Re: [Marxism] Following the money is not a useful guide for understanding mass movements | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/3/20 6:20 PM, Ernest Leif wrote:
Jacobin right now has a live session on diversity with Benn Michaels. No 
Black person in the session.


I can say this. I work as an editor - mostly as an assistant - in 
Hollywood. The only way I got in was by organizing a union at a shlock 
reality outfit called NYT Television (BTW Michael Yates book on unions 
was invaluable to me). My first meeting in LA as a board member the 
guild president told the others there - all white - that I had to fight 
my way in, while most present were all born into it.


These are well paying jobs, with a defined pension, healthcare and 
protection.


Hardly any Blacks work in post-production, except those that we fight to 
bring in.


Hollywood has been having these convos for 50 years.



A critique of Walter Benn Michaels:

https://louisproyect.org/2009/09/04/a-critique-of-walter-benn-michaels/



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Re: [Marxism] Following the money is not a useful guide for understanding mass movements | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Ernest Leif via Marxism]

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Jacobin right now has a live session on diversity with Benn Michaels. No
Black person in the session.

I can say this. I work as an editor - mostly as an assistant - in
Hollywood. The only way I got in was by organizing a union at a shlock
reality outfit called NYT Television (BTW Michael Yates book on unions was
invaluable to me). My first meeting in LA as a board member the guild
president told the others there - all white - that I had to fight my way
in, while most present were all born into it.

These are well paying jobs, with a defined pension, healthcare and
protection.

Hardly any Blacks work in post-production, except those that we fight to
bring in.

Hollywood has been having these convos for 50 years.

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 10:34 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Over the past fifty-three years as a socialist, I have seen repeated
> calls for purifying the left of capitalist influences, both governmental
> and corporate. The latest flare-up was a Jacobin article titled “Don’t
> Let Blackwashing Save the Investor Class” by Cedric Johnson, a black
> African American studies professor. Just as Deep Throat advised Bob
> Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” Johnson followed the money:
>
> While antiracist protesters were tough on long-dead oppressors,
> these
> same protests have delivered a public relations windfall for the living
> investor class. Within weeks, corporations pledged upward of $2 billion
> dollars to various antiracist initiatives and organizations. The
> leadership of Warner, Sony Music, and Walmart each committed $100
> million. Google pledged $175 million, mainly to incubate black
> entrepreneurship. YouTube announced a $100 million initiative to amplify
> black media voices. Apple also pledged $100 million for the creation of
> its racial equity and justice initiative.
>
>
> full:
>
> https://louisproyect.org/2020/07/03/following-the-money-is-not-a-useful-guide-for-understanding-mass-movements/
>
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Re: [Marxism] On that Birth of a Nation thread: Eugene V. Debs denounces it in no uncertain terms...

[wytheholt--- via Marxism]

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Debs still looks at Negroes as though they were completely uneducated and 
devoid of culture, though he does credit black people with humanity and the 
ability to achieve equality with whites. Wythe

> On July 3, 2020 at 10:36 AM Jeffrey Masko via Marxism 
> mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu > wrote:
> 
> 
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> 
> Plenty of folks nailed it, like Oscar Micheaux, yet when people bring up
> DWG, they rarely look at how it brought black filmmakers into a greater
> light as they sought representation on th screen.
> 
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2020, 3:34 PM DW via Marxism  mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu >
> wrote:
> 
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> > 
> > > >
> 
> > > 
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1916/160108-debs-birthofanation.pdf
> > 
> > > 
> > > For a person in 1916, Debs nails it.
> > 
> > > 
> > > To be published in Volume 4 of our 6 Volume collection of Deb's 
> writings.
> > Volume 2 is now out.
> > 
> > > 
> > > David Walters
> > _
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[Marxism] The End of Private Equity Is Coming - BIG by Matt Stoller

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-end-of-private-equity-is-coming

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[Marxism] Iraqi Journalist Who Threw Shoe at George W Bush is Now Part of 'Black Lives Matter' Protest

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/iraqi-journalist-who-threw-shoe-at-george-w-bush-is-now-protesting-for-black-lives-matter-2654533.html

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[Marxism] Review of *People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan*, by Steven Attewell | Eric Rauchway | Labor: Studies in Working-Class History

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan
Steven Attewell
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 viii + 323 pp., $75.00 
(cloth)

Review by Eric Rauchway

The historiography of the New Deal is a mess, according to Steven Attewell. 
Right-wing “New Deal denialist histories” argue that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 
domestic policy program slowed or prevented an economic recovery that, without 
intervention, would have sped to its conclusion more swiftly. Rather than 
explain why such interpretations are nonsense, “academic historians have been 
loath to engage with these narratives,” Attewell notes, because we have not 
wanted to give attention to slanted and obviously dishonest views of the past 
(17). But rather than cause New Deal denialism to wither without the sunlight 
of scholarly critique, our inattention has permitted it to flourish like 
unchecked kudzu. Worse: historians have actively if inadvertently abetted the 
growth of denialist interpretation. As Attewell explains, “historians have 
relied on a set of inaccurate statis- tics on unemployment rates in the 1930s 
that suggest the New Deal was less successful in fighting mass unemployment 
than it was” (91). Specifically, historians tend to recycle an old, 
once-standard unemployment series constructed by the economist Stanley Leb- 
ergott, which counted Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers as 
unemployed. This practice, Lebergott said, was proper because to count WPA 
workers as workers would be to imitate “the German practice during the 1930’s 
when persons in the labor force camps were classed as employed, and Soviet 
practice which includes employment in labor camps” (93). In Lebergott’s view, 
because the WPA was equivalent to the Nazi arbeitslager or to the gulag and the 
United States was more honest than Nazis or Soviets, the unfortunates on the 
WPA rolls should be defined, properly, as jobless. Lebergott’s series therefore 
not only made the New Deal look far more ineffective than it was in alleviating 
conditions of the Depression, it did so by diminishing the real human effect of 
Roosevelt’s jobs-creation programs. Merely to observe the powerful ideology 
underlying the Lebergott data ought to be enough to discredit them as a neutral 
representation of unemployment; but Attewell does more, noting that the 
Lebergott interpretation of joblessness wipes out the real human import of the 
WPA and other direct job–creation programs. WPA workers understood themselves 
as having dignified work at last. “We’re not on relief any more,” Attewell 
quotes the wife of a WPA employee as saying; “my husband works for the 
government” (27).

Not all academic historians will be unfamiliar with this argument, and 
Attewell’s ability to make it depends on work by Michael Darby, David Weir, and 
the essay “New Deal Denialism,” by the author of this review—among many other 
works. But he is correct that it has yet to become the default analysis of the 
New Deal, and his effort to yoke this analysis to empirical work demonstrating 
that direct job creation—as distinct from public works—was always at the center 
of New Deal policy is welcome. Attewell shows that the short-lived Civil Works 
Administration of 1933–34 proved to its proponents (Harry Hopkins chief among 
them) that the federal government could, if it chose, put happily and usefully 
into work the millions of Americans then languishing on relief. Attewell then 
revives the internal administration debate between, on one hand, Hopkins and 
the other proponents of job creation and, on the other, those officials like 
Harold Ickes, who argued for a long-range program of massive public works to 
serve as counter-cyclical balance to business downturns and who regarded rapid 
job creation as irresponsible and wasteful. The debate, Attewell says, was 
largely one over ideological emphasis, between people (Hopkins) and projects 
(Ickes). Hopkins wanted to supply jobs, everywhere, immediately; Ickes wanted 
to plan economic development, like that of the Tennessee Valley Authority, on a 
national scale. In the short term, Hopkins won. The Emergency Relief 
Appropriations act of 1935 complemented the Social Security Act of the same 
year, creating a state that would provide work for those who needed it and 
insurance for those in work.

And as Attewell argues, if one is bold enough to expose the dishonesty of New 
Deal denialists and the harmful neglect of historians who sustain them, one can 
show that indeed, Hopkins and the WPA were correct.

But if the jobs-creators won the immediate political battle, they lost the 
longer 

[Marxism] Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History

[Fred Murphy via Marxism]

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Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History - The New
York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
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[Marxism] My Italian Great-Grandmother Spelled Her Name “De Pasquale” & I Want Nothing to Do With Christopher Columbus

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://rimediacoop.org/2020/07/03/depasquale-stewart-columbus/

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Let’s Finish the American Revolution

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Ed, July 3, 2020
Let’s Finish the American Revolution
Our nation’s founding was a mess of contradictions. We must push America 
closer to its ideals.

By Timothy Egan

As baffling as it is to find statues of traitors, slaveholders and 
killers of Union soldiers ensconced in many a prominent square, consider 
the historical discordance of Custer County, S.D.


The hard beauty of the Black Hills, sacred land to Native Americans, 
overshadows the county, the main town and the state park, all named for 
George Armstrong Custer. The hard history was shaped by the slayer of 
those native people. Custer’s willful trespass into territory promised 
by treaty to the Sioux set the stage for the last violent encounters 
between New World and Old.


Just under 20 miles from Custer is Mount Rushmore, which President Trump 
plans to visit this Fourth of July weekend. A mere seven miles from 
Custer is the Native American Rushmore — a still unfinished carving of 
the Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse, 641 feet long and 563 feet high.


Here is the American paradox in a grid of stark geology.

No country can last long without a shared narrative. You wonder, on an 
Independence Day when the mood of the country is more angry and fearful 
than it’s been in a long time, if this nation can ever have such a thing 
again.


I think we can. But to make that happen, it will take an imaginative 
projection of the best instincts of those four imperfect men whose 
visages are chiseled into stone, as well as the Sioux warrior honored 
just down the road.


Before we get to them, let’s talk about him. Trump wants a fireworks 
display in the pine forest around Rushmore in the middle of fire season. 
There will be no required social distancing for the crowd. And the 
world’s most powerful narcissist will be projecting his dream to have 
his face carved next to those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, 
Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.


There you have it — everything that is so awful about him in one 
appearance, putting the lives of American citizens and a national 
landmark at risk to protect his eggshell ego.


But what about them? Rushmore was created by Gutzon Borglum, a confidant 
of leaders of the revitalized 20th-century Ku Klux Klan. Before Borglum 
took his jackhammers to the Black Hills, he had started work on the 
largest shrine to white supremacy in the world — the bas-relief 
sculpture of Confederate leaders in Stone Mountain, Ga.


Still, few people think of Borglum when they gaze up at the four 
presidents. Instead, the visitor is prompted to think of what those men 
did for a fragile democracy.


Most revolutions don’t end well. From the kindling of the Enlightenment, 
France was consumed by a wildfire of fratricide and state-sanctioned 
beheadings in the late 18th century. Russia’s 1917 revolt eventually led 
to an epic of mass murder rivaled by Hitler’s Holocaust. And the Irish 
finally threw off centuries of British rule only to plunge into a bloody 
civil war in the 1920s over the terms of that independence.


The American Revolution, birthed in part by the looting of British 
merchant ships in Boston Harbor, was the exception, until our own Civil 
War over the Original Sin that had been ignored in the founding 
documents. The protests of 2020 are a legacy of rage dating to 1619.


Each of the Rushmore presidents furthered the ennobling sentiments of 
men who tried to fashion a democracy from a revolution. Some may never 
forgive Washington for his slave ownership. But among the nine 
presidents who owned slaves, only Washington freed them all in his final 
will.


He also kept the United States from becoming a monarchy when the 
Trumpians of the day wanted to make him king.


Jefferson was a slaveholding racist who wrote “all men are created 
equal” in the Declaration of Independence. The words outlive, and 
outshine, the man.


Lincoln needs no defense, except to say that those who want to destroy 
his statues now should read Frederick Douglass’s nuanced take. Lincoln 
fought the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, the Trumpians of his day, and 
ensured that the radical truths of Jefferson would apply to four million 
formerly enslaved people.


Teddy Roosevelt was no friend of the continent’s original inhabitants. 
But he evolved. His Rough Riders were multiracial warriors. And as the 
20th century’s most influential progressive president, he invited Booker 
T. Washington to dine with him, the first time any president had broken 
bread with a Black man at the White House. This, at a time when it was 
difficult for a Black man to get a meal in a restaurant.


Each of them pushed the 

[Marxism] Scientists move to strip offensive names from journals, prizes, and more

[John A Imani via Marxism]

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(JAI:  Will repeat again that when a movement wins battles that it has not
even joined then that movement has momentum.  But if that movement consists
only of movement (protests, occupation, symbolic vandalism) without coming
together to discuss, agree upon and disseminate to the larger community its
ideas, its desires, in a word, its demands, then that movement will
deteriorate.

(Witness the 2011 "Occupy Wall Street" and its similars across the
country.  With all of the forces that these present efforts, spearheaded by
the BLM movement, where is the movement into the neighborhoods and the
recruitment of 'civilians' to our goals and thus a multiplication of the
forces we would wield?  We must go beyond (not to mean exclude) efforts to
deconstruct the policing mechanism and onward towards calls for the radical
transformation of society, i.e. the replacement of the capitalist system
that is the fount from which all inequities spew therefrom.)

In June, graffiti supporting calls for the Univeristy of Cambridge to
remove a stained glass window memorializing statistician Ronald Fisher, a
supporter of eugenics, appeared on a campus building. The university later
removed the Fisher window.
Amid protests against racism, scientists move to strip offensive names from
journals, prizes, and more

By Eli Cahan Jul. 2, 2020 , 6:05 PM

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/amid-protests-against-racism-scientists-move-strip-offensive-names-journals-prizes-and?utm_campaign=news_daily_2020-07-02_rid=401913599_cid=3387192

McGee, a herpetologist, studies the habitat and behavior of Yarrow’s spiny
lizard, a reptile native to the southwestern United States. The University
of Arizona graduate student and her colleagues regularly pack their
things—boots, pens, notebooks, trail mix—and set off into the nearby
Chiricahua Mountains. At their field site, they start an activity with a
name that evokes a racist past: noosing.

“Noosing” is a long-standing term used by herpetologists for catching
lizards. But for McGee, a Black scientist, the term is unnerving, calling
to mind horrific lynchings of Black people by white people in the United
States in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Being the only Black person out in
the middle of nowhere with a bunch of white people talking about noosing
things is unsettling,” she says. McGee has urged her colleagues to change
the parlance to “lassoing,” which she says also more accurately describes
how herpetologists catch lizards with lengths of thread.

McGee isn’t alone in reconsidering scientific language. Researchers are
pushing to rid science of words and names they see as offensive or
glorifying people who held racist views.

This week alone, one scientific society is considering renaming a major
journal that honors a renowned 19th century researcher who held racist
views, and another is voting on changing the name of a trivia competition
that canonizes a prominent eugenicist. And a prominent university has said
it will remove from a campus building the name of a famous scientist who
supported white supremacy. The moves come in the wake of last month’s
decision to rename a major statistical prize—and in tandem with efforts to
change the names of animals and plants that include ethnic slurs or honor
researchers who were bigots.

Unifying these initiatives is reinvigorated resistance to institutional
racism. Kory Evans, a marine biologist at Rice University, says, “Dismantling
white supremacism in science has taken on a new urgency” amid the broader
reckoning ignited by the killing of George Floyd, the Black man suffocated
by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May. The buildings, journals,
prizes, and organism names that have come under scrutiny “lionize figures …
who specifically took actions to undermine the humanity of people of color
… [and] who laid the academic foundation for actual discrimination,
sterilization, and genocide,” says Brandon Ogbunu, an evolutionary
biologist at Brown University.

The current movement isn’t the first to target scientists whose actions
were judged unconscionable by subsequent generations. After the fall of
Nazi Germany, apartheid in South Africa, and various communist nations, the
names of scientists who supported oppressive policies were stripped from
institutions and awards. And even before the recent demonstrations against
systemic racism in the United States, many scientists had lobbied
universities and science groups to stop honoring prominent researchers who
had bigoted views. In 2018, for instance, years of activism prompted the
University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, to remove the name of Clarence Cook
Little, an influential 20th 

[Marxism] The role of the “Spanish flu” in foiling a German offensive at the end of WW1

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=4100
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[Marxism] Eric Hobsbawm bio

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Review of Books, JULY 23, 2020 ISSUE
Clear, Inclusive, and Lasting
by Mark Mazower

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History
by Richard J. Evans
Oxford University Press, 785 pp., $39.95

Meet Me in Buenos Aires: A Memoir
by Marlene Hobsbawm, with an introduction by Claire Tomalin
London: Muswell, 168 pp., £12.99

When Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five, he was 
probably the best-known historian in the English-speaking world. His 
books have been translated into every major language (and numerous minor 
ones), and many of them have remained continuously in print since their 
first appearance. Though his work centered on the history of labor, he 
wrote with equal fluency about the crisis of the seventeenth century and 
the bandits of Eritrea, the standard of living during the industrial 
revolution and Billie Holiday’s blues. For range and accessibility, 
there was no one to touch him. What he gave his readers was above all 
the sense of being intellectually alive, of the sheer excitement of a 
fresh idea and a bold, unsentimental argument. The works themselves are 
his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?


Historians lead for the most part pretty dull lives: if they make it big 
enough to warrant a biography of their own, it is unlikely to feature 
anything more exciting than endless conferences, gripes about 
publishers, and the eventual bestowal of honors. Readers do not 
generally care about infighting in academia. Nor is it easy to be 
gripped by the more important but largely abstract questions of 
intellectual argument and debate that articulate positions and create 
schools of thought. In Hobsbawm’s case, however, the scale and nature of 
his achievement raise questions of their own. How do we explain his vast 
readership? How did a Marxist historian achieve such success during 
socialism’s decline in the second half of the twentieth century? Richard 
J. Evans’s detailed, absorbing, and fair-minded biography does not 
really address these questions, but it gives us the means to do so.


The ingredients were there from the outset to make a historian of great 
breadth and general appeal. Hobsbawm’s secular Jewish parents belonged 
to the emancipated generation that embraced the possibilities Europe 
offered Jews for the first time in their history. Born in Whitechapel, 
London, in 1881, Hobsbawm’s father, Percy, was an amateur boxer and 
athlete with no discernible interest in matters of the faith apart from 
choosing to marry a Jewish woman, Nelly Grün, who came from Vienna and a 
more well-to-do and cultivated background than Percy.


Eric was born in British-occupied Alexandria in 1917, when Percy was 
working for the Egyptian Postal and Telegraphic Service. Shortly 
afterward the family moved to Vienna and Eric’s early years were spent 
first there and then in Berlin, both cities traumatized by the effects 
of World War I and the collapse of empire. That he had lived through the 
rise of Nazism marked Hobsbawm out from most Englishmen of his 
generation and made him seem like another one of those European Jewish 
refugees who did so much to shape the postwar British academy. Yet as a 
subject of King George V, he was known to his Berlin schoolmates at the 
Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium as “the English boy.” While he grew up 
bilingual, fluent in English and German, his father’s family had been in 
England for several generations, and by the time his undergraduate days 
were over he had probably read more of the classics of English letters 
than most people manage in a lifetime.


In the large Victorian house on Nassington Road in London, where he and 
his wife, Marlene, brought up their family, the bookshelves were 
revealing. The study upstairs was filled with the kind of things one 
might have expected—specialized monographs, the complete Marx-Engels, 
the works of Lenin. But downstairs in the living room were the novels, 
essays, poems, and plays that he had enjoyed for decades. I taught at 
Birkbeck College, University of London—where Hobsbawm had taught since 
the 1940s—after his retirement; he retained an office in the department 
and was an active presence in its intellectual life. After his death I 
visited Marlene, and while we had tea and talked, I picked up a 
dog-eared Everyman edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s masterpiece Religio 
Medici. Inside the front flap was the owner’s scrawled inscription: 
“Hobsbawm, June 1944. Salisbury.”


The richly sociable life he enjoyed in north London in his final 
decades, and which Marlene Hobsbawm describes in her affectionate new 
memoir, represented a sharp contrast to the emotional difficulties of 
his 

Re: [Marxism] On that Birth of a Nation thread: Eugene V. Debs denounces it in no uncertain terms...

[Jeffrey Masko via Marxism]

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Plenty of folks nailed it, like Oscar Micheaux, yet when people bring up
DWG, they rarely look at how it brought black filmmakers into a greater
light as they sought representation on th screen.

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020, 3:34 PM DW via Marxism 
wrote:

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>
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1916/160108-debs-birthofanation.pdf
>
> For a person in 1916, Debs nails it.
>
> To be published in Volume 4 of our 6 Volume collection of Deb's writings.
> Volume 2 is now out.
>
> David Walters
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[Marxism] Racism on the Road

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Reviw of Books, JULY 23, 2020 ISSUE
Racism on the Road
by Sarah A. Seo

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
by Gretchen Sorin
Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
by Candacy Taylor
Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00

In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, 
Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He 
was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 
which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim 
Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. 
Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well. 
Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the 
1960s the Supreme Court waged a “Due Process Revolution” that 
established more criminal defense rights, such as the guarantee of 
state-funded counsel for indigent suspects and defendants. The decade 
seemed poised to bring about a more equal and just America.


Today, two generations later, American society is confronting a carceral 
state that Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow.” Abundant 
statistics show what is now an undeniable fact: people of color, 
especially black people, are overrepresented and treated unequally in 
the criminal justice system. According to the most recent Bureau of 
Justice Statistics report, blacks make up 33 percent of the prison 
population, nearly triple their 12 percent share of the US adult 
population. Many more individuals, charged with low-level offenses, may 
not be incarcerated but end up in what legal scholar Issa 
Kohler-Hausmann calls “misdemeanorland,” where they are subject to 
prolonged oversight that requires them to demonstrate good behavior 
before a judge will dismiss the charges against them. Unsurprisingly, 
this legal purgatory is racially skewed as well.


These disparities in large part reflect unequal law enforcement. In New 
York City, for example, blacks are stopped more frequently than whites, 
even after one accounts for neighborhood crime rates. In 2013 54 percent 
of all police stops were of blacks while 12 percent were of whites (29 
percent were of Hispanics). This finding, based on the police 
department’s own records, prompted a federal judge to hold the city 
liable for its unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy in the 2013 case 
Floyd v. City of New York.


In the rest of the country, where driving rather than walking is the 
norm, most people’s interactions with the police occur in their cars, 
and blacks experience starkly different traffic stops from whites. The 
Stanford Open Policing Project has examined data from twenty-one state 
patrol agencies and twenty-nine municipal police departments, which 
showed that officers stopped black drivers at higher rates than white 
drivers. Black people are not only searched more frequently than whites 
once they have been pulled over; they are often searched with little or 
no cause for suspicion. Even if a cop finds nothing incriminating, a 
“routine” traffic stop can still serve as an entry point to the justice 
system: a ticket results in fines, fees, and court costs, which, if the 
driver cannot afford to pay, will then lead to license suspensions, 
arrest warrants, contempt procedures, and, ultimately, jail. The 
sequence from traffic ticket to incarceration or even death has ensnared 
so many that the movement to defund the police after George Floyd’s 
death has prompted demands to remove traffic-law enforcement from police 
work in many cities, including Berkeley, Chicago, and Durham.


Contemporary movements against mass incarceration have recast histories 
of the civil rights movement, urging scholars to make sense of what 
happened to the promise of the Sixties. In Driving While Black: African 
American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, Gretchen Sorin examines 
the struggle to abolish segregation on the highways and byways in Jim 
Crow America. Unlike some of the more familiar narratives—the march from 
Selma to Montgomery that culminated in the Voting Rights Act, or Loving 
v. Virginia, which invalidated anti-miscegenation laws—the story Sorin 
tells does not conclude with a victory but with today’s crisis of mass 
incarceration. The open road is where many black Americans have been 
unjustly stopped, searched, and arrested—or worse. Still, Sorin 
maintains that black drivers and the black businesses that catered to 
them were crucial to the fight for equality by resisting restrictions on 
their mobility: the automobile paved the “road to civil rights,” 

[Marxism] Following the money is not a useful guide for understanding mass movements | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Over the past fifty-three years as a socialist, I have seen repeated 
calls for purifying the left of capitalist influences, both governmental 
and corporate. The latest flare-up was a Jacobin article titled “Don’t 
Let Blackwashing Save the Investor Class” by Cedric Johnson, a black 
African American studies professor. Just as Deep Throat advised Bob 
Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” Johnson followed the money:


	While antiracist protesters were tough on long-dead oppressors, these 
same protests have delivered a public relations windfall for the living 
investor class. Within weeks, corporations pledged upward of $2 billion 
dollars to various antiracist initiatives and organizations. The 
leadership of Warner, Sony Music, and Walmart each committed $100 
million. Google pledged $175 million, mainly to incubate black 
entrepreneurship. YouTube announced a $100 million initiative to amplify 
black media voices. Apple also pledged $100 million for the creation of 
its racial equity and justice initiative.



full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2020/07/03/following-the-money-is-not-a-useful-guide-for-understanding-mass-movements/


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[Marxism] When France Extorted Haiti - The Greatest Heist in History

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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clip -

I’m a specialist on colonialism and slavery
, and what France did
to the Haitian people after the Haitian Revolution is a particularly
notorious examples of colonial theft. France instituted slavery on the
island in the 17th century, but, in the late 18th century, the enslaved
population rebelled and eventually declared independence. Yet, somehow, in
the 19th century, the thinking went that the former enslavers of the
Haitian people needed to be compensated, rather than the other way around.

Just as the legacy of slavery in the United States has created a gross economic
disparity between Black and white Americans
,
the tax on its freedom that France forced Haiti to pay – referred to as an
“indemnity” at the time – severely damaged the newly independent country’s
ability to prosper.

Moreover, researchers have found

that
the independence debt and the resulting drain on the Haitian treasury were
directly responsible not only for the underfunding of education in
20th-century Haiti, but also lack of health care and the country’s
inability to develop public infrastructure.

https://theconversation.com/when-france-extorted-haiti-the-greatest-heist-in-history-137949
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[Marxism] The White United States’ Real Founding Father: Lord Dunmore | Opinion | teleSUR English

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/The-White-United-States-Real-Founding-Father-Lord-Dunmore-20140731-0040.html

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[Marxism] A Problem for College in the Fall: Reluctant Professors

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, July 3, 2020
A Problem for College in the Fall: Reluctant Professors
By Anemona Hartocollis

College students across the country have been warned that campus life 
will look drastically different in the fall, with temperature checks at 
academic buildings, masks in half-empty lecture halls and maybe no 
football games.


What they might not expect: a lack of professors in the classroom.

Thousands of instructors at American colleges and universities have told 
administrators in recent days that they are unwilling to resume 
in-person classes because of the pandemic.


More than three-quarters of colleges and universities have decided 
students can return to campus this fall. But they face a growing faculty 
revolt.


“Until there’s a vaccine, I’m not setting foot on campus,” said Dana 
Ward, 70, an emeritus professor of political studies at Pitzer College 
in Claremont, Calif., who teaches a class in anarchist history and 
thought. “Going into the classroom is like playing Russian roulette.”


This comes as major outbreaks have hit college towns this summer, spread 
by partying students and practicing athletes.


In an indication of how fluid the situation is, the University of 
Southern California said late Wednesday that “an alarming spike in 
coronavirus cases” had prompted it to reverse an earlier decision to 
encourage attending classes in person.


With more than a month before schools start reopening, it is hard to 
predict how many professors will refuse to teach face to face in the 
fall. But schools and professors are planning ahead.


A Cornell University survey of its faculty found that about one-third 
were “not interested in teaching classes in person,” one-third were 
“open to doing it if conditions were deemed to be safe,” and about 
one-third were “willing and anxious to teach in person,” said Michael 
Kotlikoff, Cornell’s provost.


Faculty members at institutions including Penn State, the University of 
Illinois, Notre Dame and the State University of New York have signed 
petitions complaining that they are not being consulted and are being 
pushed back into classrooms too fast.


The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus is known for its 
lively social scene, says a faculty petition. To expect more than 50,000 
students to behave according to public health guidelines, it goes on, 
“would be to ignore reality.”


At Penn State, an open letter signed by more than 1,000 faculty members 
demands that the university “affirm the autonomy of instructors in 
deciding whether to teach classes, attend meetings and hold office hours 
remotely, in person or in some hybrid mode.” The letter also asks for 
faculty members to be able to change their mode of teaching at any time, 
and not to be obligated to disclose personal health information as a 
condition of teaching online.


“I shudder at the prospect of teaching in a room filled with 
asymptomatic superspreaders,” wrote Paul M. Kellermann, 62, an English 
professor at Penn State, in an essay for Esquire magazine, proclaiming 
that “1,000 of my colleagues agree.” Those colleagues have demanded that 
the university give them a choice of doing their jobs online or in person.


University officials say they are taking all the right precautions, and 
that the bottom line is that face-to-face classes are what students and 
their families — and even most faculty members — want. Rachel Pell, a 
spokeswoman for Penn State, said the petition signers there represented 
only about 12 percent of the 9,000-member full- and part-time faculty. 
“Our expectation is that faculty who are able to teach will return to 
the classroom as part of a flexible approach,” she said.


Driving some of the concern is the fact that tenure-track professors 
skew significantly older than the wider U.S. labor force — 37 percent 
are 55 or older, compared with 23 percent of workers in general — and 
they are more than twice as likely as other workers to stay on the job 
past 65, when they would be at increased risk of adverse health effects 
from the virus.


Many younger professors have concerns as well, including about 
underlying health conditions, taking care of children who might not be 
in school full-time this fall, and not wanting to become a danger to 
their older relatives. Some are angry that their schools are making a 
return to classrooms the default option. And those who are not tenured 
said they felt especially vulnerable if they asked for accommodations.


Many professors are calling for a sweeping no-questions-asked policy for 
those who want to teach remotely, saying that anything less is a 
violation of their privacy and 

[Marxism] Athletes push for and achieve social justice goals

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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College athletes are leading boycotts and prompting conversations about 
racial injustice. They're also embracing their power to initiate change 
at their institutions and beyond


https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/02/athletes-push-and-achieve-social-justice-goals

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[Marxism] Seattle’s CHOP Went Out With Both a Bang and a Whimper

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Trying to create something like Rojova in Seattle was an anarchist delusion.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/seattle-chop-zone-police/

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[Marxism] 60% of fish species could be unable to survive in current areas by 2100 – study | Environment | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/fish-species-survival-climate-warming-study

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[Marxism] You Can’t Trust the Businessmen on the Board of Trustees

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Chronicle of Higher Education
You Can’t Trust the Businessmen on the Board of Trustees
A century ago, Thorstein Veblen explained why

By Nick Romeo and Ian Tewksbury June 30, 2020  PREMIUM

Just over a century ago, the same year that the Spanish flu struck 
millions around the world, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen 
diagnosed a malady of a different sort: the control of universities by 
businessmen. “Plato’s classic scheme of folly,” he wrote, “which would 
have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been 
turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of 
the pursuit of knowledge. To anyone who will take a dispassionate look 
at this modern arrangement it looks foolish, of course — ingeniously 
foolish.”


It has become a truism to say the coronavirus pandemic will change 
everything about higher education. But few discuss who should shape this 
change. The faculty? The student body? The public? Or the 
business-executive trustees that Veblen believed were destroying the 
essential nature of academe?


Veblen was the first sociologist of academe to notice the enormous and 
pernicious power wielded by university trustees from the business world. 
Many criticize the inflated salaries and power of university 
administrators and presidents, but for the first time in recent history 
there is a growing recognition that universities should not be run by 
the corporate executives who sit on their boards of trustees. Many 
academics are perpetually shocked by the depredations of corporate 
boards — the defunding of university presses, the adjunctification of 
the faculty, and the evisceration of the liberal arts — but Veblen would 
not have been surprised. The thesis he defended in 1918 is still true 
today: Scientific and scholarly inquiry are incompatible with the 
business values of profit maximization, efficiency, and consumer 
satisfaction.


Today, Veblen is best remembered for his Theory of the Leisure Class 
(1899), in which he coined the term "conspicuous consumption." But we 
ought also to remember him for The Higher Learning in America: A 
Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, his prescient 
study of American higher education, first published in 1918. He observed 
the destructive effects of many phenomena that could easily come from 
contemporary headlines: extravagant salaries for athletic coaches and 
presidents, efforts by administrators to privilege campus amenities and 
nonacademic diversions, increasing reliance on underpaid part-time 
instructors, the elimination of core requirements under the mantra of 
student choice, overreliance on dubious statistical measures of teaching 
and learning efficiency, a vast proliferation of bureaucratic 
administrators, and the substitution of careerism for the pursuit of 
knowledge.


When Veblen published The Higher Learning, wealthy industrial barons 
were funneling their fortunes into a new system of higher education, and 
the universities where Veblen worked — Cornell, the University of 
Chicago, Stanford — were all founded by the wealth of the new American 
Gilded Age. Ezra Cornell was a telegraph mogul, John D. Rockefeller an 
oil magnate, and Leland Stanford a railroad tycoon. The 20th-century 
American university was built by a new type of patron.


Veblen saw that the wealth of industrial capitalism promoted 
universities dedicated to advancing business interests. This led to an 
irresolvable contradiction between “the pursuit of learning and the work 
of preparation for the professions,” since “the training given by these 
two lines of endeavor — science and business — is wholly divergent.” 
While the pursuit of wealth seeks profit and prestige, the pursuit of 
knowledge seeks the fulfillment of curiosity.


This contradiction is what Richard F. Teichgraeber III, editor of the 
2015 edition of The Higher Education, calls the “thesis of cultural 
incompatibility.” In Veblen’s time, this contradiction manifested itself 
in the university’s adoption of new managerial forms of training and 
evaluation. Letter grades and course-credits were introduced to provide 
precise calculations of intellectual inquiry; the current dominance of 
standardized and multiple-choice testing is largely an inheritance of 
the same early 20th-century “science” of management that nearly all 
universities now accept. Veblen protested the use of letter grades and 
statistical appraisals of knowledge or learning; he would randomly 
switch As to Cs and vice versa. "My grades are like lightning," he once 
said. "They are liable to strike anywhere."


While such protests might appear quixotic, 

[Marxism] Chicago heat wave 25th anniversary: Racism common factor in 1995 deaths, COVID-19 now - Chicago Sun-Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/6/28/21302962/25th-anniversary-heat-wave-racism-covid-19-chicago-linda-murray

I reviewed a documentary about the Chicago heatwave here:

https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/23/cooked-survival-by-zip-code/

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[Marxism] Tonight (July 3): Webinar: Discussion on The Life and Legacy of Claudia Jones, with Dr. Carole Boyce-Davies, author of *To the Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudi

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://www.cpusa.org/event/a-right-to-be-radical/


Sent from my iPhone

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