[Marxism] The origin of the Debs Project...
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Quite the fascinating read...personal reflections by Tim Davenport, the literary force behind the Debs Selected Works project. We are half-way through the collecting/editing project for Volume 3. Ergo, 2 1/2 volumes to go. Volume 1 will published this fall by Haymarket. Volume 2 early next year. And so onnone of the material will have ever been published in any collection of Deb's writings. In this sense if one were to add the 6 volumes we will complete to the Letters of Eugene V. Debs: 3 Volume Set (Edited by J. Robert Constantine) there will be a total of 9 volumes of his writings. ---David Walters Tim's perspective: Two decades ago my best friend from college and I went out to lunch in Corvallis. We had both recently turned 35 and that served as the occasion — half of the biblical “three score and ten.” I don’t precisely remember a single word that we said to one another during the 90 minutes or so we were together, but I do remember it as a very reflective discussion that we had at what felt like “halftime” of our lives. Time had flown. There were good memories and good stories and others that were less happy — but it was somehow deeply satisfying to take accounts and to acknowledge mortality. The relative shortness of the first half of life emphasized the value of time and served as a source of focus for activity in the second. I now find myself feeling the same sort of mixture of pensiveness and optimism about the *Debs Selected Works* project today as the calendar ticks down on the arduous document compilation phase for the third of six volumes. Halftime approaches. • • • • • *Origin of the Debs Project* I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that I wanted to spend five years doing a comprehensive Debs writings project. Far from it — this little obsession is the end product of a long process. FULL: https://debsproject.org/2018/07/07/halftime-18-23/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] L’Chayim Comrade Stalin on Vimeo
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Yale Strom's documentary on the Jewish Autonomous Region that Stalin created. https://vimeo.com/254227098 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] OPCW finds possible use of chlorine, no evidence of sarin, in Douma | al-bab.com
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://al-bab.com/blog/2018/07/opcw-finds-possible-use-chlorine-no-evidence-sarin-douma _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Prepare for the worst | Richard Seymour on Patreon
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Richard on climate change. https://www.patreon.com/posts/19879929 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] It Really Comes Down to Empowering the Working Class
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * In the whole history of electoral party socialism -- AKA "democratic socialism" -- this "eventually" (eventually ending private property) never happens. Universal rent control, though a worthwhile reform, historically reduces the value of the buildings but does not prevent the landlord from making a profit -- partly because they have political clout to limit the rent control. "A democratic socialist recognizes the capitalist system as being inherently oppressive, and is actively working to dismantle it and to empower the working class and the marginalized in our society. Socialists recognize that under capitalism, rich people are able — through private control of industry and of what should be public goods — to accumulate wealth by exploiting the working class and the underclass. Functionally, this perpetuates and exacerbates inequality. "A progressive will stop short at proposing reforms that help people but don’t necessarily transform the system. For example a progressive might advocate for forcing landlords to do necessary repairs on buildings. But unless you advocate for universal rent control and frankly, eventually, the abolition of private property — though that’s not my campaign platform because it’s not very realistic — what you’re actually doing is just kicking the can down the road." https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/julia-salazar-interview-socialist-new-york-senate _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Ralph Paige, Champion of Black Farmers, Dies at 74
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, July 7, 2018 Ralph Paige, Champion of Black Farmers, Dies at 74 By Daniel E. Slotnik Ralph Paige, a nationally prominent advocate for black farmers who fought to save their land and to win them financial compensation for what they contended were years of government discrimination, died on June 28 in Atlanta. He was 74. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, an advocacy organization for African-American farmers that grew out of the civil rights movement and that Mr. Paige led for 30 years, beginning in 1985. In that leadership role he helped organize black farmers and others in the Southeast into economic cooperatives, educated them on how best to retain their land and became their spokesman. The life of a family farmer is never easy: Financial insecurity is the norm, smaller farms have to compete with deep-pocketed agribusiness giants, and months of toil can be wiped away by a crop blight or a freak weather event. Moreover, many black farmers say racial discrimination makes it more difficult for them to maintain ownership of land and receive financial support from local institutions as well as the Department of Agriculture. The ranks of black farmers dwindled in the 20th century. The federation sees cooperatives, in which farms join together to act as a single, stronger economic entity, as an effective way for black farms to compete as self-sufficient businesses with little need for help from outside institutions, which can be biased or even predatory. During Mr. Paige’s 46 years with the federation — he joined it in 1969 — he helped organize dozens of cooperatives and 18 community development credit unions across the Southeast. The federation now represents about 75 cooperatives, made up of some 20,000 families. He also helped educate farmers on how to retain their land through legal means, like the drafting wills — measures he considered critical to defending rural black communities. “This isn’t just another black farmer going out of business,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times in 1992, referring to the disappearance of black farms. “It is our community losing a piece of the country.” Mr. Paige challenged what he saw as a dearth of financial support offered to black farmers by the Department of Agriculture, which he contended had disproportionately denied loans, disaster relief and other monetary aid for black farmers. And the loans black farmers did receive, he said, were often smaller and took longer to process than those for white farmers. “When President Abraham Lincoln created the United States Department of Agriculture in 1862, he referred to it as the People’s Department,” Mr. Paige wrote in 2010 in a column for The San Marcos Daily Record, a Texas newspaper. “The problem is that its services have never been available to all the people.” To draw attention to the issue in 1992, Mr. Paige organized a caravan of farmers to descend on Washington for a protest rally. He later became instrumental in recruiting and preparing plaintiffs for a large class-action lawsuit filed against the Agriculture Department in 1997. In the lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, the plaintiffs asserted that they faced foreclosure and financial ruin because the department had denied them timely loans and other financial assistance. They also argued that since the agency had closed its civil rights office during the Reagan administration, there was no productive way to address their complaints. “He dedicated a lot of our resources and our organization and our staff’s time to actually working with plaintiffs, filing paperwork, educating them about the lawsuit,” Mr. Blanding said of Mr. Paige in a telephone interview. In 1999, a federal district judge in Washington approved a settlement agreement that led to a government payout of more than $2 billion to more than 15,000 claimants. The case inspired similar litigation on behalf of female, Native American and Latino farmers who contended that the department had also discriminated against them. Ralph McDaniel Paige was born on July 28, 1943, in LaGrange, Ga., to Edward and Dora Paige, maintenance workers at local businesses. He graduated from high school in LaGrange and attended Fort Valley State University, a historically black college in Fort Valley, Ga., where he played on the football team. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physical education in 1967 and was a high school teacher and coach before joining the federation. Mr. Paige first worked as a
[Marxism] Review of *The Civil War in the United States*, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Edited by Andrew Zimmerman* | Marcelo Badaró Mattos | Science & Society
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Review The Civil War in the United States, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Edited by Andrew Zimmerman. New York: International Publishers, 2016. Paper, $14.00. Pp. 256. This book is the second American edition, largely modified, of a collection of Marx’s and Engels’ writings on the Civil War. The first edition, in 1937, was organized by Herbert M. Morais, who for fears of political persecution (later confirmed), published his work under a pseudonym. The almost 80 years between the two editions largely explain their differences. As Andrew Zimmerman, professor of German history at George Washington University and editor of this new edition, points out in his Introduction, the first edition was marked by the dominant interpretation among communist militants of the day, that the Civil War corresponded to a “bourgeois revolution that removed fetters to capitalist development in the United States” (xxix). In this edition, the interpretation of W. E. B. Du Bois is assumed to be similar to the one espoused by Marx and Engels, and Zimmerman tries to merge these, to sustain the view that “the Civil War was not a bourgeois revolution, but a workers’ revolution carried out within a bourgeois republic that was finally undermined by that bourgeois republic” (xxix). For this reason, in the selection of texts made by the editor we find a greater amount of material related to slavery and to the debate about race. The book brings together 111 pieces: newspaper articles, correspon- dence and pamphlets written by Marx and Engels, and correspondence between them, and with the International Workingmen’s Association, as well as an appendix with a comment by Du Bois on the writings of Marx on the racial question. The editor organized his selections into nine parts, covering: some references to the question of slavery and abolition in Marx’s writings prior to the outbreak of the Civil War; texts of the German revolutionaries produced during the conflict; articles showing Marx’s insistence on defining slavery as the central cause of the conflict; “The Trent Affair” (a diplomatic incident with the UK in 1861 when the U. S. Navy captured two Confederate diplomats from a British ship); texts in which Marx and Engels discuss the revolutionary potential of the Civil War; Lincoln and his role in the process, including the famous correspondence between the International Workingmen’s Association and the President or his diplomatic representatives; excerpts related to the end of the war and the prognoses for the Reconstruction period; the International and its positions; and excerpts addressing the Civil War issue in Marx’s works after the end of the conflict, especially from *Capital* and *The Civil War in France*. Each part is opened with a very helpful comment from the editor, which clarifies the context, and the sources from which the texts were taken, and gives a brief analysis of the texts. In addition, Zimmerman supplies an Introduction of about 20 pages, followed by a list of bibliographical suggestions. In the Introduction Zimmerman presents an interesting analysis of the connections between Marx and Engels, exiled in England, and their German comrades from the revolutionary struggles of 1848–49 who opted for exile in North America, many of whom engaged in the abolitionist cause before the war. Several of these German exiles were frequent correspondents of Marx and Engels, such as Joseph Weydemeyer, who would fight as an artillery officer in the Union Army and continued to be involved in defending the political rights of former slaves after the end of the conflict. The editor is also concerned with explaining how Marx and Engels saw in the Civil War the most important moment for international revolutionary struggles since the defeats that followed the revolutions of 1848. The connection between the Civil War and world revolution was so much about the importance of slavery in the South of the United States for the capitalist economy on its transatlantic scale, as well as the role of enslaved workers as subjects of a revolutionary struggle. Zimmerman is not content, however, with an idealized view of Marx’s and Engels’ stances on the racial issue. He presents both their evident anti-racist position, combined with the recognition of the role of the enslaved workers in the abolition of slavery and the conclusion of the war, and the limits of their perception of the protagonist role of the slaves in that process. This role, Zimmerman believes, was underestimated by Marx and Engels, but not by some of their comrades who acted side by side with formerly
[Marxism] NY Times Book Review - The Opium War and the Humiliation of China
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/books/review/stephen-r-platt-imperial-twilight.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Donate to Philly Socialists Fund-drive | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://louisproyect.org/2018/07/07/donate-to-philly-socialists-fund-drive/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Nurses vote to strike at university of Vermont medical center
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://petitions.moveon.org/p/L_9Me_CM0zmcbPI _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] [UCE] Antarctic Melting is Speeding Up - Science News July 7 2018
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace. In just the last five years, the frozen continent has shed ice nearly three times faster on average than it did over the previous 20 years. An international team of scientists has combined data from two dozen satellite surveys in the most comprehensive assessment of Antarctica’s ice sheet mass yet. The conclusion: The frozen continent lost an estimated 2,720 billion metric tons of ice from 1992 to 2017, and much of that loss occurred in recent years, particularly in West Antarctica. Before 2012, the continent shed ice at a rate of 76 billion tons each year on average, but from 2012 to 2017, the rate increased to 219 billion tons annually/./ Full: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antarctica-lost-3-trillion-metric-tons-ice-since-1992-sea-level-rise?mode=magazine=197053 --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] MR Online | The Texas counter-revolution of 1836
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * War with Mexico intended to make Texas a slave state. https://mronline.org/2018/07/06/the-texas-counter-revolution-of-1836/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
