[Marxism] Fwd: What do we do when a neo-Nazi speaks at a Left venue? « Systemic Disorder
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[Marxism] Researching New Zealand's forgotten slaving history
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[Marxism] Fwd: Requiem for Syria « subMedia.tv
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Retreat from Race and Class by David Roediger | Monthly Review
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. * While Darder and Torres allow that “racism” is still a problem worth addressing, the recent writings of the radical political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. are done even with that. Sounding more like the “colorless” Debs than any major left commentator on race and class in recent memory, he argues, “Exposing racism [is] the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that’s usually innocuous but can flare up and become harmful.” Reed’s two late-2005 articles, “Class-ifying the Hurricane” and “The Real Divide,” are the signature pieces of the left retreat from race. They appear in relatively popular left/liberal venues, The Nation and The Progressive respectively, and represent attempts by a prominent activist in the movement to build a labor party in the United States to speak broadly and frankly. Moreover, Reed’s scholarship had offered significant opposition to liberalism’s retreat from race during the Clinton era, especially in his collection Without Justice for All. “Class-ifying the Hurricane” appeared while the horrific impact of Katrina in Reed’s former hometown of New Orleans was fresh in readers’ minds, just after many had noted the racist reporting that contrasted black “looters” with white survivors shown doing precisely the same foraging. It noted “manifest racial disparities in vulnerability, treatment, and outcome” of the experience of natural disaster. And then it turned on a dime to excoriate the “abstract, moralizing patter about how and whether race matters.” Even so, in this first of his two paired essays Reed’s retreat from race could be read as simply a strategic one. “For roughly a generation it seemed responsible to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provide some remedial response from the federal government,” he wrote. “But for some time race’s force in national politics has been as a vehicle for reassuring whites that that ‘public’ equals some combination of ‘black,’ ‘poor,’ and ‘loser.’” Katrina lay bare both race and class injustices, but in part because of the growing strength of racism, an effective response to it would have to be strictly “class-ified,” according to Reed. “The Real Divide” repeated, expanded, and made more bitter the arguments in The Nation article. Reed did continue to mention, in a labored construction, that he was “not claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized.” Indeed “any sane or honest person” would have to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of “racial disparities [that] largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial injustice.” Nonetheless, Reed followed up these generalizations by categorically declaring that “as a political strategy exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time.” The focus on racism is for Reed a dodge designed to make “upper status liberals” feel morally superior as they vote for the deeply compromised Democratic Party and ignore the “real divide” of class. In one of the few bits of the article offering ostensible, if incredibly narrow and misguided, class analysis, exposing racism is said to serve “the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians.” As in “Classi-fying the Hurricane” the arguments are partly that racism, being “too imprecise” and too abstract, lacks power as an analytical tool. However, the point Reed develops more is that among whites the very “discussion of race” reinforces “the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole.” The “racism charge,” on this view, is easily defeated by Republican appeals to “scurrilous racial stereotypes” and therefore should be jettisoned. full: http://monthlyreview.org/2006/07/01/the-retreat-from-race-and-class/ _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence | nonsite.org
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Nikil Singh responds to Adolph Reed on FB:
This is my fairly long response to Adolph Reed's latest screed. The
response is intended to be a bit all purpose, since if you've read one
of these lately, you've read them all. As someone who has read and
learned a lot from Reed's scholarly work, I was hesitant to put this out
there, since I want to resist the kind of camp thinking that these
polemics encourage. But for those who honestly struggle with what he has
had to say recently and repeatedly come up short, you may find something
of value here. (You can find the original essay at:
http://nonsite.org/…/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-mak…
Reed claims that focusing attention on racial disparity in police
violence *necessarily* draws attention away from a broader and more
accurate class reading of the sources of such violence, and thus [as
with all such focus on race and racism in his view] *necessarily* allies
with the program of neoliberal market governance, and [again] proves the
general bankruptcy of the black “professional managerial class” (pmc)
and allied (mostly academic/non-profit complex) hucksters peddling
anti-racism snake-oil as a cure for what ails us.
His primary evidence for this is that numerically more whites than
blacks are routinely killed by police (in spite of otherwise significant
racial disproportionality), and that many of the 'whitest states' have
the highest per capita rates of police homicide, and that neither of
these things can be explained by a focus on racial differentials. [BTW
this argument can be made even stronger with attention to county by
county distinctions within states and to urban rural divides.]
The substantive question about making sense of police violence in mostly
white and rural counties is important, but it is also something of a non
sequitur, for Reed's target is actually something much broader -- that
is, that the focus on race obscures and deflects. But there is little
more than presumption to his now oft-repeated axiom, (put forth without
much evidence, but with plenty of ad hominem venom), that attention to
admittedly disproportionate anti-black violence somehow prevents or
“distattends” to other sources of police violence (and to wider, more
pertinent inequalities) -- specifically that related to policing and
punishing the surplus poor, of all hues.
Once again, I am not saying that this point is always invalid. I think
it is true -- sometimes. Anyone who does political work seriously has to
face the ways that cheap identitarian grandstanding can be used to
narrow and undercut a more radical program and widening of egalitarian
affiliations. But there are many other ways to say this and to show
this, just as there are very different theoretical and political
articulations of anti-racism.
What Reed will never consider or countenance, is the possibility that
attention to racial disparity, racial inequality and racial violence
might actually be one important route to more radical and universalist
demands, something that has been shown repeatedly in the history of
black freedom struggles, as well as in labor struggles, and that would
seem to represent the kind of political orientation that he ostensibly
supports.
When this exact kind of thing occurs (in the very moment in which he
writes), as, for example, when black activists lead opposition to
instances of police murder of non-black people in Los Angeles and
elsewhere, or the laudable, detailed, if also messy and demanding
'vision for black lives' platform, Reed ignores it, or is dismissive,
describing the vision for black lives platform, for example, in
unspecific and (ultimately contradictory terms) as "fine" when narrowly
reformist, but otherwise non-strategic, unachievable, “politically
wrong-headed” and “empty sloganeering.”
The alternative that Reed himself proposes is a windy, yet deflating
turn to full-blown abstraction -- non-strategic and unachievable on its
face -- and I dare say, something on the order of an empty rhetorical
postulate: {"Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing
institutional and industrial structure [of the carceral state], he
writes, "will require a deep political strategy, one that must
eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the
regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the
state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating
regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing.”}
No duh. Of course, no sign of any such "deep political strategy" is on
offer here, or anywhere I've seen, even
[Marxism] Fwd: How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence | nonsite.org
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. * Adolph Reed is a knucklehead: "And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments." This rancid article states very logically that his analysis and Walter Benn Michaels dovetails. It is a throwback to the CP of the 1960s when the Daily Worker denounced Malcolm X for dividing the working class. Is there much difference between Gus Hall and these guys? I can't see any. http://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence _ 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] Fwd: Thieves Helped Crack the Chelsea Bombing Case, Sources Say - Chelsea - DNAinfo New York
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: What Next in Syria?
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. * Following leads from Louis and others, I have recently found very ample evidence and explanation for why the Free Syrian Army and the country-wide upsurge (rising to the level of insurrection in some places) the FSA came out of essentially disappeared from the pages of almost every publication. There is a materialist reason for all this that emerges from the more-closely-observed accounts of people who were in Syria or in close touch with people in Syria, and it is available to anyone who digs in a little. www.qunfuz.com has excellent links. It cannot be said too often: please take a look at "Burning Country" I wish the book were available on Counterpunch. If subscribers would read it, it might do a lot of good, but you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_2_15?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks=burning+country=burning+country%2Caps%2C371 _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Vote as if It Matters - The New York Times
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. * Last night on CBS' 60 Minutes, they did a 15 minute puff piece on the Libertarians and mentioned the Greens once in passing. Not surprising. On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 10:44 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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 this article Krugman makes an amalgam between Johnson and Stein: > > "It’s really hard to believe that young voters who supported Bernie > Sanders in the Democratic primary think any of this is a good idea. But Mr. > Johnson and Ms. Stein have received essentially no media scrutiny, so that > voters have no idea what they stand for." > > But the entire column is taken up with the admittedly shitty positions of > the Libertarian Party. If Krugman had even given token recognition of > Stein's positions, more people would decide to vote for her. > > http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/opinion/vote-as-if-it-matters.html > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/dmozart1756%40gmail.com _ 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] Fwd: Vote as if It Matters - The New York Times
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 this article Krugman makes an amalgam between Johnson and Stein: "It’s really hard to believe that young voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary think any of this is a good idea. But Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein have received essentially no media scrutiny, so that voters have no idea what they stand for." But the entire column is taken up with the admittedly shitty positions of the Libertarian Party. If Krugman had even given token recognition of Stein's positions, more people would decide to vote for her. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/opinion/vote-as-if-it-matters.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
Re: [Marxism] US coalition finally strikes Assad forces -- by mistake of course!
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. * -Original Message- From: Jeff via Marxism Subject: [Marxism] US coalition finally strikes Assad forces -- by mistake of course! Syria Solidarity Campaign on this US Friendly Fire incident: September 18 at 2:24pm · https://www.facebook.com/SyriaSolidarityCampaign/posts/343217749354749 On the 19th of July 2016, between 100-200 civilians were estimated to have been "accidentally" massacred by the US airforce in Manbij, North Syria [1]. Then there was no apology, no explanation, no compensation. Just *silence* Since 2014, up to 200 anti-Assad, anti-ISIS rebels have been estimated to have been killed in airstrikes by the US airforce [2]. Then there were no apologies, no explanations, no compensations. Just *silence* And now, for the first time in 5 years, the US airforce have accidentally struck the forces of the Assad regime in Deir al-Zor whilst it was trying to help them (as has been taking place since 2014 [3]). Yet this time the US issues an apology and offers compensation. Media reports do not focus on the horrific revelation that the US was trying to help the forces of a genocidal regime - which is on record having killed approximately 100 times more people than ISIS - but instead promotes sympathetic narratives to the regime's "victims". Indeed, an American airstrike against rebels in Aleppo on the same day does not make media mention [4]. Syrians on Facebook see 46,000 people talking about this airstrike "trending", whilst the dozens of daily airstrikes by the Assad regime, Russia and the US that have displaced them in the name of "fighting terror" rarely "trend" on Facebook. The only Syrians the United States cares about are the soldiers of the genocidal, fascist Assad regime. Unfortunately, much of Western media, spanning both mainstream and alternative platforms, seems to think so as well. #AssadLivesMatter [1] https://www.theguardian.com/…/us-airstrike-allegedly-kills-… [2] http://www.aljazeera.com/…/hundreds-killed-russian-air-stri… For a full list of US targeting of rebels, see: https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/…/who-has-the-us-bombed-fo…/ [3] Full list on US support for the Assad regime in Deir al-Zor, see: https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/…/who-has-the-us-bombed-fo…/ [4] https://www.facebook.com/SyriaSolidarityCampaign/posts/343013486041842 _ 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] US coalition finally strikes Assad forces -- by mistake of course!
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://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/world/middleeast/us-airstrike-syrian-troops-isis-russia.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] Fwd: What Next in Syria?
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. * Check this out from Patrick Cockburn: The very existence of a “moderate” armed opposition of any strength inside Syria has always been a matter of wishful thinking by Western leaders. Some intelligence agencies were aware of this from an early stage, but they were either ignored or governments did not really care who they were backing in trying to displace President Bashar al-Assad. As early as August 2012, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, had written a report which firmly stated: “The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Iraq.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/19/what-next-in-syria/ I thought the sentence in quotes had a familiar ring. It was in a memorandum submitted to the Pentagon but never adopted as policy that appeared on the rightwing Judicial Watch on 2012 and that has made the rounds on the Baathist amen corner ten thousand times. Cockburn, the world's greatest journalist next to Seymour Hersh and Judith Miller, includes this sentence to establish that the resistance to Assad is made up of suicide bombers. But what does the sentence say? It says, "Driving the insurgency in Iraq". If I recall correctly, Iraq and Syria are different countries. Cockburn asserts that there is no "moderate" opposition in Syria, a position he has held for the past 5 years. This, of course, is a position that he puts forward without any documentation. To start with, the term "moderate" is a loaded word. Almost all of the militias have a degree of Islamic motivation. I imagine that this is inevitable given the social composition of those who took up arms, namely the rural poor. Apparently, Cockburn is offended by the profession of faith except when it comes to the Shia sectarianism of Hizbollah and the Iranian foreign legion that is waging its own holy war in Syria. Some day the historians will look back at people like Cockburn and judge them harshly. The sooner the better. _ 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
