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

[mkaradjis . via Marxism]

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"Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin
America, ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc."

It is fascinating to think the degree to which Chinese imperialism
plays such a dominant role in Greece through control of its main port,
yet if we were forced to think through old, established dogmatic
categories, we would have to insist that Greece was an imperialist
country and China was a semi-colonial (or "oppressed") country.

It is a good example of how refusing to see Russia and China as
imperialist powers seems to me to be a refusal to simply look today's
reality in the face.

It is true, as Chris says, that it is complicated, "because China is
still a source of cheap labor for US, European and Japanese
corporations." That was also true of Tsarist Russia, whose vast
countryside was immensely more backward than is today's Chinese
countryside, yet Lenin, correctly, saw it as an imperialist country. I
believe that is called "the law of uneven and combined development."

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Chris Slee via Marxism
 wrote:
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>
> While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do have 
> to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.
>
> Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America, 
> ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.
>
> Does this make China an imperialist power?
>
> The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap labor 
> for US, European and Japanese corporations.
>
> Chris Slee
> 
> From: Marxism  on behalf of Philip 
> Ferguson via Marxism 
> Sent: Sunday, 3 September 2017 9:00:26 PM
> To: Chris Slee
> Subject: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey
>
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> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Democratic Socialists Are Here to Fix Your Brake Lights - VICE

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Sewer socialism?

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwwkaa/the-democratic-socialists-are-here-to-fix-your-brake-lights
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[Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Herman Melville's mystery: was Billy Budd black?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/07/herman-melvilles-mystery-was-billy-budd-black
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Many years ago I was told of a local Social Democrat somewhere in Germany who 
organized his neighbourhood to remove the trousers of Nazis who entered the 
neighbourhood  and to chase them away.
If such an approach had been generalized as part of an overall strategy, 
individual Nazis might have decided to give up.

In any case, I think the outright killing of a Nazi could actually weaken us.

ken h
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[Marxism] Fwd: A black eye for the Red Cross - NY Daily News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/black-eye-red-cross-article-1.3461816
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa

[David McDonald via Marxism]

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"it appears that these groups have almost completely avoided any form of
violence that is lethal;"

>From the description of the photographer who helped stop an antifa
stomping, it won't be too long before someone of the Nazis is killed and
that will change the game.

I have been reading Shon Meckfessel's dissertation, available on the
internet. Shon often posts or forwards pro-antifa stuff on Facebook. To
show you how things have changed, Shon spends CHAPTERS explaining how
violence against property, as distinct from violence against people,
challenges all our liberal assumptions that lump all forms of violence
together.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/3/17 12:51 PM, David McDonald via Marxism wrote:

I have been reading Shon Meckfessel's dissertation, available on the
internet. Shon often posts or forwards pro-antifa stuff on Facebook. To
show you how things have changed, Shon spends CHAPTERS explaining how
violence against property, as distinct from violence against people,
challenges all our liberal assumptions that lump all forms of violence
together.


Let me conclude with a look at Shon Meckfessel’s new book titled 
“Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be” that is based on his doctoral 
dissertation and that reminds me a bit of Regis Debray’s “Revolution in 
the Revolution”. Where Debray fetishized rural guerrilla warfare, 
Meckfessel fetishizes the black bloc. At least Debray can be forgiven 
for basing his book on a success—the Cuban revolution. Meckfessel 
inexplicably elevates a movement that has achieved nothing except 
getting its adventures written up in the bourgeois press.


Although it is highly possible that there are some discrepancies between 
the new book and dissertation, I am taking the chance that they are 
relatively small and will refer to the dissertation in the following 
remarks.


Since chapter three is titled “The Eloquence of Targeted Property 
Destruction in the Occupy Movement” and chapter four is titled “The 
Eloquence of Police Clashes in the Occupy Movement”, there is little 
doubt that what you will be getting is a sophisticated defense of the 
indefensible.


There’s not much to distinguish Shon from Ciccariello-Maher as this 
passage from chapter three would indicate.  Although some might think 
that plagiarism was afoot, I think that both of the professors are 
simply reflecting the zeitgeist of the widespread ultraleft milieu that 
would naturally lead them to admire Fanon and Sorel uncritically:


	If targeted property destruction works to assert comparisons within and 
across categories of violence in the hopes of destabilizing ideological 
chains of equivalence and triggering a revaluation, its affective 
reconfigurations in the discursive field of subjectivity are equally 
eloquent in its rhetorical strategy. In his classic “Reflections on 
Violence,” Georges Sorel put forward his notion of the General Strike as 
a myth which condensed all of the desired political values of 
proletarian struggle; violence, in his formation, “is assigned the 
important function of ‘constituting’ an actor.” (Seferiades & Johnston 
6). Similarly, Fanon put forth the celebrated formulation in The 
Wretched of the Earth (1968) that decolonization requires a violence to 
be done to the colonizer’s body in order to disarticulate its sacred 
inviolability, and thus constitute the post-colonial subject through the 
act of violation. Contemporary practices of public noninjurious 
violence, such as targeted property destruction, can be seen to enact 
analogous discursive actions of subjectification while avoiding the 
dehumanizing effects of bodily harm, as can be heard in the words of 
Cindy, one observer of the Seattle May Day 2012 riots:


	I think that property destruction has a good effect on those who carry 
it out… I think most people need to unlearn submission and show 
themselves that they have the 165 capacity to act for their own 
liberation. I think that when people burn cop cars, break bank windows, 
or blockade a road (thwarting the transfer of goods and or law 
enforcement) they are also demonstrating to themselves some of the 
magnitude of their ability to resist. (Cindy interview)


In the next chapter, Shon refers to the “eloquence” of fighting the cops 
with a reference to Judith Butler:


	As with the uneasy boundary between the materiality and discursivity of 
bodies examined in Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993), the 
materiality of individuals enacting oppressive behavior is not simple to 
divorce from the discursivity of their role.


I can’t exactly say that I understand this jargon but I do know this. 
Butler found nothing “eloquent” about the Berkeley Student Union 
misadventure. In an email cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 
she stated: “I deplore the violent tactics of yesterday and so do the 
overwhelming majority of students and faculty at UC Berkeley.”


I find something vaguely dispiriting about college professors in their 
40s and 50s being drawn to such juvenile antics. In a strange way, they 
remind me of the neglected minor masterpiece “Little Children” that 
starred Patrick Wilson as a law student who is not sure that he is cut 
out for the profession. In what might be called a case of “arrested 
development”, he spends hours on end watching teens skateboarding at 

[Marxism] Fwd: Nobel laureates warn Aung San Suu Kyi over 'ethnic cleansing' of Rohingya | World news | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/30/nobel-laureates-aung-san-suu-kyi-ethnic-cleansing-rohingya
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[Marxism] Modernizing the police department during the Weimar Republic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Apparently the German Social Democracy of the Weimar Republic exercised 
power in much the same fashion as both the Democrats and the Republicans 
today, at least on the question of "modernizing" the police department.


"Under the Kaiser, the police had been so hated that no dog would take a 
bone from them. The Social Democrats civilised this body, transformed 
it, and brought it into a normal relationship with the public. They 
soaked it with the Republican spirit and turned it into a reliable 
instrument of the Weimar Republic. In this regard, they had made all 
preparation for a successful defence of the Weimar state. The police 
force was well organised, splendidly armed (with armoured cars, 
machine-guns, hand-grenades, machine-pistols, carbines and tear-gas 
bombs), and for street fighting was superbly trained. The fact that it 
was more seldom used against the foes of the Republic on the right than 
against radical workers on the left, and that the misguided Social 
Democratic Police President, Zörgiebel, [31] on 1 May 1929, employed it 
against workers celebrating May Day, thus causing the Neukölln massacre, 
was not the fault of its organisation, but of the policy of the 
government whose obedient tool it was. To keep the Prussian police in 
their hands, the Social Democrats were willing to make any sacrifice. 
The sly Centre could, as their partner in the Prussian coalition 
government, squeeze one concession after another from them, both in the 
cultural and political spheres."


https://www.marxists.org/archive/petroff/1934/hitlers-secret.htm
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Winner, a Lefty Hero, & a Plagiarist. | New Republic

[tom herzog via Marxism]

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Weren't these allegations of plagiarism by Mr. Hedges debunked several years 
ago?  If memory serves me it was the person bringing the allegations who was 
found to be a sensation seeker trying to get attention and make a name for 
himself.  Hedges, like virtually every prolific writer will from time to time 
unconsciously write something that he had admired and memorized from some other 
writer having forgotten that it wasn't his own thought.  It was shown beyond a 
reasonable doubt that that is what happened to Hedges.  In other words it was 
conclusively shown that Hedges never intentionally plagiarized anyone.  And, if 
one stops to think for a moment, why would he?  He's a superb writer with 
plenty of original ideas.  This whole issue is a tempest in a tea-pot.  It's 
absurd.


Thomas Herzog
 

On Saturday, September 2, 2017, 7:30:22 PM PDT, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
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https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer-winner-lefty-hero-plagiarist
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[Marxism] Fwd: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Gail Evans and Marta Ramos have one thing in common: They have each 
cleaned offices for one of the most innovative, profitable and 
all-around successful companies in the United States.


For Ms. Evans, that meant being a janitor in Building 326 at Eastman 
Kodak’s campus in Rochester in the early 1980s. For Ms. Ramos, that 
means cleaning at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in the 
present day.


In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across 
America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core 
competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more 
nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. 
It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class 
Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.


The $16.60 per hour Ms. Ramos earns as a janitor at Apple works out to 
about the same in inflation-adjusted terms as what Ms. Evans earned 35 
years ago. But that’s where the similarities end.


Ms. Evans was a full-time employee of Kodak. She received more than four 
weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to 
go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March. When the 
facility she cleaned was shut down, the company found another job for 
her: cutting film.


Ms. Ramos is an employee of a contractor that Apple uses to keep its 
facilities clean. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years, because she 
can’t afford the lost wages. Going back to school is similarly out of 
reach. There are certainly no bonuses, nor even a remote possibility of 
being transferred to some other role at Apple.


Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the 
opportunities they created. A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking 
computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to 
teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track 
inventory. When she eventually finished her college degree in 1987, she 
was promoted to a professional-track job in information technology.


Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the 
whole company, and she has had a long career since as a senior executive 
at other top companies. Ms. Ramos sees the only advancement possibility 
as becoming a team leader keeping tabs on a few other janitors, which 
pays an extra 50 cents an hour.


full: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html

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

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do have 
to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.

Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America, ports 
in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.

Does this make China an imperialist power?

The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap labor 
for US, European and Japanese corporations.

Chris Slee

From: Marxism  on behalf of Philip 
Ferguson via Marxism 
Sent: Sunday, 3 September 2017 9:00:26 PM
To: Chris Slee
Subject: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Tristan Sloughter via Marxism]

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> Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America

And military bases in Africa and the Middle East.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Winner, a Lefty Hero, & a Plagiarist. | New Republic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/3/17 3:09 PM, tom herzog via Marxism wrote:

Weren't these allegations of plagiarism by Mr. Hedges debunked several years 
ago?


A follow-up exchange between Hedges and the author.

https://newrepublic.com/article/118212/chris-hedges-responds-accusations-plagiarism
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[Marxism] Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Winner, a Lefty Hero, & a

[Richard M via Marxism]

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Hedges responded, quite well I might add, to this charge from three years
ago:


   5.  Fwd: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Winner, a Lefty Hero, & a
  


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[Marxism] Fwd: The Secret of Hitler's Victory by Peter and Irma Petroff 1934

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Interesting to see the parallels between the German social democracy in 
1930 and today's Democratic Party.)


At the Social Democratic election meetings, mostly taking one monotonous 
form of ‘demonstrations’, gloom reigned supreme. There was a palpable 
gulf between speakers and audiences. There was much dissension even over 
the mode of address. In a meeting in Saxony, Severing, one of the 
biggest guns of the Social Democratic Party, was shouted down when he 
commenced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ – a few days later Hitler spoke in the 
same hall, addressing the meeting: ‘German men and women’, and was 
cheered. In many Social Democratic meetings the speakers would repeat 
the Nazi formula Volksgenossen, inspiring the socialist audiences with 
contempt. These external trivialities showed how wide the cleft between 
leaders and masses had grown.


Instead of an incisive criticism of the capitalist system and the policy 
of the government, anxiously awaited by the masses; instead of demanding 
drastic measures against unemployment and misery; instead of holding out 
a prospect of a bright socialist future, the Social Democratic 
apologists generally confined themselves to a purely negative criticism 
of the contradictory programme of the Nazis, and to a rejection of the 
Communist slogans. Their positive proposals seemed petty and 
insufficient, or gave the impression of no more than pious hopes, since 
there was the feeling that there was no serious intention of immediate 
action behind it.


In these exciting times the branch meetings presented a similar picture. 
The appointment of speakers as well as the selection of subjects was in 
the hands of indifferent employees at party offices, the slaves of red 
tape. A Social Democratic woman lecturer complained to us that she had 
been asked to address a Berlin women’s meeting on ‘Socialism in the 
Family’ just before the breakdown... The youth ignored these meetings. 
The elderly people, bound up with the party for a lifetime, remained 
sulkily in their seats. It brought to mind Heinrich Heine’s little story 
of the two old people who from their childhood had been used to praying 
before the image of a saint painted in glowing colours in a niche. Now 
the image had faded, the niche was in ruins – unmindful of this, they 
continued to pray.


full: https://www.marxists.org/archive/petroff/1934/hitlers-secret.htm
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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Yes, rise of China is very important.  And exactly what category it fits in
is complex for the reasons you identify.

Phil



On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 1:11 PM, Chris Slee  wrote:

> While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do
> have to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.
>
> Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America,
> ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.
>
> Does this make China an imperialist power?
>
> The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap
> labor for US, European and Japanese corporations.
>
> Chris Slee
>
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Lavelle on Sharma, 'Robert McNamara's Other War: The World Bank and International Development'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 8:21 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Lavelle on Sharma, 'Robert McNamara's
Other War: The World Bank and International Development'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Patrick Allan Sharma.  Robert McNamara's Other War: The World Bank
and International Development.  Politics and Culture in Modern
America Series. Philadelphia  University of Pennsylvania press, 2017.
 264 pp.  $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4906-4.

Reviewed by Kathryn Lavelle (Case Western Reserve University)
Published on H-Diplo (September, 2017)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Robert McNamara was an enigma his entire life. His legacy will be
debated for many years after his passing. He succeeded in
transforming every enterprise where he played a role: the auto
industry, US foreign policy in Vietnam, and the world of
international development in the 1970s. Yet the changes he initiated
both harmed and helped their intended targets. Using the prism of
McNamara's thirteen-year presidency of the World Bank, Patrick Sharma
offers a significant contribution to our understanding of this
complicated man, and the world of international development where he
focused the third portion of his career. Unlike previous leaders, he
was the first who tried to turn the bank into an intellectual leader
as well as a lending institution. Sharma is also keen to point out
that McNamara made conditionality a central feature of the
organization's work.

_Robert McNamara's Other War_ opens with a discussion of the history
of the bank from its creation until the 1960s, and McNamara's own
initial experiences with war. The early World Bank was stymied by
domestic American political tensions wherein the World Bank president
and American executive director competed for influence over control
of the bank's lending direction. Once the situation was resolved in
favor of the president, the organization needed to expand its
capability by raising money from American capital markets in order to
become a true global power. During these same years, McNamara was
forging his way, first in the air force and later at Ford Motor
Company as a "Whiz Kid." When President Lyndon Johnson assumed
office, he inherited McNamara as his secretary of defense. When
Johnson's relationship with McNamara soured, he sent him to the World
Bank upon the recommendation of its then president, George Woods. As
Sharma points out, it was a shrewd maneuver because the bank's
Articles of Agreement prevented the World Bank's president from
commenting on the political affairs of member countries, including
the United States. Regardless, McNamara's transition from secretary
of defense to World Bank president would always seem as if he were
doing penance for Vietnam.

To increase the bank's size and influence, McNamara quickly turned to
expand its existing borrowings by selling more bonds in other
countries. He also worked to modernize its management structure,
beginning with its accounting system. In addition, he expanded ties
with other international organizations, such as the World Health
Organization, International Labor Organization, and UN Industrial
Development Organization. Next, McNamara moved to de-emphasize the
large infrastructure projects that had characterized the bank's early
years with their emphasis on growth, and replace them with broader
concerns, such as population growth. He was particularly skillful at
navigating the new external environment the bank confronted, chiefly
the oil shocks of the 1970s and efforts by the US government to
control its operations.

Later in the book, Sharma details the problems that McNamara
confronted in seeking to accomplish his goal of alleviating poverty.
The examples of early rural development projects served as a
precursor for many later World Bank projects, where local agencies
struggled to meet World Bank requirements and the intended population
received relatively few benefits. These projects also became a cause
for concern about the connection between lending and policy. McNamara
formally proposed Structural Adjustment Lending in 1979. Wanting to
encourage wealthy countries to open their markets to developing
country exporters, the bank would also encourage developing countries
to expand their export sectors by carrying out structural
adjustments. Thus, the bank would link country lending programs
explicitly to the economic policies of member governments, by
agreeing to a range of bank-prescribed economic policy changes.

Shortly thereafter, McNamara informed the World Bank's board that he
would be leaving. In 1982, the role of the