[Marxism] Venezuela’s communes form the front line of a difficult revolutionary struggle
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. * Every commune is different, George Ciccariello-Maher says in *Building the Communes*, but “the coffee is always too sweet, and the process is always difficult, endlessly messy and unpredictable in its inescapable creativity”. https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/venezuela%E2%80%99s-communes-form-front-line-difficult-revolutionary-struggle _ 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: H-Net Review [H-SAE]: Lorenz on Meng and Lehrer, 'Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland'
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. * -- Forwarded message -- From: H-Net Staff Date: Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 4:40 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-SAE]: Lorenz on Meng and Lehrer, 'Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland' To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu Michael Meng, Erica Lehrer, eds. Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 2015. 312 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-01503-7; $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-01500-6. Reviewed by Jan Lorenz (Adam Mickiewicz University) Published on H-SAE (October, 2016) Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik The already substantial area of research on Jews and Jewish heritage in contemporary Poland has been dominated by discussions on memory and identity. The topic of Poland's Jewish space has drawn the attention of scholars, but now it has finally received its own dedicated collection of readings, edited by an anthropologist, Erica Lehrer, and a historian, Michael Meng. The collection combines reflections on the lived spaces of contemporary Poland and on villages, towns, and cities where Polish Jews lived before the Second World War, as well as ghettos, death camps, and Jewish cemeteries. It is impossible to exhaust the theme of Jewish spaces in Poland in a single volume, but the twelve chapters in this pioneering and long overdue collection cover significant topical ground and offer theoretical contributions, which--if not revolutionary for the anthropology of space per se--are certainly intellectually evocative in the more specific area of scholarship on memory and cultural heritage. As Lehrer and Meng argue, "spaces" have considerable heuristic potential to "turn memory into a thing one can visit," when they come to materialize and anchor "manifestations of large, often distant political, legal and economic shifts," making them tangible enough to be grasped methodologically and analytically (p. 5). This collection, to a considerable degree, builds on the particular strain of research that examines how Jewish and, to a greater extent, non-Jewish actors, individuals, and institutions are engaged in commemoration of the Polish-Jewish past, renovation of the Jewish material heritage, and (re)production of Jewish music and craft. We are invited to consider the ethical and political implications and potentialities created by these practices, for Poles, Jews, and those who identify as both, and for locals and foreign visitors. The book begins in a truly Dantean manner: guided by Geneviève Zubrzycki, the reader explores the "ideological configuration and reconfiguration" of the material remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where predominantly Jews but also Romani, ethnic Poles, and people of other nationalities were exterminated (p. 16). Zubrzycki argues that while Auschwitz is widely and increasingly recognized by Poles as a camp where predominantly Jews were killed, it still holds a central place as a national symbol of martyrdom rivaled only by Katyń--which speaks of the possibility, at least, of sharing the material symbol of collective suffering without necessarily warranting its ownership on the exclusion of the suffering of others. This raises the question of the extent to which the categories of "Poles" and "Jews" the author employs when describing these radically exclusionary positions reflect the heterogeneity of attitudes and vehement debates these issues sparked in the Poland of the time. That question aside, this is a valuable contribution to the discussion on politics and practices of commemoration at death camps. Sociologist Stanisław Kapralski's account of "symbolic exclusion" of Jews from local memories of Polish towns and villages draws our attention to concrete examples of the politics of memory of the Communist era (p. 156). For decades, either Jewish martyrdom was erased from commemoration or Jewish victims were subsumed under the generic category of "Polish victims." "Polish" here is implicitly ethnic Poles; an inclination for such erasures is something Poland's Communist regime and right-wing ethnonationalists had in common. Kapralski's strongest contribution to this volume and debates on Jewish spaces, or, to keep with his terminology, Poland's Jewish "memoryscapes," is his insistence that any conceptualizations that operate with generic categories of "Poles" or "Polish memory" (or, alternatively, of "Jewish memory") should always be approached with caution. Former sites of Jewish presence can become spaces of memory work and a number of studies in the collection invite us to consider ways in which politics of erasure have been replaced with practices of commemoration, not without its challenges and conflicts. First, Meng offe
[Marxism] Fwd: Marked for death by Trump when he was 15 | SocialistWorker.org
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[Marxism] Fwd: I Went Undercover With a Border Militia. Here's What I Saw. | Mother Jones
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. * This should be interesting. Shane Bauer went undercover in the same way he did a while ago working as a prison guard for a private prison in Louisiana, a story that appeared on NPR. Shane was one of the 3 hikers jailed as spies in Iran when they accidentally strayed into Iranian territory from Iraq. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer _ 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: Political Feminism: the Legacy of Victoria Woodhull
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. * Yeah, it's been pretty laughable lately with the op-ed in the NYT linking Marx to Trump. On 10/26/16 5:17 PM, Mark Lause wrote: Given her record in dealing with more "moderate" suffragists, the idea that Victoria Woodhull, her sister, or anyone involved in shaping the 1872 Equal Rights Party would see Hillary Clinton as a successor in any way, shape or form is simply laughable. ML _ 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: Political Feminism: the Legacy of Victoria Woodhull
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. * Given her record in dealing with more "moderate" suffragists, the idea that Victoria Woodhull, her sister, or anyone involved in shaping the 1872 Equal Rights Party would see Hillary Clinton as a successor in any way, shape or form is simply laughable. ML _ 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: The Nature of Capitalism | Jacobin
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. * The book is excellent and worth the effort if only for Chapter 13, a thorough recasting of Capital volume 1 to account for capital's adoption of fossil fuels and persistence in their use, environmental consequences be damned. On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 11:56 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. > * > > A review of a book on climate change by Andreas Malm, who co-wrote a very > good book on Iran. I doubt I will have time to read his book but there is a > 100 page or so article that I printed out about a year ago that I should > have time for. > > https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/climate-crisis-fossil-fue > l-renewables-marx-malm/ > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/fred.r.murphy%40gmail.com > -- Fred Murphy | 12 Dongan Place #206 | New York, NY | 212-304-9106 _ 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: Millennials and “unnatural” deaths under Stalin | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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[Marxism] Fwd: Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists” | Simon Pirani's archive
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. * Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists” An open letter to the Stop the War coalition Dear friends, This is to ask you to think about your organisation’s alliance with Boris Kagarlitsky, the Russian political commentator who supports war in Ukraine. In a statement of 19 October, the Stop the War Coalition (STW) described Kagarlitsky as an “anti-war activist” and a “leader and organiser” of anti-government protests. The statement, responding to an inaccurate article in the Sunday Times, acknowledged that organisations Kagarlitsky works for are funded by the Kremlin, and claimed that this amounted to only “one grant for research”. The statement is wrong. It is full of untruths, half-truths and obfuscations. In reality, (1) Kagarlitsky is not an “anti-war activist”, but a supporter of war in eastern Ukraine. (2) Kagarlitsky has been involved in anti-government protests, but since 2014 has become a collaborator with leading ultra-nationalists and fascists, and is reviled by Russian and Ukrainian anti-war activists for that reason. (3) Kagarlitsky has accepted funds from the Kremlin via various channels since at least 2009, and probably since 2005 – not “one grant for research”, but many grants. I write as a lifelong participant in the labour movement and, for the last 25 years, a researcher of Russian and Ukrainian history, politics and economy. I have no interest in supporting the Sunday Times and its witch-hunts against Jeremy Corbyn. But witch-hunts have to be fought with the truth, and your organisation is not telling the truth. Here are some details on the three points mentioned. full: https://piraniarchive.wordpress.com/home/investigations-campaigns-and-other-stuff/stop-calling-warmongers-anti-war-activists/ _ 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: Syria’s “Voice of Conscience” Has a Message for the West
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. * (Interview with Yassin Al-Haj Saleh in Glenn Greewald's Intercept, a magazine that some Syrian solidarity activists have mistakenly identified as an Assadist outlet.) Q: Please tell us briefly about your own background in Syria. A: As a university student in the late 1970s, I was a member of one of two Communist Party organizations actively opposing the regime. At that time, there was an uprising in Syria that involved students, trade unionists, lawyers, and members of other professions who were fighting against the Assad government, as well as a separate conflict between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. There were regular worker strikes in Aleppo, where I was living, and I saw with my own eyes security forces breaking down the doors of homes and businesses. To be arrested in Assad’s Syria, you didn’t need reasons. But in 1980, hundreds of my comrades and I were detained as part of a campaign by the government to break Syrian society. I was young, and the early years in jail were very difficult. We suffered harsh treatment. In later years, our conditions were not so bad and we were allowed books and dictionaries. I learned English inside prison, and for 13 years, I read maybe 100 books or more per year. In the last year of my imprisonment, I was transferred to Tadmor prison, which is one of the most vicious places on the planet — a concentration camp for torture, humiliation, hunger, and fear. I was then released in 1996. The experience of prison transformed me and my ideas about the world. In many ways, it was an emancipatory experience. I developed the belief that to protect our fundamental values of justice, freedom, human dignity, and equality, we had to change our concepts and theories. The Soviet Union had fallen and many changes were occurring in the world. My comrades who refused to change, those who adhered to their old methods and tools, found themselves in a position of leaving their values behind. This is one reason why many leftists today are against the Syrian revolution — because they adhere to the dead letter of their beliefs, rather than the living struggle of the people for justice. Q: What did you expect from the left in its response to the Syrian revolution? A: It came to me as a shock, actually, that most of them have sided with Bashar al-Assad. I don’t expect much out of the international left, but I thought they would understand our situation and see us as a people who were struggling against a very despotic, very corrupt, and very sectarian regime. I thought they would see us and side with us. What I found, unfortunately, is that most people on the left know absolutely nothing about Syria. They know nothing of its history, political economy, or contemporary circumstances, and they don’t see us. In America, the leftists are against the establishment in their own country. In a way, they thought that the U.S. establishment was siding with the Syrian revolution — something that is completely false and an utter lie — and for this reason they have stood against us. And this applies to leftists almost everywhere in the world. They are obsessed with the White House and the establishment powers of their own countries. The majority are also still obsessed with the old Cold War-era struggles against imperialism and capitalism. Recently, an event in Rome that displayed images of those tortured and killed by Assad was attacked by fascists. Just days before, it had also been attacked in a local communist newspaper for promoting “imperialism.” There is a growing convergence between the views of fascists and the far-left about Syria and other issues. The reason for this is that perspectives on the left are outdated. They are interested in high-politics, not grassroots struggles. They are dealing with grand ideologies and historical narratives, but they don’t see people — the Syrian people aren’t represented. They are holding on to depopulated discourses that don’t represent human struggle, life, and death. full: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/26/syria-yassin-al-haj-saleh-interview/ _ 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: UI Press | John Rodden | Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI and the New York Intellectuals
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. * Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red. John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents’ hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the onetime members of a radical political sect of ex-Trotskyists (barely numbering a thousand at its height), the so-called New York intellectuals. He describes the nonsensical decades-long pursuit of this group of intellectuals, especially Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe. The Keystone Cops style of numerous FBI agents is documented carefully in Rodden's meticulous case studies of how Hoover's men recruited informants to snoop on the "Commies," opened their personal mail, tracked their movements, and reported on their wives and friends. full: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/52drd9rk9780252040474.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: Without compelling change on ground there is no end for war in Syria, says prominent political scientist Gilbert Achcar - Region - World - Ahram Online
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[Marxism] Fwd: Not Just Another Stinky Fish - 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. * Branford, Conn. — In a bay near this coastal town, the sea was boiling with hundreds of herring-size shiners leaping to flee a marauding squad of bluefish. “These waters are coming back,” Bren Smith yelled above the shrieking din, as sea gulls plunged near our boat, scooping up fish. Mr. Smith grows seaweed and shellfish in Long Island Sound, and he says he’s seen a lot more action out here recently. What thrilled me about this scene was that I was witnessing what happens when fishery managers set strict catch limits to stop overfishing. Those leaping silvery fish were menhaden, also known as bunker, or pogies. To Mr. Smith and other fishermen I spoke to, there are encouraging signs that the menhaden population along the Atlantic Coast is healthy after decades of intensive commercial exploitation. Other sea creatures whose lives are intertwined with them also seem to be doing well. Sharks, whales, bluefish, tuna, osprey and other predators depend in part on these fish. “There’s all this life that wasn’t there before,” John McMurray, who captains his own charter boat, told me. He said it’s been a boon for his sports fishing business off Long Island: “In the past four years, striped bass fishing has gotten a lot better, bluefish as well. We’re even getting bluefin tuna coming inshore to feed on the schools of menhaden.” Menhaden are filter feeders. They swim in vast schools of hundreds of thousands of fish. Mouths agape as they feed, menhaden are living vacuum cleaners sucking up algae blooms that deplete inshore waters of oxygen and create biological deserts in the sea. A single adult menhaden can clean four to seven gallons of water in a minute. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/not-just-another-stinky-fish.html With its putrid smell, bony flesh and rancid oily taste, the menhaden would seem the least likely candidate for “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” the title of H. Bruce Franklin’s brilliant new environmentalist study. But Franklin is not being ironic. The menhaden is the most important fish in the sea if you understand its ecological purpose. While it is understandable that groups like Greenpeace would take up the cause of sea creatures at the top of the food chain, like the great whales or the bluefin tuna, Franklin understands that without the easily dismissed menhaden, those above it on the food chain do not stand a chance. This includes the human race as well, since the menhaden is particularly suited to cleaning up plankton-ridden waters. As one of the few marine specimens that thrive on microscopic plant life or phyloplanton, it is uniquely positioned to purify waters that have become virtual swamps as a result of the massive influx of nitrogen-based fertilizers from farms, lawns and golf courses. With much of the Gulf of Mexico having been turned into a vast dead zone by fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River, there is a drastic need for the humble menhaden. full: https://louisproyect.org/2007/05/28/the-most-important-fish-in-the-sea/ _ 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 Do Trump and Marx Have in Common? - The New York Times
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Why Is Dating in the App Era Such Hard Work? - The Atlantic
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. * "What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is riding on your initial appearance Everything in capitalist society, including people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their exchange value." Weigel's observations reminded of Eva Illouz's *Cold Intimacies: The Makings of Emotion Capitalism;* in particular, where she says that the entire dynamic of online dating is completely reversed from previous forms of Romantic interaction: "If attraction usually precedes knowledge of another person, here knowledge precedes attraction ... [P]eople are apprehended first as a set of attributes and only then ... do they apprehend the bodily presence of another". The idea here being that online dating is a sort of marketplace of commodified personalities (profiles), which are nothing more than readily computable, idealized representations of the self that happen to be measurable, machine-readable aggregates of discrete attributes and variables (the profile structures themselves configured and predetermined by the dating service). If alienation is the loss of the bond to reality, as Marx suggests, then the superstructural manifestation of the online dating world is a pretty compelling example. *Cold Intimacies *comes highly recommended, by the way. FWIW Craig Butosi, MA, MLIS, BMus Hons. Website: craigbutosi.ca Library: library.craigbutosi.ca _ 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: Political Feminism: the Legacy of Victoria Woodhull
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. * The first woman to run for the White House was born in September 1838 in Homer in rural Ohio. Victoria California Claflin was the 7th of 10 children born to parents who lived on the undesirable end of the social spectrum. Her mother worked in brothels while her con artist father regularly beat his children during drunken rages, of which there were many. He also used his offspring to carry out his numerous con jobs. Victoria California Claflin would later become Victoria Woodhull and in April 1871 announced her candidacy for President of the United States through a letter to the editor in the New York Herald. A year later she was formally nominated by the Equal Rights Party in the Spring of 1872. Frederick Douglas, the much-heralded freed slave, was nominated as Woodhulls running mate even though he never accepted it and had declared his support for the eventual winner, Ulysses S. Grant! It was a sign that although they wanted to be taken seriously, the Equal Rights Party and Victoria Woodhull failed to run a serious campaign. There was also the little problem of their female candidate not having the right to vote or indeed be of the right age. Woodhull was just shy of the minimum age barrier of 35 to take office as president of the USA. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/26/political-feminism-the-legacy-of-victoria-woodhull/ The people who launched a section of the Communist International in the USA were veteran radicals, who had fought against slavery and for women's rights for many years. They saw the emerging anti-capitalist struggles in Europe, most especially the Paris Commune of 1871, as consistent with their own. They saw revolutionary socialism as the best way to guarantee the success of the broader democratic movement. What European Marxism would think of them is an entirely different matter. The names of some of the early recruits should give you an indication of the political character of the new movement. Included were abolitionists Horace Greely, Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. Feminist Victoria Woodhull joined in and put her magazine "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly" at its disposal. The weekly not only included communications from Karl Marx, but spiritualist musings from Woodhull. The native radical movement of the 1870s was a mixed bag. Socialism, anti-racism, feminism, pacifism and spiritualism co-existed comfortably. The Europeans were anxious to purify the movement of all these deviations from the very start. Unfortunately they put anti-racism, feminism and spiritualism on an equal footing. Victoria Woodhull was unquestionably the biggest irritant, since she defended all these deviations while at the same time she spoke out forcefully for free love, the biggest deviation imaginable in the Victorian age: "The sexual relation, must be rescued from this insidious form of slavery. Women must rise from their position as ministers to the passions of men to be their equals. Their entire system of education must be changed. They must be trained to be like men, permanent and independent individualities, and not their mere appendages or adjuncts, with them forming but one member of society. They must be the companions of men from choice, never from necessity." full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/woodhull.htm _ 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: Trump says Clinton will Start WW III with Russia, but Moscow Disagrees | Informed Comment
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[Marxism] Fwd: He Who Hesitates Is Lost And Russia Hesitated -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.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. * (Paul Craig Roberts, a former economics policy adviser in the Reagan administration, writes those typical Counterpunch articles about Russia being the world's best hope for peace and national sovereignty. On his personal blog, he is not hesitant to bare his teeth. What a mad hatter.) Russia had a victory for Syria and democracy in its hands, but Putin lacked the decisiveness of a Napoleon or a Stalin and let his victory slip away as a result of false hopes that Washington could be trusted. Now a Russian/Syrian victory would require driving the Turks and Americans out of Syria. If Russia struck hard and fast, Russia could succeed by using Washington’s lie and claiming that Russia thought the US and Turkish forces were ISIS, just as Washington claimed when Washington intentionally struck a known Syrian Army position. full: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/09/24/he-who-hesitates-is-lost-and-russia-hesitated-paul-craig-roberts/ _ 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: Economics has become political - bookforum.com / omnivore
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.bookforum.com/blog/16742 _ 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: Why Is Dating in the App Era Such Hard Work? - The Atlantic
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. * As Weigel tells it, dating is an unintended by-product of consumerism. Nineteenth-century industrialization ushered in the era of cheap goods, and producers needed to sell more of them. Young women moved to cities to work and met more eligible men in a day than they could previously have met in years. Men started taking women out to places of entertainment that offered young people refuge from their sharp-eyed elders—amusement parks, restaurants, movie theaters, bars. “The first entrepreneurs to create dating platforms,” Weigel calls their proprietors. Romance began to be decoupled from commitment. Trying something on before you bought it became the new rule. Then as now, commentators fretted that dating commercialized courtship. In the early 20th century, journalists and vice commissioners worried that the new custom of men paying for women’s dinners amounted to prostitution. Some of the time it surely did—just as today, some dating websites, like SeekingArrangement, pair “sugar babies” with “sugar daddies” who pay off college debts and other expenses. “Ever since the invention of dating, the line between sex work and ‘legitimate’ dating has remained difficult to draw,” Weigel writes. Well before app users rated potential partners so ruthlessly, daters were told to “shop around.” They debated whether they “owed” someone something “in exchange for” a night out. Today, as Weigel notes, we toss around business jargon with an almost transgressive glee, subjecting relationships to “cost-benefit analyses” and invoking the “low risk and low investment costs” of casual sex. full: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/dating-disrupted/501119/ I answered a personal ad myself once. The woman who had placed it was Kerri Jacobs, a high-profile journalist who wrote for Metropolitan magazine on architecture. She has moved on to New York Magazine, where she is a regular columnist on the same topic. New York Magazine is one of the prime locations for personal ads, especially for conventional New Yorkers. She had placed her ad in the New York Review of Books, a locale for the more intellectually pretentious. Since she was an extremely good-looking young woman, I couldn't exactly figure out why she had placed an ad. After a few moments, I figured it out completely. Nobody was good enough for her. The ads were supposed to help weed out "losers," as she put it. I didn't even want to find out if I was a winner and never called her back. What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is riding on your initial appearance. Not only do you have to look right, you also have to find the words that the interviewer wants to hear. I had to put up with this nonsense when I worked on Wall Street. Why would I or any sensitive person have to put up with it in affairs of the heart? One of the reasons that Columbia University was such a deliverance for me was that I would no longer have to put up with the stupid questions of people in the Personnel Office. "Why do you think Paine-Webber and you are suitable for each other?" "I don't know. The thought of working at another one of these Wall Street dumps makes me sick to my stomach. I just need the money to pay for my rent, scholarly Marxist books and African music CD's." The unstated, and therefore more powerful, message of this movie is that the cash nexus distorts everything. Everything in capitalist society, including people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their exchange value. This colors everything. The way we speak reflects this alienated existence. We speak of the "investment" we have in an intimate relationship. We are worried whether our "assets" are to be found in our appearance, like Richard Gere's, or in our intelligence or wit, like Woody Allen's (well, from 25 years ago anyhow). full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/unmade_beds.htm _ 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] more on the Dylan thread
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. * On his later work, i have not read Maqusee's newest edition, "Wicked Messenger", but I am a huge fan of albums such as "Oh Mercy", "Time out of Mind", "Love and Theft", and "Modern Times". Dylan uses the backdrop of the apocalypse to create a mood that matches the inner emotions of heartbreak and loss. Below are a few examples: Not Dark Yet (but it's getting there) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZgBhyU4IvQ#t=325.002083 Love Sick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abbu5hcH0kk Cold Irons Bound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hO-83CIVKM When the Deal Goes Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEoGqUqy-0w Things Have Changed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9EKqQWPjyo And here's our favorite son Chris Robinson and the Brotherhood doing a Dylan cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1wJAWdAR1w Sure am glad Chris doesn't have to scream over Rich and Marc's guitars anymore. _ 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] more on the Dylan thread
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. * Interview with Marqusee in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/12/12/does-dylan-still-matter-an-interview-with-mike-marqusee/ https://vimeo.com/96138378 _ 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] more on the Dylan thread
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. * Marqusee argues that in spite of himself Dylan did make the world a better place with his music. Early on Dylan seemed to be torn between emulating Little Richard, on the one hand, and Woody Guthrie, on the other. He reconciled that dilemma by achieving a synthesis. The interesting part is the reaction he got from the hard-core folkies. The level of hostility directed toward him was simply beyond belief. When he took the Band on his electric tour, he would start with an acoustic set, playing from his early protest repertoire, and in the second set the Band would come on stage and plug in for the electric part of the show. But even that was not enough for the hardcore folk fans addicted to "form". In this clip from "No Direction Home", a fan calls him Judas from the audience. You can see Dylan's reaction. He then turns to the Band and tells them to "play it fucking loud". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCGPhzWWgco In another scene from the same film, his coterie discusses what to do in response to a death threat. Both Dylan and the Beatles were receiving a multitude of death threats. Dylan had set up residence with his wife Sara and her child in Woodstock. When Dylan caught word of the festival which was to be organized just down the road, he lit out for the Isle of Wight because he was concerned about people wandering around on his property. Any crazed and disillusioned folkie with a gun could do him harm. Look what happened to Lennon. So much for music "making the world a better place". What does one do with a Judas after all? You murder him. Music seemed to be bringing the worst out in people, not the best. Here he is at the Isle of Wight. He was relaxed and in good spirits. The Beatles were in the audience. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, but Altamont was just around the corner. http://www.jambase.com/article/watch-rare-footage-bob-dylan-band-isle-wight-1969 In "The Last Waltz", Robbie Robertson was asked why the Band decided to call it a day. Look, he said, we've been on the road for 16 years. Three members of our group are already junkies. The new wave of artists seemed to be more interested in breaking things up, but we were not really interested in all that so we began to destroy ourselves instead. In an earlier interview with the press after going electric, a reporter asks Dylan if his new interest in rock music meant he was selling out, and if so, what was his choice for achieving fame and fortune. Dylan responded, "ladies garments". One of the first commercials in which he allowed one of his songs to be used was an ad for Victoria's Secret, about a million years later. Greg _ 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