motives. Similarly interesting is Aristotle's logic of classification. (4) The summary of Hegel's logic of genesis is also of great interest. (5) I am unhappy with the conclusion, though. First, the posited connection between logic and the sciences disturbs me. Secondly, the historical development of both. I can see the hiatus between the development of logic in Aristotle and the redefinition of the subject in Hegel's time. However, the connection between the development of logic and the development of the sciences is not at all clear to me. (6) Wells claims that science emerges from classification at the beginning of the 19th century. Also that logic, outside of Hegel, never caught up. But I see two great omissions. First, there is the development of modern physics from Galileo and Newton on. This is hardly a taxonomic science. Secondly, the development of physics is congruent with the development of the calculus, which is hardly a formalism of stasis. This is all completely missing from Wells' survey. (7) The next question would be the relation between logic and mathematics (calculus). Well, we know that calculus could not overcome its logical contradictions until well into the 19th century, but I'm not aware that logic itself was basically revised during this period. Mathematicians had to tolerate contradictions until they could overcome them. Calculus did not deal with qualitative change, of course, but it did learn how to overcome the logical contradictions of motion. (8) Logic itself began to evolve late in the 19th century, both with new formalisms--Frege, etc.--and with developments in the foundations of mathematics. The criticism of formal logic overlooks all of these developments and is hence way out of date. (9) All the sciences of course have developed way beyond taxonomy for a long time. They seem to have gotten along without any major preoccupations with logic, although there have been conceptual crises yet to be resolved. For example, quantum mechanics yielded attempts to apply three-valued logic to apply to indeterminate states, not to mention the (dialectical?) principle of complementarity. There might be an interesting conceptual crisis to which a new conception of logic might apply, but I'm not aware that any particular innovation has definitively taken root. Wells' examples (p. 49-50) are rather lame in comparison to these problems. (10) The question of why Hegel is completely overlooked by modern logic is well worth asking. G.H. von Wright gives some credit to Hegel even though Hegel is not part of his purview. But modern logic involves a number of developments of conceivable relevance to dialectics, not just in foundations of mathematics, but in many-valued logics, tense logic, paraconsistent logic (which admits contradictions), etc. Whether these can be considered the old static logics is debatable, but either way they should be investigated and compared to Hegel's logic and determined whether they adequately convey genesis and not merely classification. In logic there have also been opposing schools of ontological thought from the atomism of Russell to the holism of Quine. (11) Some of these
[Marxism-Thaxis] James Heartfield reviews Doug Henwood's ANE in Spiked On-line
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0006DFD4.htm 20 November 2003 After the New Economy by James Heartfield After the New Economy, Doug Henwood, The New Press, 2003, GBP £16.95 New Yorker Doug Henwood's multimedia assault on American capitalism ranges from the Left Business Observer - a newsletter, website and discussion group - a weekly radio show on WBAI, the definitive expose of Wall Street (Verso, 1998), and now his new book After the New Economy. Henwood's high standing among radicals in America and beyond arises from his ability, not only to understand the wilder shores of high finance, but also to explain what is wrong there. Widening the focus to the economy as a whole, Henwood's latest book is a rattling good read, as well as being a clear introduction to the complexities of economic statistics and the real world trends behind them. Henwood makes short work of the shibboleths of the 'New Economy' trumpeted by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and many in the financial press. He also takes apart the 'post-materialist' fantasies of George Gilder and Business Week, showing that the 'overthrow of matter' was prematurely celebrated. He is particularly good at going for the jugular, exposing ramshackle exploitation behind the book-selling website Amazon's glowing front page, and neatly exposing 'all the substitutes for profits that became so fashionable in the later 1990s - eyeballs, hits and pageviews.' Henwood takes some risks himself. As a critic of Wall Street, he is well placed to enlarge his audience among the 'anti-capitalist' movement of recent times. But rather than joining in with the Greek chorus of woe-sayers, bemoaning the end of the world, Henwood is resolutely optimistic about new technology. More than that, he shows where the critics are wrong, exposing the anti-human ideas of the deep ecology movement and their ambition to reduce the population. Drawing out the unlovely consequences of the arguments made by greens such as David Korten and Kirkpatrick Sale, Henwood concludes 'this is snobbery, elitism and despair, masquerading as radical critique' (168). Henwood's chapter on income inequality seems the least satisfying - though the treatment of the facts is more judiciously handled than in most other approaches. (Henwood's account of the changes in the demography of the US working class, and its impact on racial and gender inequality, is most interesting.) Perhaps this is because these issues were dealt with so well before, as in Andrew Hacker's Money (1997). And, as Henwood points out, 'polarisation continued well into the 1990s and beyond, but with much less political impact. Maybe people have gotten used to it.' The fact that inequality fails to ignite popular criticism of the powers-that-be ought to be investigated, and writers like Henwood should ask more questions when establishment bodies like the United Nations churn out ever-more alarming inequality statistics. The chapter on globalisation is the best, with its clear explanation of the mysteries of trade and its willingness to go against the grain of accepted ideas on the left. In particular, Henwood takes care to show that contemporary investment patterns are not a repeat of what Lenin described as the super-exploitation of the third world, and that not all growth in the developing world is unwelcome. He is wise, too, on the state of the ruling elite, arguing that 'its members are feeling a bit besieged'. If there were more minds like Henwood's available, we might imagine the besieged elite being replaced altogether. James Heartfield's 'Capitalism and anti-capitalism' is published in interventions, Vol 5 (2), 271-89. ___ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Tariq Ali: Remembering Edward Said
New Left Review 24, November-December 2003 The physical and moral courage of a unique writer, and fighter - leading Arab intellectual, unconforming cultural theorist, champion of the Palestinian cause in the heartland of Israeli overseas power. TARIQ ALI REMEMBERING EDWARD SAID 1935 - 2003 Edward Said was a longstanding friend and comrade. We first met in 1972, at a seminar in New York. Even in those turbulent times, one of the features that distinguished him from the rest of us was his immaculate dress sense: everything was meticulously chosen, down to the socks. It is almost impossible to visualize him any other way. At a conference in his honour in Beirut in 1997, Edward insisted on accompanying Elias Khoury and myself for a swim. As he walked out in his swimming trunks, I asked why the towel did not match. 'When in Rome', he replied, airily; but that evening, as he read an extract from the Arabic manuscript of his memoir Out of Place, his attire was faultless. It remained so till the end, throughout his long battle with leukaemia. Over the last eleven years one had become so used to his illness - the regular hospital stays, the willingness to undergo trials with the latest drugs, the refusal to accept defeat - that one began to think him indestructible. Last year, purely by chance, I met Said's doctor in New York. In response to my questions, he replied that there was no medical explanation for Edward's survival. It was his indomitable spirit as a fighter, his will to live, that had preserved him for so long. Said travelled everywhere. He spoke, as always, of Palestine, but also of the unifying capacities of the three cultures, which he would insist had a great deal in common. The monster was devouring his insides but those who came to hear him could not see the process, and we who knew preferred to forget. When the cursed cancer finally took him the shock was intense. His quarrel with the political and cultural establishments of the West and the official Arab world is the most important feature of Said's biography. It was the Six Day War of 1967 that changed his life - prior to that event, he had not been politically engaged. His father, a Palestinian Christian, had emigrated to the United States in 1911, at the age of sixteen, to avoid being drafted by the Ottomans to fight in Bulgaria. He became an American citizen and served, instead, with the US military in France during the First World War. Subsequently he returned to Jerusalem, where Edward was born in 1935. Said never pretended to be a poverty-stricken Palestinian refugee as some detractors later alleged. The family moved to Cairo, where Wadie Said set up a successful stationery business and Edward was sent to an elite English-language school. His teenage years were lonely, dominated by a Victorian father, in whose eyes the boy required permanent disciplining, and an after-school existence devoid of friends. Novels became a substitute— Defoe, Scott, Kipling, Dickens, Mann. He had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales but, despite his father's monarchism, was despatched for his education not to Britain but to the United States, in 1951. Said would later write of hating his 'puritanical and hypocritical' New England boarding school: it was 'shattering and disorienting'. Until then, he thought he knew exactly who he was, 'moral and physical flaws' and all. In the United States he had to remake himself 'into something the system required'. Watershed of 67 Nevertheless, he flourished in the Ivy League environment, first at Princeton and then Harvard where, as he later said, he had the privilege to be trained in the German philological tradition of comparative literature. Said began teaching at Columbia in 1963; his first book, on Conrad, was published three years later. When I asked him about it in New York in 1994, in a conversation filmed for Channel Four, he described his early years at Columbia between 1963 and 1967 as a 'Dorian Gray period': TA: So one of you was the Comp Lit professor, going about his business, giving his lectures, working with Trilling and the others; yet at the same time, another character was building up inside you - but you kept the two apart? ES: I had to. There was no place for that other character to be. I had effectively severed my connexion with Egypt. Palestine no longer existed. My family lived partly in Egypt and partly in Lebanon. I was a foreigner in both places. I had no interest in the family business, so I was here. Until 1967, I really didn't think about myself as anything other than a person going about his work. I had taken in a few things along the way. I was obsessed with the fact that many of my cultural heroes - Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Reinhold Niebuhr - were fanatical Zionists. Not just pro- Israeli: they said the most awful things about the Arabs, in print. But all I could do was note it.
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern Policing (Monthly Review)
The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern Policing by Kristian Williams http://www.monthlyreview.org/1203williams.htm - --- Kristian Williams is a member of Rose City Copwatch, in Portland, Oregon. This essay is based on his book, Our Enemies in Blue, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press. Thanks to Emily-Jane Dawson for her comments on an earlier draft of this article. - --- Why were the modern police created? It is generally assumed, among people who think about it at all, that the police were created to deal with rising levels of crime caused by urbanization and increasing numbers of immigrants. John Schneider describes the typical accounts: The first studies were legal and administrative in their focus, confined mostly to narrative descriptions of the step-by-step demise of the old constabulary and the steady, but often controversial evolution of the professionals. Scholars seemed preoccupied with the politics of police reform. Its causes, on the other hand, were considered only in cursory fashion, more often assumed than proved. Cities, it would seem, moved inevitably toward modern policing as a consequence of soaring levels of crime and disorder in an era of phenomenal growth and profound social change.1 I will refer to this as the crime-and-disorder theory. Despite its initial plausibility, the idea that the police were invented in response to an epidemic of crime is, to be blunt, exactly wrong. Furthermore, it is not much of an explanation. It assumes that when crime reaches a certain level, the natural social response is to create a uniformed police force. This, of course, is not an explanation but an assertion of a natural law for which there is little evidence.2 We cannot rule out the possibility that slave revolts, riots, and other instances of collective violence precipitated the creation of modern police, but we should remember that neither crime nor disorder were unique to nineteenth-century cities, and therefore cannot on their own account for a change like the rise of a new institution. Riotous mobs controlled much of London during the summer of 1780, but the Metropolitan Police did not appear until 1829almost fifty years later. Public drunkenness was a serious problem in Boston as early as 1775, but a modern police force was not created there until 1838.3 So the crime-and-disorder theory fails to explain why earlier crime waves didnt produce modern police; it also fails to explain why crime in the nineteenth century led to policing, and not to some other system.4 Furthermore, it is not at all clear that crime was on the rise prior to the creation of the modern police. In Boston, for example, crime went down between 1820 and 1830,5 and continued to drop for the rest of the nineteenth century.6 In fact, crime was such a minor concern that it was not even mentioned in the City Marshals report of 1824.7 And the city suffered only a single murder between 1822 and 1834.8 Whether or not crime was on the rise, after the introduction of modern policing the number of arrests increased.9 The majority of these were for misdemeanors, and most related to victimless crimes, or crimes against the public order. They did not generally involve violence or the loss of property, but instead were related to public drunkenness, vagrancy, loitering, disorderly conduct, or being a suspicious person.10 In other words, the greatest portion of the actual business of law enforcement did not concern the protection of life and property, but the controlling of poor people, their habits and their manners. Sidney Harring wryly notes: The criminologists definition of public order crimes comes perilously close to the historians description of working-class leisure-time activity.11 The suppression of such disorderly conduct was only made possible by the introduction of modern police. For the first time, more arrests were made on the initiative of the officer than in response to specific complaints.12 Though the charges were generally minor, the implications were not: the change from privately-initiated to police-initiated prosecutions greatly shifted the balance of power between the citizenry and the state. A critic of this view might suggest that the rise in public order arrests reflected an increase in public order offenses, rather than a shift in official priorities. Unfortunately, there is no way to verify this claim. (The increase in arrests does not provide very good evidence, since it is precisely the fact which the hypothesis seeks to explain.) However, if the tolerance for disorder was in decline, this fact, coupled with the emergence of the new police, would be sufficient to explain the increase in arrests of this type.13 The Cleveland police offered a limited test of this hypothesis. In December 1907, they adopted a Golden Rule
[Marxism-Thaxis] James Heartfield on Saddam
The WEEK ending 14 December 2003 SADDAMNED IF YOU DO... The detention of Saddam Hussein in Tikrit draws to a close a long relationship between the Iraqi dictator and the USA. Saddam Hussein was a leader of the Baathist party, whose 1963 coup in Iraq was directly supported by the US State Department and the CIA as 'a useful counterweight to the spread of communism ... and the pressure from Nasserism in Egypt' (John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, Saddam's War, 1991, 54-5). Saddam's first regime was short-lived but he rose to power again, with the support of the Iraqi Communist Party - only to turn on them at the end of the 1970s. In 1980 Saddam started a war against the radical Islamic Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, at the direct request of US President Jimmy Carter's Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski (Bulloch and Morris 75-6). In the course of that war, Saddam attacked Kurds at Halabja, using chemical weapons supplied by the West, and, as journalist John Pilger recently uncovered, with US military advisors in the field. Once again Saddam was the loyal ally of the west, crushing popular opposition - so how did he make the transition to all-purpose hate figure in the first America-Iraq war of 1990-91? Bulloch and Morris have the insight that 'in the final analysis, the strength of the international response to Saddam's challenge was not about Kuwait or the future security of Israel or even about oil; it was about the status of the existing powers - particularly of the United States - in the New World Order'. (17) Allied commander General Norman Schwarzkopf explains how the New World Order put Iraq in America's firing line in his autobiography 'It Doesn't take a Hero' (with Peter Petre, Bantam Press, 1991). The book documents how, in the lead up to the Gulf War itself, Schwarzkopf's professional militarism coincided with the American military establishment's needs of the moment. Schwarzkopf joined Central Command, which covers parts of the Middle East, in July 1988. By July 1989, running short of the enemies a general needs to justify his job, he was pointing the finger at Iraq: 'I was confident of the Middle East's strategic importance and, therefore, of Central Command's reason for existence. Nobody except a few stubborn hardliners believed that we'd go to war against the Soviets in the Middle EastSo I asked myself, what was most likely? Another confrontation like the tanker war, one that had the United States intervening in a regional conflict that had gotten out of control and was threatening the flow of oil to the rest of the world. What was the worst case? Iraq as the aggressor' (p286) Schwarzkopf worked overtime to throw out the old 'Zagros Mountains plan', which assumed a Soviet invasion and replaced it with 'Internal Look'. The new plan assumed an Iraqi invasion to seize Saudi oil fields. The telling thing here is that Schwarzkopf, in line with his own career outlook assumes that there must be an enemy, and then goes looking for one. The wish is father to the thought. What is generally true for generals happens to be particularly true for a militaristic society like the USA - first they needed an enemy, then they found one. Looking back at this episode, it is not hard to see why perceptive commentators believed the Iraqi regime had been set up to invade Kuwait in August 1990. On the eve of the invasion April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein that the USA had 'no opinion on the Iraq-Kuwaiti dispute' - at the same time that the US military command for the region was actually preparing for a war with Iraq. The transcripts of the Glaspie-Saddam encounter are reproduced in Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent's 'Secret Dossier - The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War', Paladin, 1991. The transcripts show that Saddam was convinced that he had American backing for the Kuwaiti invasion, just as he had for his previous military actions, and was incredulous when he was challenged by the US. In late July 1990, Schwarzkopf staged a mock-up of 'Internal Look' just two weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As he says himself 'the movements of Iraq's real-world ground and air forces eerily paralleled the imaginary scenario in our game' (Schwarzkopf, p292). After the Gulf War, there was no possibility that the Iraq could be allowed back into the pro-Western club. By surviving the US-led invasion, Saddam stood - rather against his own inclinations - as a permanent challenge to American status. Martin Woollacott, a liberal Guardian journalist, summed up the prevailing consensus: 'The issue of whether or not Baghdad still has, hidden away somewhere, a serious nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, or ballistic capacity, on which it can now begin to build again, important though it is, is less important than the fact that Saddam has successfully defied Washington and New York. The weapons question is a red herring.'
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Saddam's capture, Bush's victory?
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:13:27 - Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: some good points on the background to Saddam's capture by James Heartfield. My initial attempt - Bush appeared to be unusually cautious in his victory televison broadcast, which seemed to be crafted towards Iraqis rather than US electors. That is at least one achievement of Saddam's resistance and that of the wider Iraqi people. I think that is certainly the case, especially after Bush got burned politically over his landing on the aircraft carrier, with the banner Mission accomplished. You may also recall, that when Saddam's sons were killed, all sorts of commentators were claiming that would mean the end of the insurgency. As we know things didn't quite work out that way. My suspicion is that with the passing of the months, Saddam's role in the insurgency, such as it was, had become increasingly diminished. He was probably more concerned with saving his own skin than with directing guerilla operations against coalition forces. Another point. It may well be the case that with the capture of Saddam, the door may be opened to the entrance of new forces into the insurgency now that there is no chance that it can lead to the return of Saddam to power. Many of the Shi'ites seem to have been holding back from joining the insurgency for that very reason. Now at least some of them may now feel less inhibited about joining it. But if the allied invasion of Iraq was illegal, so was the capture of its leader. Well of course. And I wonder what sort of trial if any he might receive. Any sort of trial that is more than just a simple show trial would most certainly involve Saddam's legal team seeking to subpoena all sorts of officials from the Carter, Reagan, and Bush I administrations. If that sort of thing was to be allowed the results would be most painful to the US and especially for the current Administration many of whose officials were very much involved in aiding Saddam's regime in the past, when he was a US ally in good standing, and to that extent are complicit in some of his worst crimes. Behind the repeated degrading images of the prisoner with his mouth being examined and his hair in disarray - worse than images that caused indignation when it was US military who had been captured and paraded in front of the cameras - was the question of whether this means total victory. Bush was wise to say ``The capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq, presumably excluding allied troops from ever being the perpetrators or provokers of violence themselves. The trial will have to be on the grounds of crimes against humanity rather than being on the wrong side in geopolitics. Saddam would have much to reveal. Precisely my point, especially if his attorneys can subpoena US officials, past and present, who were involved in aiding his regime. And the worse crimes were in the context of conflict and instability - as so often happens in history - in which the US and the west had a major part - the war against Iran, where Iraq was the ally of the US, and the events after Iraq's defeat in which the Saddam regime brutally supressed an uprising. Yes according to the prevailing conventions of international law for Iraq to invade Kuwait was a breach of sovereignty, but in the context of the history of Mesopotamia over thousands of years it was hardly illogical. For Britain and the US to invade in the 21st century required them to show, that unlike the majority of the Security Council they turned out to be right about WMD if you accept the questionable logic on which Blair persuaded Bush to debate with the UN. Presumably in preparation for an authoritative trial the Bush administration will have to hope that second level commanders will reveal many details of WMD more shocking than battlefield chemical weapons. At his news conference Maj Gen Odierno revealed that he thought that it unlikely that Saddam had been personally directing the (increasingly effective) resistance to the allied occupation. That presumably reflects the prevailing view among the top levels of the US military in Iraq and may be very significant. After the inital psychological blow of Saddam's capture to those personally loyal to him, it is even possible that his capture will lead to a more sustained campaign of military resistance against the occupying forces and the imposition of a US led finance capitalist economy. For some Saddam will be a martyr and hero, but his capture may make it in fact easier for all Iraqi nationalists to network on the basis of anti-Americanism rather than support for the old regime. An American rout in Iraq is still possible, however much it will be smoothed over in the polite language of diplomatic exchanges between the leading imperialist powers, who are all positioning themselves carefully today in the way they phrase
[Marxism-Thaxis] Saddam Arrest Cheer Fades Into Iraqi Ire at U.S. (Reuters)
[The only difference is that Saddam would kill you in private, where the Americans will kill you in public...] Saddam Arrest Cheer Fades Into Iraqi Ire at U.S. Mon Dec 15, 5:03 AM ET By Joseph Logan BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Joy at the capture of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) gave way to resentment toward Washington Monday as Iraqis confronted afresh the bloodshed, shortages and soaring prices of life under U.S. occupation. The morning after Iraq (news - web sites)'s U.S. governor revealed the ousted strongman was a disheveled prisoner, Iraqis flooded the streets to snatch up newspapers emblazoned with photos of the man who ruled them by fear, now humbled and captive. Many were ecstatic to see Saddam captured and hoped he would answer for his deeds but said they would not rush to thank America -- in their eyes the source of their problems since a U.S.-led coalition toppled Saddam in April. I hope that we get the chance to try him our way, to let everyone who suffered make him taste what he had made us taste, said Ali Hussein, 29, a stationery shop owner who said he was still dizzy with joy. But whether he's in a hole or in jail, it does nothing for me today, it won't feed me or protect me or send my children to school, he said. Even as news of Saddam's capture sank in, car bombs ripped through two police stations in the capital, the latest in a series of attacks U.S. forces blame on loyalists of Saddam and on foreign terrorists infiltrating Iraq. President Bush (news - web sites) warned that catching Saddam would not end attacks by people who do not accept the rise of liberty in the heart of the Middle East, implying a pledge of a better life many Iraqis said Bush was failing to keep. It's great that he's caught, but it wasn't him who screwed up the petrol and the electricity and everything else so badly, so now a canister of gas that was 250 dinars costs 4,000, if you can get one, said Ghazi, a 52-year-old dentist, from his car as he queued with hundreds of other drivers waiting for petrol. This is an oil country and it should be rich. It should not be Afghanistan. Other drivers echoed the complaints of chronic fuel shortages in a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves, as well as of their treatment at the hands of troops who have killed civilians while hunting suspected Saddam partisans or pursuing criminals with Iraqi police. The Americans promised freedom and prosperity; what's this? Go up to their headquarters, at one of those checkpoints where they point their guns at you, and tell them that you hate them as much as Saddam, and see what they do to you, said Mohammad Saleh, 39, a building contractor. The only difference is that Saddam would kill you in private, where the Americans will kill you in public, he said. A lot of things -- safety, freedom, prosperity -- that we were supposed to have are gone. They promised many things, and now that they have caught Saddam maybe they kept one. The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Honor Roll: American Philosophers Professionally Injured During the McCarthy Era (by John McCumber)
The Honor Roll: American Philosophers Professionally Injured During the McCarthy Era The thirteen philosophers named here would correspond to about 78 in today's profession, which is roughly six times as large as it was in those days. None of them, to my knowledge, has ever been commemorated in any way by the American philosophical profession. John McCumber I. Albert Blumberg, Johns Hopkins; philosopher of science and editor of Philosophy of Science; spent ten years in the middle of his career working on a bookstore (personal statements from colleagues in the profession). Later employed at Rutgers. II. Robert Colodny earned a doctorate in history and philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950. According to George Reisch, he worked primarily in technical philosophy of science. In 1961, while he was in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Colodny was accused by a State Representative of being a Communist sympathizer. He was called before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), where he testified that he had been misquoted and was not a Communist. The committee took no action against him. Pitt's administration then conducted its own sixmonth inquiry, and cleared him again. Colodny taught at Pitt 25 more years. In 1970, he wrote: A university can never be more certain that it is properly functioning than when its faculty is accused of subversion, because then some entrenched idea is under assault and some traditional holder of power feels the tempest of new and renewing ideas. (I am including Colodny here, even though he was in a history department, because I realized that that any reason for not considering him a philosopher would also apply to me.) III. Irving Copilowish concealed his previous membership in a Trotskyist group when he was hired at Michigan in 1948. Upon realizing that his deception would be discovered, Copilowish confessed to his colleagues. William Frankena, Chair of the Department, then certified that Copilowish, as a logician, was free of Marxist bias in both his life and his ideas. Copilowish changed his name to Copi and wrote a standard logic textbook (Hollinger 178179) IV. Barrows Dunham, chair of the philosophy department at Temple University, was subpoenaed by HUAC in February, 1953. Though the Temple administration encouraged him to cooperate with the Committee, he gave only his name, age, and home address before taking the Fifth Amendment. He was tried for this, and was acquitted in 1955. But Temple had already fired him, in September 1953. His position was restored-in 1981 (Schrecker 209212). V. David Hawkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Colorado, was summoned before HUAC late in 1950; he talked about himself (though not about others), and had tenure. He therefore kept his job; but the University Board of Regents ordered an investigation into the entire Philosophy department, which ended the career of Morris Judd (q.v.; Schrecker 249f) VI. Morris Judd was an untenured professor at the University of Colorado. He told investigators hired by the Board of Regents (see above, David Hawkins) that he was not a Communist, but refused to further discuss his politics. He was fired over the protests of the Philosophy Department, which considered him its most promising instructor. Judd spent his working life managing the office in his family's junkyard. The Regents refused to make the report against him public until May, 2002. At that time Judd finally saw the testimony that had ended his career fifty years before. The chief witnesses were identified as A and B. (Schrecker 250, personal correspondence) VII. Jacob Loewenberg, a Berkeley Hegel scholar, was fired after 35 years of service because he refused to take the California loyalty oathapparently the only philosopher there to be so dismissed. Eventually, having reached retirement age, Loewenberg was given emeritus status (Gardner 229, 268). VIII. V. J. McGill was fired from Hunter College and moved to San Francisco, where he spent his career as a lecturer in philosophy at San Francisco State. During the student revolt of 1968, Sidney Hook contacted newly appointed Chancellor S. I. Hayakawa and attempted to get McGill fired from his lectureship (personal interview with colleagues). IX. Stanley Moore had joined the philosophy department at Reed College in Oregon after a job offer from Brooklyn College was rescinded because one of his letters of recommendation called him a fanatical Marxist, both in theory and in practice. He thought that Reed's reputation for tolerance would help him when he appeared before HUAC in June, 1954. But the toleration was extended, it turned out, only by the faculty; Moore was fired by the Board of Trustees in August. The Board of Trustees admitted that its action with respect to Moore had been wrongin 1978 (Schrecker 236240). X. William Parry, of the University of
[Marxism-Thaxis] What Next? No.27
The new issue of the Trotskyist magazine, What Next? No.27, edited by Bob Pitt can be found online at http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext Jim F. The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: [marxistphilosophy] Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited (Ralph Dumain)
Unfortunately, this book is hard to come by, and I do not have my own copy, but I did manage to get a look at a library copy. I've put up the table of contents and other basic information: Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ilyenkv2.html Just a few stray notes on the contents: Bakhurst's article focuses on Ilyenkov's aesthetics, which are profoundly humanistic though prejudiced against much of modern art. Zweerde's specialty is Soviet philosophical culture. In this article, he discussed how Ilyenkov interacted with Soviet philosophical culture, in terms of his own interests and original manner of expression, and both how he was curtailed by the Soviet regime while still permitted to function, and what this can tell us about ideological life in the USSR. Silvonen's comparison of Ilyenkov and Foucault is based on Ilyenkov's conception of ideality--his conception of the relation of mind and matter/body--and a comparison with Foucault's notions. Vartiainen makes use of Nonaka Takeuchi's ideas about knowledge creation and M. Polanyi's notion of tacit knowledge, and presents a schema involving conversions between explicit and tacit knowledge. Knuuttila combines Umberto Eco's semiotics and Ilyenkov's ideality. The articles on the logic of Capital in relation to ideality (Jones, Chiutty, Honkanen) are fascinating and merit close study, as does this facet of Ilyenkov's work. Honkanen discusses Ricardo, mathematical modelling, Uno and the Japanese school, and the history of historical vs. logical approaches to Capital. The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: [marxistphilosophy] Evald Ilyenkov'sPhilosophy Revisited (Ralph Dumain)
Actually it was Ralph Dumain's discussion of Ilyenkov which I forwarded to this list. Jim Farmelant On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 13:03:54 -0800 Steve Gabosch [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi Victor, I have been lurking on Marxism-Thaxis now for a few weeks. Jim's discussion of Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited got my attention, too. Hi, Jim! Thanks for your post on that book, you are always expanding my horizons, as does Victor. On another discussion list last summer, I noticed some comments you made, Victory, about Ilyenkov and Peter Jones and the concept of ideality. I am glad you posted here on this topic. I am still a newcomer to Ilyenkov, but I am excited by what I have read of his so far. The compilation of essays in the book Jim discusses indeed look intriguing. I spent some time last year with a couple different versions of an essay Peter Jones wrote on the concept of the ideal - perhaps this is the essay of his in this compilation. Ilyenkov's essay The Concept of the Ideal was a key reading in one of the components of an internet course the xmca discussion list sponsored last spring, along with relevant writings from David Bakhurst and Peter Jones, who had different takes. This course had a big influence on me in seeing how Marxism and activity theory are connected. Ilyenkov was for me a turning point, along with Bakhurst. One conversation-starter in this line of inquiry on ideality, sort of like the old saw if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?, is the question, 'does an artifact such as a hammer have ideality (or, do representations only have ideality?)'. I found the Jones viewpoint very challenging on several levels. First, he answers the above question 'no', that artifacts such as hammers do not have ideality. Second, Jones makes the claim that Ilyenkov also answers 'no'. My reading of Ilyenkov's essay, following Bakhurst's writings on the subject, is that Ilyenkov answers very clearly, 'yes', and provides a compelling line of reasoning in support of this position. It is a wider and deeper look at the relationship of the material and the ideal than I had previously considered. I especially appreciated the implications of Ilyenkov's theorizing for cultural-historical psychology and psychology and philosophy in general. This discussion of materialism and ideality sounds like it would be of interest both here on Thaxis and also on xmca. I am not quite prepared for it right now - I would like to re-read the above materials, and try to see if I can find a copy of the compilation Jim talks about. I am also just getting a sense of the discussions about Soviet philosophy such as on the site Jim provides a URL to, so I have some homework. But it could be a worthy topic sometime down the line. Thoughts? - Steve At 08:04 PM 1/19/04 +0200, you wrote: Jim, Thanks for the reference. I'm well acquainted with Bakehurst and Jones's writings on Ilyenkov, but much less familiar with the works of the Japanese School. I expect reading it will be an interesting experience. Regards, Victor - Original Message - From: Jim Farmelant [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 12:45 AM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: [marxistphilosophy] Evald Ilyenkov'sPhilosophy Revisited (Ralph Dumain) Unfortunately, this book is hard to come by, and I do not have my own copy, but I did manage to get a look at a library copy. I've put up the table of contents and other basic information: Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ilyenkv2.html Just a few stray notes on the contents: Bakhurst's article focuses on Ilyenkov's aesthetics, which are profoundly humanistic though prejudiced against much of modern art. Zweerde's specialty is Soviet philosophical culture. In this article, he discussed how Ilyenkov interacted with Soviet philosophical culture, in terms of his own interests and original manner of expression, and both how he was curtailed by the Soviet regime while still permitted to function, and what this can tell us about ideological life in the USSR. Silvonen's comparison of Ilyenkov and Foucault is based on Ilyenkov's conception of ideality--his conception of the relation of mind and matter/body--and a comparison with Foucault's notions. Vartiainen makes use of Nonaka Takeuchi's ideas about knowledge creation and M. Polanyi's notion of tacit knowledge, and presents a schema involving conversions between explicit and tacit knowledge. Knuuttila combines Umberto Eco's semiotics and Ilyenkov's ideality. The articles on the logic of Capital in relation to ideality (Jones, Chiutty, Honkanen
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Monthly Review on Ralph Miliband
On Mon, 2 Feb 2004 17:35:15 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Jim Farmelant wrote: We will comment here on just one aspect of Milibands thinking: what might be called the dialectic of reform and repression of the advanced capitalist state. Miliband consistently argued throughout his political and intellectual career that even in the advanced capitalist states the political progress and reform identified with the welfare state would quickly come up against its own limits and prove in many ways temporary. In light of this, it's interesting that Miliband's own sons, David and Edward, are living proofs of this. David sits (almost literally) at the right hand of Tony Blair, and Edward is about to return to the UK Treasury as an advisor to Gordon Brown. Does Doug or anybody else here know about the political histories of Miliband's sons? In other words were they always Blair-type Third Way guys or did they go through a period of being radical leftists? Did their father ever comment publicly on his sons' politics? Jim F. -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 38 Greene St - 4th fl. New York NY 10013-2505 USA voice +1-212-219-0010 fax+1-212-219-0098 cell +1-917-865-2813 email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] webhttp://www.leftbusinessobserver.com ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Marlor Sweezy (1910- 2004)
Paul Sweezy, a man I loved, died last night. He was a Marxist revolutionary. john mage ___ The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre
I don't know if this will be of any use to you or not, but Martin Morf had an article Sartre, Skinner, and the Compatibilist Freedom To Be Authentically in the journal Behavior and Philosophy, 26 (1), 29-43. (http://www.behavior.org/journals_BP/1998/Morf_abstract.cfm). In that article he attempted to relate the two different psychologies advanced by Sartre and B.F. Skinner, where Sartre had advanced a psychology based on phenomenology and which placed emphasis on free will, as opposed to Skinner's attempt to develop a psychology that was materialist and determinist. Morf holds that it is possible to assimilate many of Sartre's insights into the framework of a Skinnerian psychology without our having to embrace Sartre's notions concerning free will. He also addresses the issue the relations of subject and object in the two psychologies. Thus, concerning Skinner, he writes: While Skinner generally adopted a realist stance on the ontological questionof what there is (e. g., Kvale Grenness, 1967), he repeatedly rejected a realist stance on the epistemological question of how and what we know. He did not see a personal self or perceiving subject at the epistemological center of events (Woolfolk Sass, 1988, p. 111). Much like Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, p. xi), Skinner rejected the notion of the inner man, the homunculus who inspects the patterns projected on the brain by the sensory organs perceiving the external world. More generally, Skinner rejected, in the best postmodern spirit, the double world of subject and object, inner and outer, physical and psychological. He made no distinction between the public and the private world, other than to characterize the latter as less accessible because the verbal community finds it more difficult to reinforce self-descriptive than overt responses (e. g., Kvale Grenness, 1967, p. 144; Skinner, 1963). On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 07:55:34 - Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I need to review a clinical psychiatric book that draws theoretical inspiration from some of Sartre's formulas about subject and object. I am writing to ask for advice on what reservations are there about Sartre's philosophical approach. I feel uneasy about him, despite his left wing claims, and I cannot remember why. I would appreciate comments that are philosophical rather than political for this purpose. Many thanks Chris Burford ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Ask No Questions
Ask No Questions The US press may finally be realising it was hoodwinked over the war . but the coverage of Madrid proves it hasn't learned. By Ian Bell The Sunday Herald, 21 March 2004 Who was it who alerted British tabloids to the fact that our troops on Cyprus were under imminent threat of attack from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Who was it who supplied the New York Times, in September of 2002, with the intelligence that allowed the paper to state that Iraq had attempted to procure thousands of aluminium tubes in order to enrich uranium and produce a nuclear bomb? These, of course, were only two of many fantasies whose roots will never properly be known. You could add the tale of yellowcake, the fairy story of mobile chemical weapons laboratories, the oft-repeated fiction that United Nations resolution 1441 made war inevitable. A year on, with carnage in Madrid marking the anniversary of the invasion, the pieces of the mosaic no longer matter much. The pattern is what counts. Part of the pattern, a large part, can be discerned in the American press. After the election of the Spanish socialist party and the decision by its leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to remove Spain's troops from Iraq, newspapers in the United States were almost of one voice last week. This was, they told their readers, appeasement of al-Qaeda. They may have mentioned, but certainly did not stress, that 91% of the Spanish people had opposed the war to begin with and that, unarguably, Zapatero was obeying the democratic will. Nor did American papers waste much time explaining the fury of voters in Spain towards the outgoing prime minister, José María Aznar, who had attempted to spin the tragedy for electoral gain by claiming certain knowledge that the massacre had been carried out by ETA, the Basque separatist group. It was one lie too many. Lies, it seems, are the currency of modern war. You might have thought some collective memory would store the experiences of Suez, of Vietnam, of the Falklands and Gulf I. Not so: the media's attention span is short and journalists forget. The thing they forget, above all, is that politicians don't tell the truth about wars. There is a difference, for all that, between naivety and docility, between trust and a wilful refusal to test what you are being told. A lot of things about the Iraq conflict were failing to make sense long before the fighting began. Even then large sections of the press, particularly the American press, simply chose to believe what the politicians said. That was, as even some Americans have begun to admit, a big mistake. Headlines have told their story. Iraq's arsenal was only on paper admitted the Washington Post recently. So, what went wrong? Time magazine wanted to know. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal was obliged to report that: Pressure rises for probe of pre-war intelligence. The cat was out of the bag: they'd been had. Yet why had publications with vast editorial resources been such easy marks? And why had sceptics and dissidents been silenced? The answer to the second question is simple: the great American newspapers censored themselves. They became, if you like, patriotically deaf. In the post-9/11 atmosphere they had no editorial strategy for coping with George Bush's moral authority, and no editorial will to devise one. If the President was going after the guys who knocked over the Twin Towers, decent Americans were with him. The trouble with that argument is that it confused cases. Iraq, despite another subset of official fictions, had nothing to do with September 11, and every spy agency said so. That takes us back to our first question, whose answer is also simple: complicity. The American media, in large part, chose to cooperate. First, they chose to take the White House at its word and failed to check assertions a junior reporter would have checked. Then they adopted Iraqi defectors and exiles, many capable of saying anything if it would lead to war on Saddam, as reliable sources. Then they preferred to ignore sceptical rumblings in the intelligence community, widely reported in Europe, over WMD. Finally, they heaped contempt on the International Atomic Energy Authority and its inspectors. When the fighting began, a novel process helped to cement relationships. The embedding of journalists was attractive to the media for one obvious reason: it cut their costs. These days the insurance premiums required to cover a civilian in a war zone are astronomical, running into tens of thousands of pounds. With embedded correspondents, the media could be guaranteed words and pictures and be relieved of insurance costs. The attraction can be measured, in a small way, by the fact that the Sunday Herald was the only Scottish newspaper to refuse the chance to embed. The deal was attractive to the military, too. A journalist can only report what he or she sees. With embedding, the armies knew exactly where most correspondents were, and
[Marxism-Thaxis] Ideology and Economic Development (Monthly Review)
Ideology and Economic Development by Michael A. Lebowitz http://www.monthlyreview.org/0504lebowitz.htm Michael A. Lebowitz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, and is the author of Beyond Capital: Marxs Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He is currently living and working in Venezuela. - --- Economic theory is not neutral, and the results when it is applied owe much to the implicit and explicit assumptions embedded in a particular theory. That such assumptions reflect specific ideologies is most obvious in the case of the neoclassical economics that underlies neoliberal economic policies. The Magic of Neoclassical Economics Neoclassical economics begins with the premises of private property and self-interest. Whatever the structure and distribution of property rights, it assumes the right of ownerswhether as owners of land, means of production or the capacity to perform laborto follow their self-interest. In short, neither the interests of the community as such nor the development of human potential are the subject matter of neoclassical economics; its focus, rather, is upon the effects of decisions made by individuals with respect to their property. Logically, then, the basic unit of analysis for this theory is the individual. This individual (whether a consumer, employer or worker) is assumed to be a rational computer, an automaton mechanically maximizing its benefit on the basis of given data. Change the data and this lightning calculator of pleasures and pains (in the words of the American economist Thorstein Veblen) quickly selects a new optimum position.1 Raise the price of a commodity, and the computer as consumer chooses less of it. Raise the wage, and the computer as capitalist chooses to substitute machinery for workers. Raise unemployment or welfare benefits, and the computer as worker chooses to stop working or to remain unemployed longer. Increase taxes on profits, and the computer as capitalist chooses to invest elsewhere. In every case, the question asked is, how will that individual, the rational calculator of pleasure and pain, react to a change in the data? And, the answer is always self-evidentavoid pain, seek pleasure. Also self-evident are the inferences to be drawn from this simple theoryif you want to have less unemployment, you should lower wages, reduce unemployment and welfare benefits, and cut taxes on capital. But, how does this theory move from its basic unit of the isolated, atomistic computer to draw inferences for society as a whole? The essential proposition of the theory is that the whole is the sum of the individual isolated parts. So, if we know how individuals respond to various stimuli, we know how the society composed of those individuals will respond. (In the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as societyjust individuals.) What is true for the individual is true for the economy as a whole. Further, since each economy can be considered as an individualone who can compete and prosper internationally by driving down wages, intensifying work, removing social benefits that reduce the intensity of job searches, lowering the costs of government, and cutting taxesit therefore follows that all economies can, too. To move from the individual to the whole in this manner, though, involves a basic assumption. After all, those individual atomistic computers may work at cross-purposes; the result of individual rationality may be collective irrationality. Why isnt that the conclusion of neoclassical economics? Because faith bars that paththe belief that when those automatons are moved in one direction or another by the change in given data, they necessarily find the most efficient solution for all. In its early versions the religious aspect was quite explicit that instantaneous calculator of individual pleasure and pain was understood to be led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.2 For Adam Smith it was clear whose hand that wasNature, Providence, Godjust as his physiocratic contemporary, Francois Quesnay, knew that the Supreme Being was the source of this principle of economic harmony, this magic being such that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself.3 But the Supreme Being is no longer acknowledged as the author of this magic. In his place stands the Market, whose commandments all must follow or face its wrath. The unfettered market, we are told, ensures that everyone benefits from a free exchange (or it would not occur) and that those trades chosen by rational individuals (from all possible exchanges) will produce the best possible outcomes. Accordingly, it follows that interference with the perfect market by the state must
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history
On Mon, 3 May 2004 16:38:49 +0100 Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: And BTW Patrick Cockburn likewise argues that the US has essentially lost the war in Iraq. The Independent on Sunday, 02 May 2004 It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history. Yes. My intuition too. And of world historical significance perhaps even greater than the defeat in Vietnam. Is is too early to ask why, in marxist terms? I would think that the stakes for the US in Iraq are far higher than what they were in Vietnam. Vietnam had rubber plantations which had been of interest to the French but I don't think were of any great value to the US, and there was talk of oil off the Vietnamese coast but I don't think that at that time, US oil companies were that eager to go out and pump it. To a large extent the Vietnam War had been over the US trying to save face in a situation where it committed itself militarily, far in excess to its real economic or geopolitical interests in Indochina. It was in Richard Nixon's words over trying to avoid the US appearing to be a pitiful, helpless giant. In the end while the defeat of the US in Vietnam was quite demoralizing, the US did recover within a few years. However, the situation in Iraq seem to be quite different. Here the stakes are much greater. Iraq is itself a major oil producer, and it sits adjacent to other countries that are even greater oil producers. While the United States, itself, is only partially dependent on Mideast oil, most of Europe and Japan are greatly dependent on oil from that region, and if they were to be suddenly deprived of that oil, their economies would quickly grind to a halt. So for the US the economic and geopolitical stakes are far higher than they were in Vietnam. A defeat here would, I think, be far more devastating than was the defeat in Vietnam. Chris Burford ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] NY Times obit for William Hinton
William Hinton, Author Who Studied Chinese Village Life, Dies at 85 May 22, 2004 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT William H. Hinton, whose accounts of Chinese village life helped shape America's understanding of Mao Zedong's revolution, died last Saturday at a nursing home in Concord, Mass., where he had been living for several years. He was 85. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Catherine Jean Hinton. His books Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Monthly Review Press, 1966) and Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (Random House, 1983), about the impact of the 1949 revolution on a village where he worked, were widely read and remained required reading for generations of university students over the decades. The books offered an authentic - if, some critics said, an occasionally overromantic - peek at the patterns of life for the peasants in whose name the revolution was fought. His writing offered a sympathetic account of Communist China at a time when America was deeply anti-Communist, which led to a 14-year delay of the publication of Fanshen. Mr. Hinton captured gritty details of the impact of the revolution on the traditional way of life and the resistance to change in Long Bow, in southeastern Shaanxi Province. He explained, for example, the struggles of elected councils to replace the old magistrates who ran the village. He described how individual villagers hopefully placed the family privy at the edge of the public road in anticipation of a contribution to the domestic store of fertilizer from any traveler who might be in need of relief. The books also touched on the beginning of Mr. Hinton's own gradual disillusionment with the progress of the revolution. He summed up his later conclusions in a series of essays, which were collected in The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China (Monthly Review Press, 1990). This disillusionment came too late to avoid the trouble he faced at the height of the McCarthy era, which led to the confiscation of his notes on Fanshen, the loss of his passport, his blacklisting from employment and his being called up before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, led by Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi. William Howard Hinton was born Feb. 2, 1919, in Chicago, the second child and only son of Sebastian Hinton, a lawyer, and Carmelita Chase Hinton, an educator who founded The Putney School, in Putney, Vt. Mr. Hinton was in the first class to attend Putney and graduated in 1936. Accepted at Harvard, he postponed college and instead traveled in the Far East, supporting himself with odd jobs. He attended Harvard from 1937 to 1939, then transferred to Cornell and in 1941 took a bachelor of science degree in agronomy and dairy husbandry. In 1945 he married Bertha Sneck, a translator and editor. They had one child, Carmelita, now a documentary filmmaker in Brookline, Mass. The marriage ended in divorce in 1954. In 1959 he married Joanne Raiford, a metallurgical technician, with whom he had three children, Michael Howard, of Reading, Pa.; Alyssa Anne, of Carrboro, N.C.; and Catherine Jean, of Arlington, Mass. Ms. Raiford died in 1986, and the following year Mr. Hinton married Katherine Chiu, an employee of Unicef, who survives him, along with his first wife, his four children, two stepchildren and three grandchildren. With high hopes for the Chinese revolution, Mr. Hinton returned to China during World War II as a propaganda analyst for the Office of War Information, and then again in 1947 as a tractor technician for the United Nations. When the United Nations program ended he stayed on as an English teacher and land-reform adviser in Fanshen, where he took more than 1,000 pages of notes on what he saw. When his passport expired, he returned to the United States in 1953, and his troubles began. After the Eastland Committee held hearings on him and pronounced the trunk full of papers they had taken from him to be the autobiography of a traitor, he worked as a truck mechanic in Philadelphia until he was blacklisted, then took up farming in Fleetwood, Pa., on land that his mother owned. All the while he kept up a legal battle to recover his notes and papers. When he finally won, he set about writing Fanshen. In 1971, after the book was translated into Chinese, Zhou Enlai invited him to visit China again, and he resumed his work as an agricultural adviser. Besides revisiting Long Bow, he continued to write and lecture on Chinese and Mongolian culture, and to consult for various Chinese and United Nations agricultural organizations. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/international/asia/22HINT.html?ex=10862 48833ei=1en=428dffb9859b586a The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!
[Marxism-Thaxis] Some thoughts on the death of 'anti-Marxist' Maxime Rodinson (The Daily Star)
Some thoughts on the death of 'anti-Marxist' Maxime Rodinson By Michael Young Special to The Daily Star Thursday, May 27, 2004 With the death of Maxime Rodinson on Monday, the world of Middle Eastern studies has lost a French Marxist scholar who rarely succumbed to dogma, and who always enriched his works through the intricacies inherent in his own person - those of a working-class French Jew whose parents were killed at Auschwitz, and who devoted his life to learning about the Arabs and Islam. For many outside the academy (where Marx lives on, beyond extradition) Rodinson's Marxist approach to Middle Eastern history may now seem dated. Yet his biography of the Prophet Mohammed, written in 1961, remains an essential text today for its ambition to situate the rise of Islam primarily in its social and economic context, from whence a Muslim empire sprang. For Rodinson, embryonic Islam triumphed because it met the sociological needs of the Arabian Peninsula, and Mohammed (the political actor rather than the envoy of God) was its essential handmaiden. Rodinson's ambition was to make understandable, how and why this mystic, intoxicated with the Divine, was able to become a head of state, a military commander and an ideological leader. Read today, the book provokes two thoughts: that Rodinson's approach remains as useful as any to understand a modern rendering of political Islam that can only really be grasped by delving into the materialistic roots of its proponents; but also that militant Muslims have increasingly embraced the image of the Prophet armed as their ideal. Nor was Rodinson a suffocating determinist. As he wrote in his 1981 book Marxism and the Muslim World, there was indeed an underlying core, a constant, an inspiration, an initial elan which, whether it comes from Allah or Mohammed, was encouraged if not determined, by social, historical, political, cultural and other conditions. But it was also true that from the beginning this elan was embodied in ideologies and active organizations (so that these and) the actions decided on ... necessitated practical revisions. What does Rodinson offer the Middle Eastern liberal? When he criticized Edward Said's Orientalism, he was slandered by the vindictive author as an ex-Stalinist incapable of understanding the nature of criticism, and more generally the critical method. Yet what Said had written of Rodinson earlier was more on the mark, namely that he made a constant attempt to keep (his) work responsive to the material (he was studying) and not to a doctrinal preconception. Rodinson's variegated career echoed his dislike for straightjackets. The son of Russian immigrants, he spent seven years in Lebanon during the 1940s - six of them as a French civil servant and six months as a teacher at a Maqasid high school in Sidon. He returned to France in 1947 and remained in the French Communist Party until 1958, when he left following Nikita Khruchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress. He later described himself as an independent Marxist who refused to advise a course of militant action, particularly in the Arab world. This, he admitted, opened him up to charges of being anti-Marxist, and he would later write that he had often been a source of irritation and despair to his former comrades. However, Rodinson never recycled himself into a neo-conservative. On Israel he always remained critical, admitting to a repugnance (for) Jewish nationalism (though he did later say Israel had legitimacy as a new nationality). This repugnance he expressed most fiercely in a pamphlet published in Jean-Paul Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes in 1967, at the end of the Arab-Israeli war. It was later translated into English under the title Israel: A Colonial Settler State? Rodinson, in dissecting Zionism, wrote of it that the belief in the infallibility of one's own 'ethnic' group is a frequent phenomenon in the history of human groups. It is called racism. Though the passage conditioned racism on a sense of faultlessness (which not all Jews, or indeed Zionists, necessarily possessed), it surely nourished many an argument equating Zionism with racism. But Rodinson was more subtle than that, and in the closing lines of his pamphlet he wrote of the Palestinians, in a passage that, regrettably, has as much relevance today as it did then: It is not easy to get a conquered person to resign himself to defeat, and it is not made any easier by loudly proclaiming how right it was that he was soundly beaten. It is generally wiser to offer him compensation. And those who have not suffered from the fight can (and, I believe, even must) recommend forgiveness for the injuries inflicted. They are hardly entitled to demand it. What has been written of Rodinson has focused on his work as an Orientalist. As my colleague Samir Kassir wrote in Al-Nahar, he was not an ordinary Orientalist ... he transcended classical Orientalism to engage in critical analysis.
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Chalabi a Used-up Spook:Stratfor
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY 28 May 2004 Overdoing Chalabi By George Friedman On Feb. 19, in a piece entitled Ahmed Chalabi and His Iranian Connection, Stratfor laid out the close relationship Chalabi had with the Iranians, and the role that relationship played in the flow of intelligence to Washington prior to the war. This week, the story of Chalabi, accused of being an Iranian agent by U.S. intelligence, was all over the front pages of the newspapers. The media, having ignored Chalabi's Iranian connections for so long, went to the other extreme -- substantially overstating its significance. The thrust of many of the stories was that the United States was manipulated by Iran -- using Chalabi as a conduit -- into invading Iraq. The implication was that the United States would have chosen a different course, except for Chalabi's disinformation campaign. We doubt that very much. First, the United States had its own reasons for invading Iraq. Second, U.S. and Iranian interests were not all that far apart in this case. Chalabi was certainly, in our opinion, working actively on behalf or Iranian interests -- as well as for himself -- but he was merely a go-between in some complex geopolitical maneuvering. Iran wanted the United States to invade Iraq. The Iranians hated Saddam Hussein more than anyone did, and they feared him. Iran and Iraq had fought a war in the 1980s that devastated a generation of Iranians. More than Hussein, Iraq represented a historical threat to Iran going back millennia. The destruction of the Iraqi regime and army was at the heart of Iranian national interest. The collapse of the Soviet Union had for the first time in a century secured Iran's northern frontiers. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan secured the Shiite regions of Afghanistan as a buffer. If the western frontier could be secured, Iran would achieve a level of national security it had not known in centuries. What Iran Wanted Iran knew it could not invade Iraq and win by itself. Another power had to do it. The failure of the United States to invade and occupy Iraq in 1991 was a tremendous disappointment to Iran. Indeed, the primary reason the United States did not invade Iraq was because it knew the destruction of the Iraqi army would leave Iran the dominant power native to the Persian Gulf. Invading Iraq would have destroyed the Iraq-Iran balance of power that was the only basis for what passed for stability in the region. The destruction of the Iraqi regime would not only have made Iran secure, but also would have opened avenues for expansion. First, the Persian Gulf region is full of Shia, many of them oriented toward Iran for religious reasons. For example, the loading facilities for Saudi oil is in a region dominated by the Shia. Second, without the Iraqi army blocking Iran, there was no military force in the region that could stop the Iranians. They could have become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and only the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in the region would have counterbalanced Iran. The United States did not want that, so the conquest of Kuwait was followed by the invasion -- but not the conquest -- of Iraq. The United States kept Iraq in place to block Iran. Iran countered this policy by carefully and systematically organizing the Shiite community of Iraq. After the United States allowed a Shiite rising to fail after Desert Storm, Iranian intelligence embarked on a massive program of covert organization of the Iraqi Shia, in preparation for the time when the Hussein regime would fall. Iranian intentions were to create a reality on the ground so the fall of Iraq would inevitably lead to the rise of a Shiite-dominated Iraq, allied with Iran. What was not in place was the means of destroying Hussein. Obviously, the Iranians wanted the invasion and Chalabi did everything he could to make the case for invasion, not only because of his relationship with Iran, but also because of his ambitions to govern Iraq. Iran understood that an American invasion of Iraq would place a massive U.S. Army on its western frontier, but the Iranians also understood that the United States had limited ambitions in the area. If the Iranians cooperated with U.S. intelligence on al Qaeda and were not overly aggressive with their nuclear program, the two major concerns of the United States would be satisfied and the Americans would look elsewhere. The United States would leave Iraq in the long run, and Iran would be waiting patiently to reap the rewards. In the short run, should the United States run into trouble in Iraq, it would become extremely dependent on the Iranians and their Shiite clients. If the Shiite south rose, the U.S. position would become untenable. Therefore if there was trouble -- and Iranian intelligence was pretty sure there would be -- Shiite influence would rise well before the Americans left. Chalabi's job was to give the Americans a reason to invade, which he did with stories of weapons of mass
[Marxism-Thaxis] George Monbiot on the Indian election
As the Indian election shows, the big money won't let the people win by George Monbiot Published in the New Statesman (May 27 2004) Democracy in India lasted for five days, two hours and eight minutes. Between the resignation of Atal Behari Vajpayee and the resignation of Sonia Gandhi, the state belonged to the people. Then the lost property was returned to its owners. It's not that Sonia Gandhi was a woman of the people. She was the heir to a corrupt dynasty whose domination of Indian politics owes everything to sentiment and nothing to sense. She stood, it seems, simply to keep the family name in play, in order to permit her children to inherit the ancestral title. But the people chose her for what she was not. She was not Mr Vajpayee, the prime minister who had used religious conflict to disguise his wider war against the poor. She was not the government whose officials had boasted of India's new five star culture, which told the people that India was shining, but forgot to mention that it was shining only on the elite. She was choosen to govern because she had promised, in her patrician way, to do something for the poor. But the voters who chose her were in turn voted down by a more powerful electorate. Sonia might have pulled out anyway, but she had little choice when the financial markets announced that she was unfit to rule. They appointed the former finance minister Manmohan Singh to take her place. The Economist magazine reports that when he was nominated, the Bombay exchange rapidly recovered from its fright. And well it might. Whereas the BJP [Vajpayee's party] were always reluctant reformers, Mr Singh is the genuine article, a man who understands better than any other leading Indian politician the scope of what still needs to be done. This needs to include plenty more privatisation. 1 In the world's largest democracy, democracy has been prohibited. The same can now be said of almost every nation on earth. The owners of property have reasserted their right to rule. Take the US. In the Guardian this week, Martin Kettle praised John Kerry's softly softly campaign to win the presidency. Militant opinion in the US might want him to tear into Bush not just on Iraq but on the Middle East, on civil liberties, on inequality, on the environment and on the spiralling government deficit ... but Kerry is proving smarter than all these people think. 2 His wily strategy is to win the election by sitting back and waiting for Bush to fall into the traps he has set for himself. Now it may well be true that Kerry can win by these means. But this raises a question which Kettle neither asks nor answers: what then is the point of John Kerry? What use is an opposition which refuses to oppose? Which won't even discuss the issues on which the election is supposed to be fought? The obvious answer of course is that the point of John Kerry is to get rid of George Bush. Which suggests that the only point of the election after that will be to get rid of John Kerry. The real reason why Kerry won't discuss the issues Kettle lists or, for that matter, any issues at all, is that the powers behind the powers in the US forbid both meaningful discussion of policy in public places and meaningful dissent in private places. This, of course, is why Kerry is the Democratic nominee, rather than someone who represents that portion of the electorate which isn't married to heiresses and didn't learn its politics at Yale's Skull and Bones club. He could have offered the citizens of America free healthcare, but only if he was prepared to lose the support of the medical companies which will help to fund his re-election. He could have voted against the decision to attack Iraq, but only if he had been prepared for Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and every other major media outlet to ensure that he never again dared to show his face in public. John Kerry is the product of a system which has reduced democracy to a spectator sport. Democracy is the means by which the elite resolves its trifling differences while the rest of us look on. You may ask how it came to this, but that would be the wrong question. Democracy is one of those things, like science and shipping, which the West wrongly claims for itself. Among the indigenous people of West Papua, the Amazon and East Africa, I have seen more sophisticated democratic systems than our own, or those of ancient Greece. They have always been there. Until, as Rousseau had it, civil society was founded by the man who first enclosed a piece of land, announced that it was his and found people simple enough to believe him, the unenclosed peoples are likely to have made their decisions collectively, and, we can assume, more or less equally. But the systems we now call democracies are those constructed by the propertied classes of civil society. And they were constructed to keep the lower orders out. The Greeks denied the vote to women and
[Marxism-Thaxis] Maxime Rodinson
Maxime Rodinson Marxist historian of Islam Douglas Johnson Thursday June 3, 2004 The Guardian The French historian and sociologist Professor Maxime Rodinson, who has died aged 89, was a renowned specialist on Islam and the Arab world. His Marxism meant that he studied Islam in terms of economic and social history, distancing himself from the tradition of those who studied the subject in terms of belief and its comparison with Christianity. The first public demonstration of this approach was his biography Mohammed (1961), which has been revised and reprinted many times. Rodinson always spoke more about Muslims than about Islam, and this book is a key to his whole work. He did not ignore Islamic texts and, in later publications, claimed it was only by the misuse of certain texts that some Muslims sought to justify terrorism. Rodinson was an active presence in public debates and controversies, sometimes inadvertently. Indeed, in 1999 Mohammed was withdrawn from the curriculum of the American University in Cairo after it was attacked by a newspaper columnist, and banned by the Egyptian minister for higher education amid charges that it denigrated the Islamic faith. In 1967, on the eve of the six-day war, Rodinson became well known in France when he expressed a certain reticence about Israel, despite himself being Jewish. He had always been suspicious of Zionism and considered those who expressed enthusiasm for Israel were indulging in a belated form of colonialism. But Israel existed and could not be abolished. Therefore, a Palestinian state had to be created and supported. So, in 1968, with Jacques Berque, the specialist on Algerian history, Rodinson set up a study group to work for a Palestine state. That year, too, his Israel Et Le Refus Arabe,was published. In 1973, his Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? appeared in English. Born in Marseille, Rodinson was the son of Russian-Polish immigrants, who became members of the Communist party. His father worked in the clothing trade, and Maxime became an errand boy at the age of 13. From then on, it was the struggle for self-education. Books were borrowed, obliging teachers, who did not demand payment, were sought and, since Rodinson recognised the existence of many worlds, he cultivated an interest in the Middle East and its languages. In 1932, aged 17, he gained entry to the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, profiting from a system that allowed those without academic qualifications to take the competitive entrance examination. From then, he had a highly successful academic career. He went to the National Council of Research in 1937, becoming a full-time student of Islam, and also joined the Communist party. In 1940, he was fortunate to be appointed to the French Institute in Damascus, both because he could extend his knowledge of Islam and, more particularly, escape the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. Both his parents subsequently died in Auschwitz. Returning to Paris in 1948, Rodinson was put in charge of the Muslim section of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In 1955, he became director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, becoming professor of classical Ethiopian four years later. He resigned from the Communist party in 1958 amid accusations that he was doing this to further his career. But he always insisted that being a party member was like following a religion, and, as an agnostic, he did not want to do this. But he remained a Marxist, and the party indicated privately that they were prepared to readmit him should he ever ask, though he never did. Among his other works were Islam Et Capitalisme, (1966, English edition, 1974); Marxisme Et Monde Musulman (1972); Les Arabes, (1979); La Fascination De l'Islam, (1980); L'Islam: Politique Et Croyance (1993); and Europe And The Mystique Of Islam (published in English, 1989). One must not forget that Rodinson was also from Marseille; as such, he had a great sense of humour and a taste for sometimes daring chansons. He was married with a daughter and two sons. · Maxine Rodinson, historian and sociologist, born January 26 1915; died May 23 2004 The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Human Rights Botch: Vivanco Venezuela
Human Rights Botch: Vivanco Venezuela By Al Giordano, Posted on Thu Jun 17th, 2004 at 03:04:21 PM EST José Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch today launched a media-attention-seeking attack on the Venezuelan government for a new law providing a process for impeachment of Supreme Court justices in that country. He held a press conference in Caracas, barking highly charged words in a report titled Venezuela: Judicial Independence Under Siege. Vivanco and Human Rights Watch are now on record opposing a U.S.-modeled impeachment process for Supreme Court justices in Venezuela. The timing - two months before the August 15 referendum in that country - is obviously a partisan attempt to meddle in electoral politics. Perhaps Vivanco and his bureaucrats should have done a little bit of research on the United States Constitution and American History before demonstrating such ignorance about democratic principles. Before this essay is done, we will hear from Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt - whose stated principles on the appointment and impeachment of Supreme Court justices HRW has now gone against with this maneuver - on this question. But first let's consult a more recent U.S. president who spoke on this issue… Gerald R. Ford… Four years before becoming president of the United States, Republican Congressman Gerald Ford spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives, calling for the impeachment, under the provisions allowed by the U.S. Constitution, of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Ford said: What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history; conviction results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused from office. - Source: Congressional Record #11,913 (1970), 116th Congress The title of the Human Rights Watch report creates an impression that, prior to the presidency of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela had judicial independence. That is a knowingly false statement, because in the text of the report, Vivanco and HRW admit that it never has had it. Their cruel joke against human rights is revealed by the inflammatory, knowingly false, language they use against a new judicial reform law in Venezuela. The HRW report claims: The new law, which President Chávez signed last month, expands the Supreme Court from 20 to 32 members. It empowers Chávez’s governing coalition to use its slim majority in the legislature to obtain an overwhelming majority of seats on the Supreme Court. The law also gives the governing coalition the power to nullify existing judges’ appointments to the bench. Fact Check: The Venezuelan judicial impeachment process is virtually identical to that in the United States (a process about which the beltway-based Vivanco has been wholly silent for the entirety of his career). No authentic democracy can survive without the checks and balances that allow removal of court justices by Congress. The United States constitution also provides for use of a slim majority to appoint Supreme Court Justices. (Remember the U.S. Senate battle over the nomination of Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas? Only fifty-percent plus one vote was required to install him: the same exact process that the hypocrite Vivanco attacks in Venezuela.). With less than two months to go before the historic August 15th referendum (to recall or ratify the term of President Hugo Chavez: the voters will decide), Vivanco and Human Rights Watch's partisan political agenda stands naked. Instead of praising Venezuela for being the only country on earth that allows citizens to recall their president, and that has recently shown its commitment to that process, Vivanco is throwing tomatoes at a process that, although it exists in many other countries including the United States, he and his organization have remained totally silent about in other lands. Impeachment of Supreme Court Justices is a vital right for any authentic democracy. As recently as this young century, the National Lawyers Guild seriously considered a campaign to impeach the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who appointed George W. Bush as president, ratifying a stolen election. As the quote from former President Ford, above, reveals, the right to impeach U.S. Supreme Court justices for any offense that of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history. That is how a system of checks and balances works. Vivanco has thus harmed Human Rights Watch's credibility around the world with this latest grandstanding maneuver. National Lawyers Guild vice president Nathan Newman wrote of this process in the United States: In fact, over the course of American history, the House of Representatives has
[Marxism-Thaxis] July-August issue of Monthly Review
The July-August issue of Monthly Review is devoted in almost its entirety to a consideration of China's economy and what this tells us about the fate of socialism there, or as Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster put it: We depart this year from our usual practice for MR's July-August double issue. Instead of a collection of articles on a common theme, we are devoting the issue to a single manuscripta study of China and economic development theory by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett that will be published in book form by Monthly Review Press early next year. Although there are numerous books on China, this one is especially worthy. It is a careful, clear, well-grounded Marxist study of how a major post-revolutionary society turned away from socialism. In addition, the current transformation in China throws light on why capitalism, by its very nature, creates poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction in the process of economic growth. Unfortunately most of this issue is not accessible online. But the Editors' Forward and Hart-Landsberg Burkett's introduction are. See: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0704editors.htm http://www.monthlyreview.org/0704intro.htm Also see John Mage's tribute to the late Bill Hinton, who was a leading China expert: http://www.monthlyreview.org/billhinton.htm The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Economist's obit for Paul Foot
PAUL FOOT Jul 29th 2004 Paul Foot, a British investigative journalist, died on July 18th, aged 66 THERE are more people walking the streets of Britain who have been freed from prison by Paul Foot than by any other person. Mr Foot was far from being vain or self-seeking, but he must have been pleased by this compliment from one of his editors at the DAILY MIRROR. It was a vindication of his work as a campaigning journalist whose efforts on behalf of victims of injustice were not only tireless and brave, but also capable of bringing about results that would change people's lives. Though he wrote articles of every kind, and books too, his innovation was the investigative column, a device that worked because it was based on hard research rather than mere prejudice and polemic. Not that he was short of prejudice and polemic. Far from it: they were the starting-point of all his inquiries, for Mr Foot was a committed socialist of a largely unreconstructed kind, with a particular admiration for Leon Trotsky. Indeed, many of his energies were devoted to the cause of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite outfit. How could anyone with views such as his produce balanced journalism? Mr Foot could not. He did not even try. But that was not the point. He still could, and did, produce excellent work. Doggedly--the word aptly describes the terrier in him--he dug out information that powerful people did not want to see published. The tradition of radical journalism goes back a long way in Britain, to William Hazlitt, William Cobbett, Tom Paine, John Wilkes and beyond. These 18th- and 19th-century essayists and pamphleteers were not self-described neutral observers who meticulously separated facts from opinions, discarded the opinions and then left readers to form their own judgments. They were committed campaigners who had a point of view and made no apologies for expressing it. Mr Foot was in that tradition. He was also in the tradition of British satire, whose most notable exponents have usually been writers, such as Jonathan Swift, or caricaturists, such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. In the 1960s, the genre enjoyed a wonderful renaissance, bursting out on every front--the stage (Beyond the Fringe), night clubs (The Establishment, in London), television (That Was The Week That Was) and, most enduringly, the magazine PRIVATE EYE. BORN TO REBEL By circumstance and breeding, Mr Foot slipped easily into this world of satire and dissent. His grandfather, Isaac Foot, a devout Methodist, had been a Liberal MP, as was his uncle Dingle, though he later defected to Labour. Another uncle, John, became a Liberal peer, and a third, Michael, was to lead the Labour Party. His father, Hugh (later Lord Caradon), was a diplomat and colonial servant whose career included terms as governor of Cyprus and Britain's ambassador to the United Nations. The taste for satire started at Shrewsbury School, where he wrote for the school newspaper, as did his near contemporaries, Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and Willie Rushton. This trio went on to found PRIVATE EYE in 1961, which Mr Foot was to join six years later. Though he wrote for many other publications over the years--the DAILY RECORD in Glasgow, the DAILY MIRROR, the GUARDIAN among them--and edited the magazine ISIS while up at Oxford in 1961 and later SOCIALIST WORKER, he never cut his links with the EYE. Yet Mr Foot was unlike the others on PRIVATE EYE. For most of them, such as John Wells, an Oxford friend, the main aim was to puncture pomposity and make people laugh. Mr Foot had a sense of humour and could be a devastating exponent of mockery, but he was above all a polemicist and muck-raker. His contributions to the EYE were not cartoons like Rushton's or spoof diaries like Wells's; they were the scandalous revelations in his Footnotes column. These, too, were different from the classical writings of British radical journalists, and they--and Mr Foot's other investigative books and articles--were his real contribution to public affairs. To most people his politics seemed potty. His revelatory journalism was different. Though equal scepticism greeted his first inquiries into potential scandals, his diligence and persistence nearly always won him admiration in the end. Those who fell foul of him included politicians (Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Reginald Maudling), union leaders (Clive Jenkins), architects (John Poulson), journalists (notably his boss at the MIRROR, David Montgomery), businessmen (the list is long), as well as disc jockeys, civil servants and countless others. His exertions to right injustice were equally impressive: the Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater Four and the Cardiff Three were all freed from prison after campaigns led by Mr Foot. On two occasions, Mr Foot stood for public office. The first time, in 1977, when he tried for Parliament, he gathered only 377 votes. He did better in 2002, as candidate for mayor of Hackney, in east
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Discussing Sudan #1
SOUThern MILITIA ARMED and TRAINED BY ISRAELl, FINANCED BY u.s. republican regime and supported politically by the congressional black caucus, trans-africa, and most black american reactionary racialists. Discussing Sudan #1 by Lil Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] In an article posted simultaneously on [EMAIL PROTECTED], and [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aduku Addea intimated the necessity for scientific economic and political analysis of the wars in Sudan. Aduku's article is presented in the body of this Essay, and his -- along with Connie White's, Roy Walker's and Gail Daggs' data and analysis are embedded throughout the Essay. The hypocritical sentimentalism of British, American, and Israeli politicians and so-called NGOs is dismissed. It is interesting that the ideologists and politicians that denounce impoverished Black governments in neocolonial Africa for demanding foreign aid, and African-America in America as dependent on 'big government', and in each case chide them to do for self, are the very ones who are dismissing inferior Sudan and the African Union's effort to solve the Sudan crisis. The myth is that Africans are incapable of doing for self, thus these African and African-American ideologists and politicians in their function as Fifth Columnists function for imperialism by calling on the White man (Western imperialism) to invade and save Africans from Africans! Whining and begging, these ideologists and politicians are calling on the White man to solve the Sudanese crisis by imposing UN sanctions and/or British-American invasions-occupation. Thus, instead of allowing Africans to fess up to their history of internal tribal wars being played out in the present, these ideological agents of Anglo-American imperialism are blaming the Arabs for the present problems in Sudan. Mealy mouthing demagogic rhetoric about Arab colonialism in Sudan, the Africans and American African-Americans calling for British re-colonization conveniently forget that it was the British imperialists colonialism that created modern Sudan and its problems. Rejecting the ability of Sudanese, and or the African Union to do for self -- i.e. solve their own problem -- and instead calling for U.S./U.N. economic sanctions followed by Anglo-American invasion and occupation, these ideologists of re-colonization by Anglo-American imperialism even regurgitate the U.S-British rhetoric of calling European and American occupation forces peace keepers although it was/is U.S. and Israeli arming, training and funding the Christian militias and local tribal bands to initiate and continue in wars against the Sudanese government. These are the issues we will be discussing in this Essay. It is ironic at the outset, that though the African Sudanese are Muslims, they are Black descendents of Nubians and indigenous to the geography. The outsiders engendering the perpetual wars in Sudan, the European Israelis and the Americans the politicians and media has Americans including African Americans believing that the Sudanese of northern Sudan are Arabs -- invaders -- on one hand, and that the Christian militias in the south are indigenous Africans targets of 'genocide' on the other. In actuality, the proxy relationship of the Israeli government and military to the Christian militias in Sudan is the same as the Israeli government and military had with the Christian militia in Lebanon, the Phalange. The geopolitical function of the Phalange Christian militia as an agency of murder and destruction in Lebanon -- in alliance with if not quisling of Israel, and therefore U.S. imperialism: Hundreds of Palestinian refugees and other poor people were killed in the slaughter by the Phalange militia, which was aligned with Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. * The militiamen were let in by the surrounding Israeli forces, who did not intervene as the killing continued. The actual number slaughtered is unknown but amounted to at least several hundred. http://www.metimes.com/issue99-39/reg/lebanon_marks_1982.htm * The Phalange attracted Christian youths from the mountains northeast of Beirut as well Christian students in Beirut. The politics of the Phalange party was pro-Western, and they opposed any pan-Arabism. * 1982: The Phalangists cooperates with Israel, in planning an attack on Lebanon. June 6: Israel invades Lebanon from its southern border, and its forces start advancing north, reaching Beirut in short time. September: The Phalangists have become the strongest party in Lebanon, thanks to the aid of Israel. September 13: Bashir Gemayel is killed few days before he is to be sworn in as president of Lebanon. September 16: As a way of retaliating the killing of
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Discussing Sudan #1
On Sun, 01 Aug 2004 18:51:44 -0400 Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It is always worthwhile to look beneath the surface and investigate the facts, but I don't trust Lil Joe's rhetoric. There's something sectarian and dishonest about this. Do you have any better sources that would help people unravel the situation? Well Lil Joe had originally sent that piece directly to this list but for various reasons it bounced to me as moderator so I then forwarded it to the list. (BTW I found this political biography of Lil Joe at http://www.nathanielturner.com/liljoebio.htm. Well over at Uncle Lou's Marxmail list, there has been some discussion of Sudan, starting with the following piece that was posted by Uncle Lou, himself. NY Press, July 28-Aug 3, 2004 ONE HELLHOLE UNDER GOD Why the Republican Party suddenly cares about Sudanor at least pretends to. By Christopher Lord Of all the unlikely places for America to be getting involved in another war, western Sudan has particularly little going for it. Unless you count a few million potential candidates for the Christian missionary business, there's little to interest outside entrepreneurs. What the country has in extraordinary abundance is problems. And thanks to a surprising chain of events, it looks as though some of these problems now belong to the United States, too. America's reasons for getting involved are complicated, and there are so many highly charged factorsslavery, religious persecution, fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim), dictatorship, murder, ethnic strife, rape and faminethat it's difficult to see through the tangle of complications. This has led to a drastically simplified view of what is actually happening. The first oversimplification, dating back to Bill Clinton's presidency, is that Sudan means slavery. Though not the only serious human rights offender in the world, Sudannot Brazil, not Egyptcaught the attention of human-trafficking activists. They, in turn, passed the fever on to congregations in African-American churches. From the churches, the issue spread into wider black political circles. My ancestors were slaves. African-Americans can relate to slavery more intimately, politically, socially and spiritually, than they can anything else, said talk-radio host Joe Madison in 2001. It is this connection that first made Sudan an American political issue. During the Clinton years, the political path led to the Democratic Congressional Black Caucus, Rev. Al Sharpton and what you could loosely call a liberal idea. But the antislavery idea was not quite enough to reach mainstream white churchgoers, key members of the Bush II voter base. Hence, oversimplification number two: The war in Sudan was essentially about the persecution of Christians by Muslims. This de-blacked message made white evangelicals and Republican politicians comfortable, so on March 22, 2001, Republican Dick Armey, at that time House Majority Leader and ally of the evangelicals, said of Sudan: It is the only place in the world in which religious genocide is taking place. People are being tortured, mutilated and killed solely because of their Christian faith. The religion-driven interest in Africa led directly to the bizarre spectacle in Kampala last year, when mystified Ugandans listened to George W. tell them that God sent him there. In fact, he wasn't talking to them at all, but to Christian voters back home. Church groups, in this case white church groups, had also begun organizing around the issue of an abstinence-based AIDS policy in Africa. Without this link to his fundamentalist base, Bush would be unlikely to ever mention the continent. But like slavery, the persecution of Christians is a side issue in Sudan, where some estimates put Christians as outnumbered two- or three-to-one by those with traditional beliefs in spirits and magic, and people now counted as Christians are recent converts, the targets of European and American missionary campaigns (and in many cases still believers in traditional spirituality). Even by evangelical standards, there are some weird versions of Christianity on offer. The notoriously brutal Lord's Resistance Army, for instance, a Ugandan group also operating in southern Sudan, claims to want a society based on the Ten Commandmentsand abducts children to be soldiers. The Muslim/anti-Muslim explanation falls apart further when you consider that there are Christians in the south, and Muslims in the north. Many American activists are attracted to the fact that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement are Christians. While this group is the main opponent of the government in the south of the country, in Darfur the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) is avowedly Muslim, and the other main opposition group, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) has a message of equality of religions under the law. Fact is, the issue of self-determination for
[Marxism-Thaxis] John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools - Ed Luttwak
Sunday Telegraph October 24, 2004 John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools By Edward Luttwak One of the more amusing spectacles of these less-than- amusing times is the emergence of a Kerry fan club among European anti-war enthusiasts. The letter-writing campaign of The Guardian to the voters of Clark County, Ohio, is especially silly, but is only one of many examples. Of course many people support John Kerry for the next president of the United States for a variety of reasons - he is credible when he promises to cut the Federal deficit, for example. But to support him in the hope that he would make American military policy more doveish is absurd. All the evidence is that he will do the exact opposite. He has declared that he wants to increase the US Army by two divisions, more than the total of Continental Europe's intervention troops. That too is a credible promise, in part because Iraq has exposed an acute shortage of ground forces and an excess of navy and air force personnel. But beyond any specific policy positions, there is Kerry, the very combative man. In the televised debates, when President Bush spoke of defeating terrorism, Kerry invariably spoke of killing the terrorists. This was not just an electoral pose: the words accurately reflect the character of the man. He is a fighter, a two-fisted brawler. In all his past electoral campaigns, successful or otherwise, he was always the more aggressive candidate, ready to make wild accusations he knew to be false in the hope that some voters would believe even the incredible. At the moment he is telling older voters that Bush has a secret plan to cut their pensions by 45 per cent, and younger voters that Bush has a secret plan to re-introduce compulsory military service. And Kerry was certainly a fighter in Vietnam. Like many other well-born Americans of the time, Kerry already opposed the war as contrary to US strategic and economic interests (not as a pacifist) when he volunteered for an extra tour of duty in Vietnam, having already served his compulsory year safely aboard ship. As all the world knows by now, he won a Silver Star by beaching the boat he commanded, to jump off in pursuit of a Viet Cong guerrilla, whom he shot dead. He did not have to be in Vietnam, he could have been at home; he did not have to beach the boat - the standard tactic would have been to pull back from the shore all guns firing, not ram the prow into the mud. And as commander of the boat, he did not have to chase the guerrilla himself. He did it all simply because he is a fighter, and a ferocious one. I am quite certain that if Kerry had been president on September 11 he would have reacted more violently than Bush, sending bombers into Afghanistan, not just Special Forces scouts, and demanding immediate co-operation - or else - from Saudi Arabia, not just Pakistan. European anti-militarists have really picked the wrong guy as their hero. It is true that Kerry opposed the 1991 Gulf War (as did Senator Nunn, among other certified hawks) but he urged the use of force in Bosnia, regretted the failure to invade Rwanda before that, approved the Panama intervention of the first President Bush and was an enthusiast for the 1999 Kosovo war, before voting in favour of the war in Iraq. If Kerry is elected next month, he will certainly not act out his apparently clear-cut opposition to the war by immediately withdrawing US forces from Iraq - although even the Bush Administration is pursuing a form of disengagement, striving to add to the number of Iraqi police and National Guard as quickly as possible rather than sending more US troops. With a rifle strength of well under 60,000, there are not even enough American soldiers to control the Baghdad area, let alone the whole Sunni triangle. Kerry is unlikely to change course. He too will pursue disengagement, with the aim of leaving Iraq to its elected government after January, with as much of an army, national guard and police force as can be built up in the meantime. The only difference - and here is the greatest irony - is that Kerry would almost certainly disengage more slowly than Bush simply as a matter of political positioning: he is the one more vulnerable to accusations of abandoning Iraq to Islamic fanatics, warlord-priests and Saddam loyalists. It is not just over Iraq that the hawkish Kerry will confound European liberals. He has harshly criticised Bush for not being tough enough with Iran - another irony, because it implies a preference for unilateral action rather than the multilateral diplomacy he supposedly espouses. Iran's fanatical priests and Revolutionary Guard thugs, having faked the last elections, now rule the country behind the increasingly thin facade of President Khatami's elected but powerless government. The extremists have been playing a diplomatic game with the E3 - Britain, France and Germany - and with the
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools - Ed Luttwak
On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 13:07:30 -0400 Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It is essential not to have illusions. It is also crucial to defeat Bush. The problem is that's of Kerry supporters do have illusions concerning him. The fact is, he is a hawk concerning both Iraq and the so-called war on terrorism and he has spent this campaign trying to outflank Bush from the right on these issues (sort of like JFK's 1960 election strategy against Nixon). I see no reason why he won't govern this way, if he enters the Oval Office next year, given his political record, and the kinds of political forces that he would most likely be bumping up against, if he becomes president. Also, the record of liberals and progressives in regards to the Clinton Administration is not very comforting here. Under Clinton we saw such things as the passage of NAFTA and GATT, the abolition of AFDC, the passage of anti-terrorism legislation following the Oklahoma City bombing (which presaged Bush's Patriotic Act), the prosecution of a war against Yugolslavia in 1999, and the brutal imposition of sanctions (backed up by frequent aerial assaults) against Iraq. In other words stuff, that most progressives would never have tolerated from a Republican president. But after all, Clinton was our guy who was himself under constant attacl by the right, so all was forgiven. I suspect that we would see much the same thing under a Kerry Administration. He too will come under assault by the right-wing attack machine and all manner of liberals and progressives will be looking the other way, when Kerry pursues a more aggressive foreign policy, or revives the draft or attempts to privatize social security, or does other things that a Republican president cannot do, since after all Kerry is our guy. At 12:47 PM 10/24/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote: Sunday Telegraph October 24, 2004 John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools By Edward Luttwak ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis Speed up your surfing with Juno SpeedBand. Now includes pop-up blocker! Only $14.95/ month - visit http://www.juno.com/surf to sign up today! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The FBI and Science Society
The lastest issue (Winter 2004-2005) of Science Society has an article, The FBI and Science Society, by David H. Price, which, using files that the author obtained from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act, details the decades-long investigation of the journal from the 1940s to the 1960s, the FBI, apparently, viewing Marxist theorizing as almost as dangerous to national security as outright Marxist activism. I am sure Ralph Dumain will be amused to learn that according to Price: --- But during the postwar 1940s and throughout the 1950s the FBI viewed most philosophical links to Marxism as threats to their vision of Americanism. During the early Cold War most forms of materialist analysis were seen by the FBI as threats to national security (see Price and Peace, 20003). Thus the FBI reacted with strong concern upon reading the essays of Bernhard Stern, Elmer Barnes and others affiliated with the early years of Science Society in the book *Philosophy for the Future* (Sellars, et al., 1949): They are day in and day out influencing the minds of countless youths. Their influence goes beyond the classroom. They are also writers issuing books and articles designed to influence educated and articulate adults in positions of importance. There can be little doubt that these materialists are subtly preparing the minds of at least a percentage of those reached by them for the acceptance of communism. Further, they are preparing a greater percentage of educated minds to be sympathetic or soft on communisn. . . . It is not unlikely that the majority of the educated enemies of the Bureau who are regularly attacking or opposing us in one form or another are philosophic materialists. And, they are not decreasing in numbers. *Philosophy for the Future* is our problem of the future. (WFO 100-FBI Office Memorandum, 7/28/57). ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Bourgeois economists question trade theory
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_49/b3911408.htm DECEMBER 6, 2004 SPECIAL REPORT -- THE CHINA PRICE Shaking Up Trade Theory For decades economists have insisted that the U.S. wins from globalization. Now they're not so sure Ever since Americans began fretting about globalization nearly three decades ago, economists have patiently explained why, on balance, it's a boon to the U.S. Yes, some Americans lose their jobs, either to imports or because factories move to cheap-labor countries such as China or India. But the bulk of this work is labor-intensive and lower skilled and can be done more efficiently by countries that have an abundance of less-educated workers. In return, those countries buy more of our higher-value goods made by skilled workers -- for which the U.S. has a comparative advantage. The lost jobs and lower wages in the U.S., economists say, are more than offset when countries specialize like this, leading to more robust exports and lower prices on imported goods. Now this long-held consensus is beginning to crack. True, China is emerging as a global powerhouse, realigning many economic relationships. But in the long run a more disruptive trend may be the fast-rising tide of white-collar jobs shifting to cheap-labor countries. The fact that programming, engineering, and other high-skilled jobs are jumping to places such as China and India seems to conflict head-on with the 200-year-old doctrine of comparative advantage. With these countries now graduating more college students than the U.S. every year, economists are increasingly uncertain about just where the U.S. has an advantage anymore -- or whether the standard framework for understanding globalization still applies in the face of so-called white-collar offshoring. Now we've got trade patterns that challenge the common view of trade theory, which might not be so true anymore, says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics (IIE), a Washington (D.C.) think tank. A leading advocate of free-trade pacts, he still thinks white-collar job shifts are good for the U.S. The great debate percolating among the country's top trade economists gained new prominence with a recent article by Nobel laureate Paul A. Samuelson in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP). In the piece, the 89-year-old professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who largely invented much of modern-day economics, questions whether rising skills in China and India necessarily will benefit the U.S. The reaction was swift. Experts such as Columbia University trade economist Jagdish N. Bhagwati, who countered Samuelson in the next JEP issue, resist the notion that the new offshoring could lower U.S. wages or slow growth of gross domestic product. After all, these economists have spent their professional lives ridiculing such conclusions as so much protectionist nonsense. Nevertheless, they aren't yet able to reconcile what's happening on the ground with the ideas they have so passionately defended. This is a whole unexplored question that is very controversial, and nobody has a clue about what the numbers are, says Robert C. Feenstra, a prominent trade economist at the University of California at Davis. Global Labor Pool The central question Samuelson and others raise is whether unfettered trade is always still as good for the U.S. as they have long believed. Ever since British economist David Ricardo spelled out the theory of comparative advantage in the early 1800s, most economists have concluded that countries gain more than they lose when they trade with each other and specialize in what they do best. Today, however, advances in telecommunications such as broadband and the Internet have led to a new type of trade that doesn't fit neatly into the theory. Now that brainpower can zip around the world at low cost, a global labor market for skilled workers seems to be emerging for the first time -- and has the potential to upset traditional notions of national specialization. There are three ways this new development could disrupt the U.S. economy. If enough cheap, high-skilled workers become available around the world, competition may drive down U.S. wages for a wide swath of white-collar workers. Even economists who still see overall net gains agree that this is a potential problem. For the first time, high-skilled U.S. workers are going to be exposed to international competition, though it's not clear how much it will hurt their wages, says Bhagwati. A second concern is how much of the gains from trade will flow through to U.S. consumers. Until now the pain of globalization has been borne by less than a quarter of the workforce, mostly lower-skilled workers, whose wage cuts outweighed the cheaper-priced goods globalization brings. But the other three-quarters of American workers still came out ahead, since they weren't affected by foreign wage competition. If blue- and white-collar
[Marxism-Thaxis] materialism and science: gravity anomaly revealed by measuring motion of probes (from Lil Joe)
The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it Marx The article below examines unanticipated challenges to old perceptions, and laws. Expanding knowledge of object's gravity in expanding space-time is changing as human scientific instruments go farther faster, and slower (fast/slow dialectics, where laws are at one confirmed and negated, i.e. altered comprehension matching the new data) changing our perceptions. It wont be easy, and looking back at history in Europe it may even be dangerous (Bruno, Galileo) in that new perspectives challenge institutions whose authority is based on conventional sociopolitical dogma regarding the universe, and man's place in it. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b3 The mechanical materialism of Newton and Descartes -- and even William Paley's Watch Analogy -- corresponded to the mechanical world of the manufacturing and industrializing capitalist's world-view, just as Malthus, Spencer and Darwin's competition, invention, struggle for existence, corresponded to competition, invention and negation of competitors in British market capitalist society. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions and Malthusian struggle for existence. It is Hobbes bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegels Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an intellectual animal kingdom, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_06_18.htm Frances Bacon was right: Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.txt Contemplation cannot go any further than the object, or objective world being contemplated. This is true even of the imagination -- e.g. the 'beast' in the Book of Revelation having 'seven heads, ten horns and ten crowns' (one on each horn) is a monster imagined by placing together things that already exist, separately but merged into a single monstrous life form, object. -- Similarly Paley's watch analogy presupposed the existence of human technology, the cumulative result of technological developments and innovations of preceding generations, thus the watch. What Bacon suggested, or rather what is implicit in his suggestion, is that the invention and improvements of scientific instruments collecting data, analyzing the data for the formulation of hypothesis, and then other instruments to test the hypothesis, all methods and technologies made available to the scientific community to collect, analyze and test for themselves, has the tendency to maximize detached objectivity, thus minimize if not overcome the subjective prejudices inherent in individual contemplation. I think that the article below shows that Bacon was right. On the other hand, as in the United States progress in the biological sciences is hindered, where institutionalized social prejudices e.g. the power of Churches, threatened by advances in biology and paleoanthropology, use that power to attack these sciences as only theories i.e. subjective opinions of Charles Darwin. The more physics advance discovering new things, and insights into the natural workings of the universe, subsequently making god an unnecessary hypothesis, the religious reactionaries will invade this scientific discipline as well. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. Thus: the existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b3 The advances in science follows the advances in technology, and provides ideational weapons that are only taken up by the philosophical representatives of the revolutionary class, in its polemical conflicts with the ideologists of the powers that be. It was so when Bruno and Galileo represented the materialist advances of philosophy and science in the interests of the then rising bourgeoisie, and today the advances in science are defended by the philosophical materialists representing the interests of the proletariat, as only a revolutionary worker dominated society with an
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Have a happy and merry December 25
On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 10:17:45 -0500 Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: A-fucking-men! But: Born: 4 Jan 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England Died: 31 March 1727 in London, England Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Although by the calendar in use at the time of his birth he was born on Christmas Day 1642, we give the date of 4 January 1643 in this biography which is the corrected Gregorian calendar date bringing it into line with our present calendar. (The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in England until 1752.) But Newton still has a better claim to December 25 than that other guy in ancient Judea, who (if he existed at all) was almost certainly not born on December 25, if we follow the descriptions of the circumstances of his birth as described in the New Testament. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Newton.html At 05:47 AM 12/25/2004 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote: Today, as the world pauses on the birthday of one of history's greatest men, whose teachings continue to benefit the entire human race, let us join in toasting the memory of Sir Isaac Newton, and of all the giants on whose shoulders he stood. Jim Farmelant ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Israel's Culture of Martyrdom (The Nation)
Israel's Culture of Martyrdom by Baruch Kimmerling Nations like to imagine themselves as unique, but one belief they have in common is that it is noble to die in their name. Death and redemption are the themes of almost every form of patriotism. In the case of Israel, however, the connection between nationalism and death is especially visceral. For the Jewish state is a nation that emerged from the ashes of a project of extermination, and that sees itself as the best defense against the renewal of violent persecution. Zionism, the state's ruling ideology, is a triumphal creed shadowed by death. (Rest of article at: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050110s=kimmerling) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Sex. Race, Class (from Selma James, widow of CLR James)
Sex, Race and Class Selma James There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. This story continues at: http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/25/1656235 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Stan Goff's reply to Li'l Joe on Haiti (from Marxmail)
I have no idea who Joe Radical is or where he gets his information on Haiti, but the idea that the former FRAPH and FAdH paramilitaries that are demanding back pay in Haiti are some expression of proletarian contestation if not asserted out of pure ignorance of Haitis class dynamics is worthy of Timothy Leary on his best mescaline. The soldiers were put out of their jobs when the army was disbanded, whereupon they migrated to DR with the help of Uncle Sugar and began plotting the next takeover. Back pay! Their back pay should be a bullet for each brain stem. Their latest method for showing whos boss in small villes is to shoot teenage girls in the crotch with 12-guage shotguns. These are representatives of the most reactionary sector of Haitian society, and their fight with the compradors of 184/Convergence is a fight for political power between Duvalierist caudillos and financial technocrats like Apaid and Bazin. The masses which are largely peasants, not proletarians are feared by both these sectors equally, and it is the uprisings of the masses that continually force these two ruling factions back into one anothers arms during their internecine truces as they combined to oust Aristide who was elected by 92% of the Haitian people. His conflation of the former military and the urban intifada in the slums shows he knows nothing about Haiti. The paramilitaries have been busy, busy, busy killing people in the slums for months now in an effort to extinguish this rebellion. By the way, it is Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not Bernard. Seminal moment and portent of things to come, indeed. Pass the crack pipe. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Tariq Ali on the Iraqi elections
Out with the old, in with the new The Iraqi elections were designed not to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west Tariq Ali Monday February 7, 2005 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1407404,00.html The US, unlike the empires of old Europe, has always preferred to exercise its hegemony indirectly. It has relied on local relays - uniformed despots, corrupt oligarchs, pliant politicians, obedient monarchs - rather than lengthy occupations. It was only when rebellions from below threatened to disrupt this order that the marines were dispatched and wars fought. During the cold war, money was supplied indiscriminately to all anti-communist forces (including the current leadership of al-Qaida); the 21st-century recipients are more carefully targeted. The aim is slowly to replace the traditional elites in the old satrapies with a new breed of neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the US. This is the primary function of the US money allocated to democracy promotion. Loyalty can be purchased from politicians, parties and trades unions. And the result, it is hoped, is to create a new layer of janissary politicians who serve Washington. This most recent variant of democracy promotion has now been applied in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will hit Haiti (another occupied country) in November. Create a new elite, give it funds and weaponry to build a new army and let them make the country safe for the corporations. The 2004 Afghan elections, even according to some pro-US commentators, were a farce, and the much vaunted 73% turnout was a fraud. In Iraq, the western media were celebrating a 60% turnout within minutes of the polls closing, despite the fact that Iraq lacks a complete register of voters, let alone a network of computerised polling stations. The official figure, when it comes, is likely to be revised downwards (according to Debka, a pro-US Israeli website, turnout was closer to 40%). The high turnout was widely interpreted as a rejection of the Iraqi resistance. But was it? Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's many followers voted to please him, but if he is unable to deliver peace and an end to the occupation, they too might defect. The only force in Iraq the occupiers can rely on are the Kurdish tribes. The Kurdish 36th command battalion fought alongside the US in Falluja, but the tribal chiefs want some form of independence, and some oil. If Turkey, loyal Nato ally and EU aspirant, vetoes any such possibility, then the Kurds too might accept money from elsewhere. The battle for Iraq is far from over. It has merely entered a new stage. Despite strong disagreements on boycotting the elections, the majority of Iraqis will not willingly hand over their oil or their country to the west. Politicians who try to force this through will lose all support and become totally dependent on the foreign armies in their country. The popular resistance will continue. Many in the west find it increasingly difficult to support this resistance. The arguments for and against it are old ones. In 1885, the English socialist William Morris celebrated the defeat of General Gordon by the Mahdi: Khartoum fallen - into the hands of the people it belongs to. Morris argued that the duty of English internationalists was to support all those being oppressed by the British empire despite disagreements with nationalism or fanaticism. The triumphalist chorus of the western media reflects a single fact: the Iraqi elections were designed not so much to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west. After Bush's re-election the French and Germans were looking for a bridge back to Washington. Will their citizens accept the propaganda that sees the illegitimate election (the Carter Centre, which monitors elections worldwide, refused to send observers) as justifying the occupation? The occupation involved a military and economic invasion as envisaged by Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism, who pioneered the notion of lightning air strikes against Iran in 1979 and Argentina in 1982. The re-colonisation of Iraq would have greatly pleased him. Politicians masking their true aims with weasel words about humanity would have irritated him. What of the media, the propaganda pillar of the new order? In Control Room, a Canadian documentary on al-Jazeera, one of the more disgusting images is that of embedded western journalists whooping with joy at the capture of Baghdad. The coverage of elections in Afghanistan and Iraq has been little more than empty spin. This symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps reinforce the collective memory loss from which the west suffers today. Carl Schmitt, a theorist of the Third Reich, developed the view that politics is encompassed by the essential categories of friend and enemy. After the second world war, Schmitt's writings were adapted to the needs of the US and are now the bedrock of neocon
