[Marxism] The book that explains Charlottesville

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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*Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan
for America*
Nancy MacLean

clip -

In a moment of high political and ideological tension, it is not surprising
that Nancy MacLean’s new book, *Democracy in Chains*, might strike a nerve
with the public: the book offers a close account of the early years of one
particular strand of right-wing economics scholarship. And after the events
of this past weekend, when white supremacy returned to the very grounds of
the University of Virginia where a large chunk of MacLean’s story takes
place, interest in what MacLean has to say will likely grow. As well it
should, because MacLean’s account explains what happened in Charlottesville
at two different but related levels. More concretely, the University of
Virginia's status as a bastion of white supremacy and
white-supremacist-validating scholarship is exactly what was at issue both
during the period MacLean writes about it and today, and at a greater
remove, the long gestation period of the current upsurge of white
supremacist and anti-democratic sentiment is exactly her book’s foremost
subject and concern.

By taking aim at the legacy of James M. Buchanan, the Nobel Prize–winning
economist whose scholarship and political philosophy reverberate through
the conservative movement to this day, MacLean’s book has pitched
intellectual historians such as herself against Buchanan’s academic heirs,
to whom she ascribes complicity in a long political devolution. While a few
nonaligned scholars have entered the fray, the debate has so far largely
been drawn along ideological and disciplinary lines. This is unfortunate
because MacLean uncovers a crucial history in her book, one that economists
especially need to grapple with.
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-book-explains-charlottesville
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[Marxism] The forgotten world of Communist Party bookstores

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/communist-party-cpusa-bookstore-fbi
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[Marxism] Donald, the deals and the mafia dons

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Australian, August 16, 2017 Wednesday
Donald, the deals and the mafia dons
By Cameron Stewart WASHINGTON

When Donald Trump was a fast-rising property developer in the early 
1980s, he decided to build his signature casino complex in -Atlantic 
City, New Jersey - a town where construction was ruled by the mob.


The problem for the brash New Yorker was that part of the land he wanted 
for his casino was owned by Salvie Testa and Frank Nar-ducci Jr, mafia 
hitmen known as the Young Executioners.


They worked for Atlantic City mob boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo. 
Even so, Trump did the deal, eventually buying the land for $US1.1 
million, about twice the market price for the 465sq m block that had 
sold five years earlier for $US195,000.


It is deals such as this that have long fuelled rumours of Trump's 
associations and connections with the mafia.


As The Australian reveals today, the NSW Police Board was so concerned 
about Trump's suspected mafia connections in -Atlantic City that, in 
1987, it recom-mended that Trump's bid to build the Darling Harbour 
casino be rejected.


"Atlantic City would be a dubious model for Sydney and, in our judgment, 
the Trump mafia connections should exclude the Kern/Trump consortium," 
the board concluded, according to NSW government cabinet minutes from 1987.


Trump has consistently denied his dealings with any suspected mobsters 
ever crossed the line. But he has admitted that almost everyone involved 
in building casinos in Atlantic City in the 1980s used mob-linked companies.


"You had contractors that were supposedly mob-oriented all over Atlantic 
City," he said once. "Every single casino company used the same 
companies." Trump has never been charged in relation to any 
mafia-related links, an outcome that some attrib-ute more to luck than 
ethics.


David Cay Johnston, who has written a book on the casino business and 
has covered Trump's business dealings for 27 years, told Politico 
Magazine: "Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming 
investigators, Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters 
and swindlers head-on.


"Some of Trump's unsavoury connections have been followed by 
investigators and substantiated in court, some haven't. When confronte-d 
with evidence of such -associations, Trump has often claimed a faulty 
memory." By the late 80s, when Trump was bidding to build the casino at 
Darling Harbour, his business dealings in New York and Atlantic City had 
involved mafia-connect-ed companies.


In New York, Trump became a major customer of a concrete company 
controlled by mafia bosses Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and "Big Paul" 
Cast-ellano when he built the Trump Tower and Trump Plaza buildings. 
Salerno was head of the -Genoese crime family while Castellano was don 
of the Gambino crime family.


Wayne Barrett, the author of Trump: the Deals and the Downfall, wrote 
that Trump chose to purchase overpriced concrete from the 
mobster-controlled companies, perhaps to ensure there were no delays to 
the projects. "There was a certain amount of mob -association during 
(the -period which his) father and he were building which was very 
difficult to avoid in the New York construction world," Barrett wrote. 
"He (Trump) went out of his way not to avoid them, but to increase 
them." Writes Johnston: "Trump had no reason to personally fear Salerno- 
or Castellano, at least not once he agreed to pay inflated concrete- 
prices. What Trump -appeared to receive in return was union peace. That 
meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery 
delays." When Salerno was convicted and sent to prison, his indictment 
listed an $US8m concrete contract at Trump Plaza.


Barrett believes Trump met Salerno at the townhouse of Trump's former 
New York fixer, Roy Cohn, who had connections to the mob. Trump denies 
it, -although a staffer of Cohn told Barrett she was at the meeting.


"Instead of looking for the witnesses … the New Jersey Division of 
Gaming Enforcement took an easier path," Johnston writes. "They put 
Trump under oath and asked if he had ever attended such a meeting. Trump 
denied it. The inquiry ended." Trump has admitted the concrete company 
that helped build Trump Tower and Trump Plaza, S Concrete, was 
"supposedly associated with the mob", but it was chosen because it was good.


"Virtually every building that was built was built with these 
companies," Trump said in a 2015 -interview with The Wall Street 
Journal. "These guys were excellent contractors. They were phenomenal. 
They could do three floors a week in concrete. Nobody else in the world 
could do three floors a week." A 

[Marxism] Fwd: Did free speech allow the Nazis to come to power? - Weekly Worker

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Yes, we in the CPGB are perfectly prepared to use the no-platform tactic 
under certain circumstances, but we oppose the traditional far-left 
approach, which boils everything down to often pointless displays of 
physical force or, in the shape of UAF, a liberalistic, ‘something must 
be done’ howl. But it is a profound mistake to elevate no-platform into 
a principle.


Furthermore, our insistence on freedom of speech is programmatically 
linked to our overall conception of socialism - which is rooted in the 
entire Marxist world view. Plainly, to reject freedom of speech is to 
reject Marxism itself and hence the entire project of universal human 
emancipation - it is hardly an optional add-on. Why? Socialism, the 
first stage of communism, can only be the act of self-liberation for the 
great majority, by the great majority - not merely the winning of a 
parliamentary majority. Therefore it follows that the working class 
cannot be treated as little children incapable of handling awkward and 
complicated questions - children who need to be protected from bad ideas.


full: 
http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1045/did-free-speech-allow-the-nazis-to-come-to-power/

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Re: [Marxism] Looking for a list of Marxist film critics

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 8/17/17 7:34 PM, Jeffrey Masko via Marxism wrote:

​I don't really know of any film reviewer who is using Marxist film
theories in the way Dave Zirin uses Marxist theories to critique sport.


Yeah, I wish there was someone like that.
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Re: [Marxism] Looking for a list of Marxist film critics

[Jeffrey Masko via Marxism]

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Thanks for the reply and I don't know all that much about Harry Alan
Potamkin but love the idea of someone who straddles the divide between a
film critic doing film criticism and a film reviewer who gives opinions
without acknowledging academic film theory.

In that vein, I think Robin Wood was quite insightful and so was Peter
Biskind, although I don't know if I'd term either Marxist. Doug Kellner and
Fred Jameson are a couple of the bigger names that I would include as
explicitly Marxist.

The whole of the psycho-analytic Marxism of the members of Screen in the
70's and 80's such as Jean-Luc Comolli, Jean Paul Narboni, Laura Mulvey,
and those who work(ed) with apparatus theory would be on my list. So would
those using suture theory, but that is more academic and not mass market.

More currently, Bill Nichols, Rick Berg, Steven Ross, Jane Gaines come to
mind as well as those associated with the Union for Democratic
Communications such as Steve Macek, Lee Artz, and Dana Cloud. Members of
the Society for Cinema and Media Studies class caucus are mostly Marxist or
at least Marxist sympathetic with Pat Keeton, Terri Ginsberg and all using
Marxist theories to guide their work. None of this are mass market, but
fairly accessible to those who are interested in film theory.

​I don't really know of any film reviewer who is using Marxist film
theories in the way Dave Zirin uses Marxist theories to critique sport.
Although there are those who ​
​may have sympathies or allegiance to Marxism​, actually using Marxist
theories from those above or from Marxist literature is rare, to say the
least. Henry Giroux is probably the closest I can think of right now...
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[Marxism] Fwd: Michael Moore’s Broadway Debut Finds the Provocateur Where He’s Needed Least | Village Voice

[John Obrien via Marxism]

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I am always amazed about how people so easily forget.


During Michael Moore's bitter 2014 divorce with his wife - she released

the facts on Michael Moore's wealth and where he invested - including

his large stocks in Boeing, the military merchant of Death and Citi Bank.

That he gave little to charities and had besides his nice several floor

Westside Manhattan condo - a twenty million dollar mansion in

Michigan among his nine houses.


 Moore is a fake and using the image of being a "real progressive".

Words but not Deeds, the revenues of his films and books, etc. have

been to enrich him.  All this was in the very public divorce.


Romantic leftists like religious unquestioning leftists - have often

been taken in by the hucksters and self promoters.



I might be getting soft in my old age, but I think this review is a bit
harsh.  Moore can be all over the place politically at times but he is
still the filmmaker that combined the roles of performance artist and
documentary film maker so brilliantly in

*Roger and Me.*
comradely

Gary


On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 6:58 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
.
> A shrewd review.
>
> https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/16/michael-moore-broadw
> ay-show-terms-surrender-review/
> _
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[Marxism] Fadwa Suleiman, Actress and Voice of Syrian Opposition in Exile, Dies at 47

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, August 17 2017
Fadwa Suleiman, Actress and Voice of Syrian Opposition in Exile, Dies at 47
By SAM ROBERTS

Fadwa Suleiman, a Syrian actress who bridged gender and sectarian 
boundaries to personify the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, 
died on Thursday in Paris, to which she had fled in 2012. She was 47.


Her death, from cancer, was announced by the National Coalition of 
Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, an anti-Assad group based in Cairo.


“Fadwa became known for leading the protests and sit-ins against the 
Assad regime and for chanting the first slogans for freedom,” the 
coalition said in a statement, which called her “one of the symbols of 
the Syrian revolution.”


Facing a death sentence for her role in peaceful antigovernment 
protests, and scorned by her own family, Ms. Suleiman fled Syria in 2012 
with her husband, Omar. They found their way to France, where she was 
granted asylum.


Syria’s civil war has been waged by several factions, including Sunni 
Arab and Kurdish groups and pro-democracy rebels inspired by the Arab 
Spring in 2011.


Continue reading the main story
The factions have acted independently or as proxies for foreign 
governments. (Russia is supporting Mr. Assad, whose Baath Party seized 
power in a 1963 military coup; a NATO coalition has bombarded Islamic 
extremists.) The rebels have failed to dislodge Mr. Assad.


In her impassioned calls for peaceful protests, Ms. Suleiman emerged as 
a rare female symbol of the rebellion. She, like Mr. Assad, is a member 
of the minority Alawite sect of Shia Muslims, who compose about 10 
percent of Syria’s population.


“There are, of course, supporters of the regime from the Alawite sect, 
like there are from any other sect,” Ms. Suleiman told the news network 
Al Jazeera in 2011. “But since the regime is Alawite, all its 
wrongdoings are being blamed on the whole community.”


In a 2012 interview with M, the magazine of the French newspaper Le 
Monde, she disavowed sectarian ties of her own.


“I am a human being, living out of all prejudice and going to the 
unknown,” Ms. Suleiman said. “I belong to humanity. My first and my 
second husbands are Sunni. I do not belong to any religion. These 
classifications are out of date.


“When the revolution broke out, I realized that I was a Syrian, and that 
my role was to guide people so as not to let them be dragged to death.”


She said at the time that she was joining rallies and making other 
public appearances to protest the state’s influence over Syrian cultural 
institutions and to counter Mr. Assad’s attempts to demonize the 
antigovernment demonstrators. She was joined at a number of protests by 
Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a Syrian soccer star.


“I just wanted to go just to say we Syrians are one people,” Ms. 
Suleiman told Al Jazeera. “I wanted to contradict the narrative of the 
regime and show people that there is no sectarianism in Syria. I wanted 
it to stop its lie that those who protest are armed groups, foreign 
agents or radical Islamists.”


Most sources said that Ms. Suleiman was born on May 17, 1970, in the 
northern city of Aleppo.


After moving to Damascus, she graduated from the Higher Institute for 
Dramatic Arts and acted in numerous plays. She also appeared on Syrian 
television shows including “The Diary of Abou Antar,” “Little Ladies” 
and “Small Hearts.”


Peter Harling, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, an 
organization in Brussels whose goal is to prevent deadly conflicts, was 
quoted by The Financial Times in 2012 as praising Ms. Suleiman’s role in 
preventing even worse violence in Homs, the city in western Syria that 
endured indiscriminate bombardment by government forces and was one of 
the first to hold large demonstrations against Mr. al-Assad in 2011.


“She has tried to contain the damage among Alawites who have been 
hijacked by the regime,” Mr. Harling said.


Ms. Suleiman told Reuters in 2012, “The regime portrays Homs as a hub 
for extreme Islam, but I walk in Sunni neighborhoods distributing 
fliers, and go like this, without a veil, into the homes of religious 
families and discuss politics and organizing the next protest.”


Asked if she feared a victory in the civil war by groups that want to 
create an Islamic state, she replied: “If the Syrian people choose 
democratically that they want to be ruled by Islamists, then this is 
their choice. I am not scared of Islamists ruling the country, because 
if you are in the Syrian street, you will realize that Islam here has 
never been strict or extremist.”


After the revolt began in 2011, Ms. Suleiman was hunted by state 
security forces. 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Michael Moore’s Broadway Debut Finds the Provocateur Where He’s Needed Least | Village Voice

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I might be getting soft in my old age, but I think this review is a bit
harsh.  Moore can be all over the place politically at times but he is
still the filmmaker that combined the roles of performance artist and
documentary film maker so brilliantly in

*Roger and Me.*
comradely

Gary


On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 6:58 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> A shrewd review.
>
> https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/16/michael-moore-broadw
> ay-show-terms-surrender-review/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Michael Moore’s Broadway Debut Finds the Provocateur Where He’s Needed Least | Village Voice

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A shrewd review.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/16/michael-moore-broadway-show-terms-surrender-review/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Long-time member of Lyndon LaRouche’s fascist cult contributes to Robert Parry’s Consortium News | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2017/08/17/long-time-member-of-lyndon-larouches-fascist-cult-contributes-to-robert-parrys-consortium-news/
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[Marxism] Fwd: With Charlottesville, Donald Trump’s Racism on Full Display | Observer

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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From the newspaper owned by Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law.

http://observer.com/2017/08/donald-trump-charlottesville-racism/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Redefining Notions of Party Composition for the Green Party

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13626
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[Marxism] Fwd: Right But Wrong: Trump’s Defense of Confederate Symbols and Its Threat to Color-Blind Liberalism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(By Timothy Messer-Kruse, the author of the invaluable "The Yankee 
International: 1848-1876.")


Historically, Trump was right: there really is no moral difference 
between Lee and Washington or Jefferson. All enslaved others which means 
not just buying a “slave” as one buys a horse — horses are horses but 
men and women are only enslaved by a daily active effort to keep them 
bound and obedient. Jefferson posted ads for the recapture of a 35 year 
old man named “Sandy” the same year he proposed Virginia pass a bill for 
the gradual ending of slavery. Washington took time away from his 
Presidential duties to pursue 22 year old Ona Judge when she escaped and 
fled north.  Washington’s teeth were not wooden, they were skillfully 
crafted from the human teeth extracted from a living enslaved man’s mouth.


full: 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/17/right-but-wrong-trumps-defense-of-confederate-symbols-and-its-threat-to-color-blind-liberalism/

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[Marxism] Taking apart Gareth Stedman Jones book on Marx

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Gareth Stedman Jones. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Allen Lane, 
London [etc.] 2016. xvii, 750 pp. Ill. Maps. £25.95; $35.00; €31.50.


a review by Lucia Pradella in August 2017 International Review of Social 
History


The global economic crisis and the subsequent social and political 
turmoil have led to a revival of interest in Marx’s life and ideas. It 
is thus not surprising that, amid a rich literature on Marx’s critique 
of capitalism, new attempts have emerged at reconstructing his life. 
Unlike Francis Wheen’s and Jonathan Sperber’s recent biographies, 1 
Gareth Stedman Jones’s is mainly a work of intellectual history 
distinguished for its use, albeit partial, of the new historical 
critical edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings (Marx-Engels 
Gesamtausgabe, MEGA-2 2 ). The renowned British historian aims to offer 
an alternative picture to twentieth-century iconography, which “bore 
only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth” 
(p. 595). Given Stedman Jones’s expertise in working-class movements in 
nineteenth-century Britain – where Marx spent the larger part of his 
life – this goal should make the book even more interesting. And, 
indeed, readers are not disappointed; for example, in Stedman Jones’s 
reconstructions of the social background of the First International or 
the development of social democracy in Germany. Against Marx’s 
monumental and pupil-less face scrutinizing us from the cover page, 
Stedman Jones seeks to offer a more mundane and contradictory picture of 
Marx, or, as he insists on calling him, “Karl”. One could argue that the 
twentieth century is marked by many other such attempts, starting with 
David Riazanov’s. But Stedman Jones’s biography is also driven by 
another, albeit implicit, goal: coming to terms with Marx in the light 
of his own intellectual development from Marxism to post-structuralism. 
The outcome of this double game of mirrors is not always convincing.


In the first part of the book, for example, Stedman Jones criticizes 
Marx’s concept of social classes in the light of the idea, which he 
advanced in his 1983 Languages of Class, that class is not “an 
expression of a simple social-economic reality”, but “a form of language 
discursively produced to create identity” (p. 306). Marx’s approach to 
class would merge young Hegelian understandings of the role of labour in 
the transformation of the world and the language of class “originating 
in republican, socialist and even Legitimist opposition to the 
‘bourgeois’ monarchy of Louis Philippe in France” (p. 306). The 
influence of French and British political economy on Marx’s analysis of 
the class struggle is thus largely overlooked. Strikingly, Stedman Jones 
ignores Marx’s reflections in the Kreuznach Notebooks on the influence 
of property relations during the French Revolution, and the importance 
of Marx’s and Engels’s trip to Manchester in 1845. In Manchester, Marx 
met Chartist and trade union leaders, and read in the original the works 
of British political economists, including socialists like Thomas Rowe 
Edmonds, William Thompson, and John Francis Bray, who used Ricardo’s 
value theory to trace the roots of profit in the only apparently free 
transaction between capital and labour (see MEGA-2, section IV, bks. 4 
and 5). These sources contradict Stedman Jones’s argument that the 
Chartists criticized exploitation only as a consequence of political 
exclusion (p. 311), and that, like other members of the propertied 
classes, Marx “failed to listen to the discourse of workers themselves” 
(pp. 311–312). It is simply untrue that in 1850 “Karl arrived in England 
with little knowledge of the English class system beyond what he had 
read in Guizot and Engels” (p. 350).


Stedman Jones’s reconstruction of Marx’s intellectual development in 
London is also partial and often unsatisfactory. He largely ignores the 
content of Marx’s London Notebooks (1850–1853) and the elaboration of 
his critique of political economy in the early 1850s. Although he admits 
that Marx and Engels wrote 487 articles for the New York Tribune – far 
more than for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung – Stedman Jones devotes much 
less attention to Marx’s scientific journalism in London. He thus 
underestimates the changes in Marx’s position at the time. Stedman Jones 
argues, for example, that Marx’s articles on India repeat the same 
vision of international revolution advanced in the Manifesto (pp. 358, 
359). Now, whatever one’s position on Marx’s view in the 1850s of the 
double mission of British colonialism in India, there is a big 
difference between the Manifesto’s vision of 

[Marxism] Fwd: Pando: As Reason's editor defends its racist history, here's a copy of its holocaust denial "special issue"

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Reason always tried to position itself as an "edgy" libertarian antiwar 
magazine. It co-hosted a conference on the Science Wars with Frank 
Furedi at the New School in October, 2001. I could never stand them, 
even more so now that it turns out that they were writing Ernest Zundel 
type shit in 1976.


https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/
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[Marxism] White Supremacy in the Age of Trump | Keri Leigh Merritt | AlterNet via Portside

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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http://portside.org/2017-08-14/white-supremacy-age-trump


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[Marxism] Fwd: Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions - Bloomberg

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more 
Americans are dying at younger ages. But for companies straining under 
the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could 
have a grim upside: If people don’t end up living as long as they were 
projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won’t have 
to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/americans-are-dying-younger-saving-corporations-billions
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