[Marxism] The American Working Class on Unfamiliar and Dangerous Terrain

[Richard Modiano via Marxism]

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The working class in the United States faces tremendous difficulties, but
there are some hopeful signs of movement in workplaces and unions, in
communities, and on the left. As this article was being edited, the
national uprising against the police murder of George Floyd spread across
the country, complicating in ways that remain uncertain both the
coronavirus and the planned reopening of the country intended to end the
depression. Clearly, however, all of these events taken together suggest
that we are entering a new era in the struggle for democracy and
socialism.

https://newpol.org/the-american-working-class-on-unfamiliar-and-dangerous-terrain-a-fightback-begins/


Richard Modiano
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[Marxism] Song

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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It’s Been Burning for a While

https://playingforchange.com/videos/burning-for-a-while/?utm_source=Premium+Members_campaign=1b7b91f0ff-burning+for+a+while+%28members%29_medium=email_term=0_9b70e99e0e-1b7b91f0ff-13101641_cid=1b7b91f0ff_eid=f46f38ad6e
 

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Re: [Marxism] Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Malcolm X Today - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-why-we-should-all-read-malcolm-x-today/



“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of 
what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create 
their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.”


And presciently for our time: 'That's not a chip on my shoulder; that's 
your foot on my neck.'


/— /Malcolm X, whose birthday, unlike MLK's, passed unremarked upon six 
days ago.


That time may have arrived. All the elements converge, and informed 
experience is still the best teacher. The information is increasingly 
available, in increasingly accessible form, while the people most 
impacted by violence and inequality have recently been in a period where 
quiet reflection on experience was possible, and a massive amount of it 
has accrued to reflect about.


--- or else.

Not to hit too hard on MLK, but as Kehinde Andrews recalls, Martin 
Luther King, unlike Malcolm, thought that the capitalist system could be 
redeemed. An interviewer noted that difference between them, and asked 
Malcolm if he thought MLK was an 'Uncle Tom.' He replied that using that 
expression could subject one to a libel action, but that he could say 
that 'Uncle Martin is my friend.' My recollection of my reading, though, 
is that Martin was supposed to have been coming around by the time he 
was snuffed.



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[Marxism] Inside a Huge Brooklyn Protest: ‘The World Is Watching’

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, June 1, 2020
Inside a Huge Brooklyn Protest: ‘The World Is Watching’
By Michael Wilson

Rewind, before the trash fires and lootings and arrests, to the scene 
outside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Sunday evening.


A gate agent at Kennedy Airport, Victoria Sloan, stood in the crowd with 
the setting sun at her back, thinking about the time the police hassled 
her little brother. Several feet away, Daniel English, a young media 
consultant, handed out free pizza and water with friends at a table one 
of them had brought along. Cory Thomas, a 40-year-old lead abatement 
specialist, held his phone aloft, sharing the scene with an old friend — 
the two were once beaten by the police, he said, when they were teenagers.


Soon, the group would march through the broad avenues and narrow side 
streets of Prospect Heights, greeted at every turn with applause and 
honking horns and raised-fist salutes. Bryce Stewart, 35, of Bushwick, 
stopped his motorcycle and climbed atop it for a better look.


That mood, one of spirited, sometimes vulgar but essentially peaceful 
indignation, lasted until dark. Then, as it had on each of the previous 
nights of protest, the glass started to shatter. It began Sunday around 
10 p.m. in SoHo, when a knot of young men on the periphery of a large 
march from Brooklyn smashed a clothing store window and stole a jacket, 
dragging the entire mannequin out onto the sidewalk.


Scenes of rampant looting and violence between the police and protesters 
have dominated news coverage of New York City’s protests around the 
world, and contributed to the announcement Monday by Gov. Andrew M. 
Cuomo of an 11 p.m. curfew in the city. The crimes being committed have 
frustrated the protest’s earliest arrivals, the ones who write slogans 
on the lids of pizza boxes to hold overhead, only to see their efforts 
hijacked by the shadowy newcomers with their metal bars and stolen clothing.


“There are people out there who are very negative,” said D.J. Elliott, 
30, a gym manager in Harlem. “And this is their golden opportunity.”


Leroy O’Brien, who, at 63, was among the older of the protesters, was 
less charitable about the motivations of looters and vandals. 
“Knuckleheads,” he said.


A window smashed at the Lululemon shop on Broadway in SoHo. Peaceful 
protesters are worried that late-night looting and violence has 
overtaken their message.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
Night after night, protesters have been arriving on a scale without 
modern precedent, bringing with them a breadth of backgrounds as wide as 
the city around them. Many of them have converged at the Barclays 
Center, which rises up at the intersections of several neighborhoods, 
old and new, white and black.


Many are young, whether black or white, Asian or Latino, from different 
neighborhoods and boroughs. They are familiar in their young-New-Yorker 
outrage — squint, and one sees the figurative offspring of the faces of 
the Stonewall Riots, while far outnumbering them. Many bring personal 
experience to the new wave of fury over the death of George Floyd in 
Minneapolis.


At Barclays on Sunday, a crowd of hundreds, and growing, cheered for 
angry speakers, for the supportive honks of passing cars, for one 
another. At his pizza table, Mr. English, 27, who is white, said the 
death of Mr. Floyd left him feeling helpless.


“Avoiding feeling helpless is really what brought me out three days in a 
row,” he said. He and his friends set up a table with pizza, water and 
masks to hand to protesters.


“People started donating money and going to the store for us, getting 
cases of water,” Mr. English said. “A bag of granola bars. It was 
unbelievable.” The protesters offered a whole pizza to the police. “They 
said, ‘No, thank you,’” he said, but later, they asked for water.


Because of the late-night mayhem, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo enacted an 11 
p.m. curfew in the city and said he would double the number of officers 
on the streets.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
Nearby, Ms. Sloan, 27, of Flatbush, stood and watched speakers railing 
against police violence. “It could be my father, my brother, my uncle, 
my cousin, my friend,” she said. “It makes me angry.”


She carried a core memory to the gathering: “When I was young, my 
brother locked himself out of the house,” she said. As he paced in the 
streets, “three cops pulled up on him,” she said. “I’m screaming, ‘He’s 
my brother!’ Just because you see a black man running, doesn’t mean that 
he’s a threat.”


She planned on leaving early, to return to her daughter, Lalin, 2, and 
in case the night took a turn to trouble — 

[Marxism] Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(I hate George Will just as much as the next person but he does have a 
way with words.)


Washington Post, June 1, 2020 at 3:18 p.m. EDT
Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.
By George F. Will

This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his 
spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — 
showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than 
the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a 
strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing 
insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven 
that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.


Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted 
today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the 
French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of 
American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents 
leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of 
public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as 
mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be 
punished. He must be removed.


Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one 
person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters 
hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood 
on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please 
don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was 
fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.


D.C. protesters don’t want their voices lost in the chaos
Before clashes between protesters and police, and a night of chaos 
across D.C., there was a third day of mostly peaceful protests outside 
the White House. (Joyce Koh, Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)

[Full coverage of the George Floyd protests]

What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining deviancy down” now defines 
American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an unprecedentedly 
unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered nominees with 
higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered 
would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern 
for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the 
percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct.


Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This 
year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the 
president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four 
more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, 
dampens enthusiasm.


The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had 
many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator 
of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will 
survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of 
national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his 
removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, 
unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, 
will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus 
would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the 
senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for 
petting.


In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. 
Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We 
cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic 
health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate 
Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite 
collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible 
to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if 
convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for 
. . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May 
I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the 
world’s most risible deliberative body.


A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on 
candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the 
Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then 
toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose 
unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have 
voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot 
anticipated:

[Marxism] A follow-up on Joshua Clover’s “Riots-Strikes-Riots” | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Someone asked me for my opinion on the Afterword to the 2019 edition of 
Joshua Clover’s “Riot. Strike. Riot: The New  that answers his Marxist 
critics. I am at a disadvantage since I never read his book. I still 
don’t have plans to read it—life is too short—but I will take a stab at 
it based on a reading of a Verso blog article he wrote in defense of the 
Yellow Vests, who he sees as emblematic of riots as the working-class 
struggle of our time, just as the strike was in an earlier period. In 
essence, he sees the strike as the embodiment of class struggle at the 
point of production that might be typified by the Flint sit-down strike 
of 1936-7, while the Yellow Vests express the struggle that erupts at 
the point of circulation, ie., the marketplace.


https://louisproyect.org/2020/06/01/a-follow-up-on-joshua-clovers-riots-strikes-riots/

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Re: [Marxism] Tom Sugrue on 1968 vs 2020 (from FB)

[STEVEN ROBINSON via Marxism]

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The differences Sugrue notes may not be universal.

In Oakland, plenty of Mom and Pop businesses had their windows smashed, for 
instance.

True, the big box stores of Emeryville were pillaged but there were no protests 
nearby.   Either the Oakland protesters went out of their way to grab TVs out 
of the Best Buy in Emeryville,  which seems highly unlikely or the looters in 
Emeryville were a different set of people than those protesting in Oakland.  SR.

> On June 1, 2020 at 4:58 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism < 
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu > wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> While protestors in both periods broke into stores and burned buildings.
> But most 60s looting and burning happened in African American
> neighborhoods. “Mom and pop” businesses, including black-owned stores in
> many cities, were targets, not national chains.
> 
> 60s rebels were much less likely to loot and burn central business
> districts, malls, and stores with a predominantly white clientele than
> today.
> 
> Examples: Philadelphia 1964: North Philly, Columbia Avenue and North
> Broad. Philadelphia 2020: Center City, Chestnut and Walnut Streets near
> Rittenhouse Square. Los Angeles 1965: Watts. Los Angeles 2020: Melrose,
> the Grove Mall, even Rodeo Drive.
> 
> Why the shift? We will need more research for a definitive answer, but I
> have a few hypotheses.
> 
>  https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/srobin21%40comcast.net
> 
> 
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[Marxism] 8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody [Video] - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Needs to be seen on NYT for video showing exactly how Floyd was killed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html

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[Marxism] Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Malcolm X Today - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-why-we-should-all-read-malcolm-x-today/

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[Marxism] “Do Not Resuscitate”: My Experience with Hospice, Inc. - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/01/do-not-resuscitate-my-experience-with-hospice-inc/

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[Marxism] Tom Sugrue on 1968 vs 2020 (from FB)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A lot of superficial comparisons are floating around about 60s uprisings 
and today. I think the 1968 = 2020 comparisons are mostly facile. Let’s 
look at similarities and differences.


Similarities: As in the 1960s, today’s protestors are enraged by the 
still unresolved problem of police violence.


Persistent racial inequality is still the tinder lighting the fires.

The line between peaceful and violent protests both then and now is 
blurry. Many 60s uprisings (for example Birmingham ‘63, Newark ‘67) 
began with demonstrations followed by looting, arson, and clashes with 
the police.


As in 1967-68, urban discontent is a response to the delegitimation of 
key institutions, especially government.


As in the long hot summers, many police are themselves rioters.

Key differences: The crowds on big city streets today are far more 
racially diverse today than in 60s. Yes, there were white looters during 
the long hot summers, but this weekend’s crowds are far more mixed 
racially than could be imagined fifty years ago.


While protestors in both periods broke into stores and burned buildings. 
But most 60s looting and burning happened in African American 
neighborhoods. “Mom and pop” businesses, including black-owned stores in 
many cities, were targets, not national chains.


60s rebels were much less likely to loot and burn central business 
districts, malls, and stores with a predominantly white clientele than 
today.


Examples: Philadelphia 1964: North Philly, Columbia Avenue and North 
Broad. Philadelphia 2020: Center City, Chestnut and Walnut Streets near 
Rittenhouse Square. Los Angeles 1965: Watts. Los Angeles 2020: Melrose, 
the Grove Mall, even Rodeo Drive.


Why the shift? We will need more research for a definitive answer, but I 
have a few hypotheses.


The boundaries of commercial segregation have weakened since the 1960s, 
even if housing and educational segregation have persisted, even 
hardened. We still have “shopping while black” incidents, but in the 60s 
malls and upscale shopping districts in the 60s were nearly all-white. 
No more.


Neighborhood shopping districts have died off over the last 50 years, 
especially in places with large non-white populations. In most cities, 
they are not ecomomically or symbolically important targets for protests 
anymore.


But more importantly, I suspect that today we are seeing a new, hybrid 
form of protest emerging in places like Minneapolis, NYC, Chicago, 
Philly, et al. It’s a fusion of anger against the police with opposition 
to global capitalism symbolized in multinational chain stores.


Watching footage of the burning of a Doc Martens in Philly, the attack 
on a Nordstrom in LA, the burning of a Target in Minneapolis suggests a 
new pattern: LA ’65 meets Seattle ‘99 meets Ferguson ’15.


We have seen similar combinations in other countries—think not just 
locally but globally. In the last decade, protestors in places as 
diverse as New York, Paris, London, Madrid, and Seattle have sometimes 
separately, sometimes together challenged police and multinational 
businesses.


For example, protests at McDonalds in Paris; the fires and window 
breaking of anti-gentrification activists in London; the occupation of 
Wall Street, the marches on Madrid’s banks, the anti-police profiling 
demonstrations in Place de la République.


If I am right about this fusion, we are in for protests and disruptions 
that are bigger, more intersectional, more disruptive, and more 
transformative than what we have seen in the last fifty years. More to come.


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[Marxism] 3 Young White Guys With a Machete Beat Up a Nonwhite Protester in Minneapolis - VICE

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj48qv/3-young-white-guys-with-a-machete-beat-up-a-nonwhite-protester-in-minneapolis

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[Marxism] Facebook workers rebel over Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to act against Trump | Technology | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/01/facebook-workers-rebel-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump

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[Marxism] 3 Young White Guys With a Machete Beat Up a Nonwhite Protester in Minneapolis - VICE

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The latest evidence of fascists intervening in Minneapolis protests 
under the guise of black bloc tactics.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj48qv/3-young-white-guys-with-a-machete-beat-up-a-nonwhite-protester-in-minneapolis

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[Marxism] What Comes Next: Life Beyond Pandemic | Literary Hub

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Ai-jen Poo, and More on What to Make of the 
Future


https://lithub.com/what-comes-next-life-after-pandemic/

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[Marxism] The lost history of communism below the Mason-Dixon line.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Nation, JUNE 15/22, 2020 ISSUE
A Southern Vanguard
The lost history of communism below the Mason-Dixon line.
By Robert Greene II

This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American 
Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of 
the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the 
emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.” 
W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia, 
S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither 
strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern 
Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young 
people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no 
one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like 
Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy required 
challenging and remaking the larger system of exploitative capitalism 
that had subjected black and white Southerners to centuries of 
injustice. With the Congress of Industrial Organizations executing its 
Operation Dixie to organize industrial workers in the South that year 
and with African American veterans back from the war embarking on their 
own militant and heroic struggle for human rights there, Du Bois’s 
insistence that the South had become the center of a new battle for 
freedom was in no way far from the truth.


BOOKS IN REVIEW
RED, BLACK, WHITE: THE ALABAMA COMMUNIST PARTY, 1930–1950
By Mary Stanton

Part of the reason for this was that the struggle for civil rights and 
racial equality in the South had long been linked to activity in the 
economic sphere, where millions of white and black Southerners worked as 
sharecroppers and factory employees and in various low-wage jobs. During 
the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the region the 
“nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” and there had always been an 
undercurrent of Southern-based radicalism that sought wide-ranging 
change—not only civil and political rights but also economic and social 
ones.


To add to this, beginning in the 1930s, many of the leaders and 
organizers in the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow were members 
of the Communist Party or its fellow travelers. From Harlem in New York 
City to Birmingham, Ala., black and white Communists organized across 
racial and class lines throughout the Great Depression and World War II 
to fight fascism abroad and hunger and racism at home. By the time the 
Southern Negro Youth Congress was organized, many involved in the 
burgeoning civil rights movement had been active in earlier Communist 
and Communist-affiliated groups. Others who were radicalized by the 
trial of the Scottsboro Boys and the Angelo Herndon case were exposed to 
many radical economic ideas and felt a particular loyalty to the left, 
having witnessed in both trials the Communist Party backing lawyers to 
take up the cause of black civil and legal rights in the South.


So when Du Bois spoke before a crowd of young black activists in the 
mid-1940s, he was preaching to the choir, because an ever-growing number 
of radical Southerners already agreed with him that the struggle against 
white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too. As Du Bois told 
them, the “first and greatest…allies are the white working classes about 
you,” which had also been exploited by wealthy capitalists interested in 
dividing the South’s working class.


Mary Stanton’s new book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 
1930–1950, helps recover this history through the story of one of the 
party’s most important sections: District 17, a regional unit of the 
national party that was headquartered in industrial Birmingham and 
sought to coordinate efforts to organize white and black Southerners in 
Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. During the Depression, World War II, 
and the early postwar years, the group was at the forefront of the 
struggle throughout the Deep South against police brutality, lynchings, 
and anti-free-speech laws. In terms of the number of members, it often 
punched above its weight: James S. Allen, a Communist organizer who 
wrote the memoir Organizing in the Depression South, estimated that in 
1931 the party had fewer than 500 members in Alabama, Tennessee, 
Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. By chronicling the party’s 
successful efforts to establish a foothold in Alabama during the 1930s 
and ’40s, Stanton shows us that Communist organizers adopted a variety 
of organizing tools and resources—including the International Labor 
Defense (ILD), the American section of the 

[Marxism] Tanker truck speeds into Thousands of George Floyd protesters on Minneapolis bridge.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/tanker-truck-george-floyd-protesters-minneapolis-bridge.html

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[Marxism] Modern Monetary Theory: Neither modern, nor monetary, nor (mainly) theoretical ? — Crooked Timber

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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[Marxism] Neil Davidson Archive now at Marxists Intenet Archive

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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