[Marxism] Black and Latino "identity politics" are working class politics
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 is another post that relates to debates in the DSA and goes against the tradition that I and a lot of the people on this list used to share. I don't post these here to provoke people or to act as a troll, but because I think it is important to discuss out these issues especially with those that have had the same political background as I do and thus share a good number of positions, ways we look at the world, etc. http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2019/04/black-and-latino-identity-politics-are.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA’s Left and Right Both Miss the Point: We Need to Build the Left and the Working-Class Together
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. * I think this article on the DSA's "fierce internal debate," like the New Republic piece on the DSA's "Race Problem" that preceded and seems to have provoked it, have a very serious problem, namely, how do you explain an organization that has grown from somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 members three years ago to one with almost 60,000 now? The answer is that today's DSA is the product and an outgrowth of a much broader new socialist movement that is emerging in the United States. It is not the only expression. The first sign of this new explicitly socialist generation (beyond Occupy Wall Street's rough but class-conscious "we are the 99%") were precisely the Philly Socialists, in the summer of 2012, to which the comrade who wrote the regenerationmag.org article belongs. So I think it is more accurate to say that the DSA *has been grown* by outside forces than the more neutral "it grew" and to say that it *recruited* tens of thousands of members by its own activity and efforts is false. I've written about this on my blog several times, most recently in the post "The question facing the Democratic Socialists of America: What Are We?" https://bit.ly/2FNZZu0M In Atlanta, we have around 800 members, 90% new, a lot of the pre-2016 members in their 70s and glad to hand over the reins to a new generation, among whom at most a handful have organizing experience. And we are far from building relationships with and actively engaging even a fifth of our members ... and remember these are overwhelmingly people who reached out and joined through their own initiative. Talking about a "fierce debate" in the DSA with left wings and right wings, entryists and horizontalists, can be misleading because there aren't even any forums for this debate, just postings and proclamations in various online spaces, some of which are never even mentioned on the group's national discussion boards, which involve probably less than 1% of the membership and a few percent of the activists. The national leadership, which is dominated by people from a caucus that used to be called "momentum" simply does not lead. As far as I can tell it makes no attempt to involve much of anyone beyond itself and a tiny circle in its decisions nor to convince much of anyone once they have been made. This provoked a tremendous cluster-fuck around the Bernie endorsement because it was married to an approach to the presidential campaign that many in the DSA consider sectarian and was never discussed at all beyond 10 or 15 folks in the upper reaches of the organization. That strategy is here: https://bit.ly/2IdfjTM. A pretty savage critique from the San Francisco chapter is https://bit.ly/2F8l8Pg, combining both a critique of a national endorsement before our convention as well as of the campaign plan. My own critique, strictly of the politics of the National Political Committee's approach, is here: https://bit.ly/2YRpNyb. As is typical of the NPC and its members, there's been no political argument for its approach mostly an insistence that it is necessary under campaign laws and further explanations of legalities. How could such a grouping wind up dominating the only national leadership body? The pre-2016 DSA had never had disputes or caucuses, being a staid social-democratic organization. The 2017 DSA was transformed by an influx of new people and at its convention small organized factions played an outsized role. Momentum re-organized as the Spring Caucus in January and blew up in March, splitting into its main components, one based in the East Bay DSA, the other in Philly. Its official documents presented it as relentlessly workerist, economist, and class reductionist, so much so that by contrast groups like Progressive Labor and International Socialists from the 1960s and 1970s almost seem like staunch defenders of Malcolm X. But there is also the North Star caucus (no relation to the late Peter Camejo), which is the continuation of the Harrington outlook that dominated the DSA until recently. There is a libertarian quasi-anarchist caucus, and there had been a more r-r-r-evolutionary than thou Communist Caucus, but I'm not sure it still exists. There is a thing called "Build" which is not a caucus, it says, but promotes a political approach and will certainly have some of its leading people as candidates for the incoming leadership. One of the most prominent caucuses, called Refoundation, dissolved last year, and recently a new caucus emerged called Socialist Majority (full disclosure: I am a member and one of the signers of its initial statement). It defen
[Marxism] Gracchus Babeuf: From Jacobin to Communist - COSMONAUT
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[Marxism] Alliance of Middle East Socialists calls for transnational humanist socialist network
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. * "Dear Friends: "Critical developments around the globe compel the creation of a new type of transnational socialist and anti-authoritarian solidarity network. "Objectively, we are facing the growth of authoritarian capitalist governments, an increasing economic and military competition between the U.S. and China, and the ominous consequences of climate breakdown. In addition, we confront insurgent white-supremacist and other racist ethno-nationalist movements which, similar to ISIS in their extremist views, are willing to employ mass-violence against Muslims, Jews, and other marginalized people. "Subjectively, a new generation of youth is getting interested in socialism because capitalism’s inhumanity and exploitation does not offer it a better future. The Me Too movement challenging sexual abuse is growing among women around the globe and targeting the abuse of women in government, all fields of work, and the family. The Black Lives Matter movement which emerged in the U.S. in response to state-sanctioned police murder and abuse of Black people has struck a chord internationally. There is no lack of popular protests and strikes around the world, from Sudan, Algeria, Iran and Palestine to Europe, and from China and India to Latin America, Haiti, and the U.S. However, some of these struggles are being crushed by various authoritarian and imperialist forces, and others face the danger of rightwing populism. "In response to these struggles, the international Left has been disappointing." See link for full article. I hope others will add their names. https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/call-for-the-formation-of-a-transnational-socialist-humanist-solidarity-network/ -- *“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black Jacobins" by C. L. R. James Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] DSA gains in Chicago
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. * https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-democratic-socialists-city-council-election-20190403-story.html https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/democratic-socialists-america-chicago-rossana-rodriguez-carlos-rosa-chicago-teachers-union On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 6:52 AM Anthony Boynton via Marxism wrote: > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/03/americas-socialist-surge-chicago _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Is Howie Hawkins Going to Make the Green Party Get Its Shit Together for 2020?
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[Marxism] Review of Allen Young's "Left, Gay & Green: A Writer’s Life."
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 Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture Volume 11, 2018 A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties By John McMillian, For many years – when I was in college, graduate school, and even for some time after that – I used to envy those Baby Boomers who had immersed themselves in the American left during the 1960s and 1970s. They had been righteous in their support of civil rights, outraged about the Vietnam War, and they got to enjoy the era’s great music, as well as various exciting cultural events, like Woodstock and the Moon landing. I always figured it must have been exciting to come of age during such dramatic and compelling times. The Portuguese have a fine word for that kind of melancholy longing I’m describing: saudade. In recent years, however, that feeling has largely dissipated. I’m no longer sure I’d have enjoyed the Sixties. Part of the reason may be that I’ve been studying that era for about twenty years (so maybe I’ve finally maxed out on the topic). Meanwhile, my thoughts about the desirability of almost any kind of “revolution” have changed. (I now think it’s usually best when social change unfolds gradually.) Furthermore, it turns out that we are currently living through an uncommonly tumultuous time, and I don’t find it too enjoyable. I’m apprehensive about the future, and the social justice left that prevails on American campuses nowadays frequently offends me. It is in some ways surprising, then, that I have such a fond appreciation for Allen Young’s memoir, Left, Gay & Green: A Writer’s Life. (The title alludes to the fact that Young was a red diaper baby, and then a journalist who was active in the New Left, gay rights, and environmental movements.) Let me say upfront that I have known Young, from a distance, for many years. Back in the mid-2000s, when I was researching my book, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, I visited the Allen Young Papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, and I interviewed Young over the telephone. Since then, we have occasionally exchanged cordial emails. We have only met once, however, and that was just for a few moments, by pure chance, many years ago. (He was walking out of Columbia University’s Fayerweather Hall, and I was walking in.) Put another way, if it had turned out that I had significant criticisms of Left, Gay & Green, I would not have been particularly hesitant to say so. But mostly I have compliments. Young calls his book an “autobiography,” rather than a “memoir,” because it encompasses his entire life, rather than just the years when he was most intensively engaged in leftwing activism. His amiable, conversational prose style makes for quick reading, but Left, Gay & Green resists easy summary. It is not a didactic autobiography, meant to impart a lesson, or develop a theme. And although it is a longish book (480 pages) each of its twenty-four chapters is subdivided into short, discrete sections. Frequently, Young will pause his narrative in order to share various musings, ponder conundrums, or poke gently at people’s foibles and eccentricities – sort of like a hip Andy Rooney. Some readers may find these digressions excessive, but I found them delightful. Young also occasionally includes excerpts from his writings long ago, which he analyzes from his perspective today. Young grew up on a Jewish farm in the Catskill Mountains. For years, his main daily chore was to collect eggs from his family’s chickens, clean them, and pack them for shipping. His parents were secretly members of the American Communist Party, which of course put the family at risk during the Red Scare. Unlike some communists who resided in big cities, however, Young’s parents were not bohemians. They were hard-working, straight-laced, and stoic. That posed a problem for Young, because he knew from an early age that he was gay. He lived in “the closet” – and repeatedly tried dating women, while also having secret liaisons with men – from his adolescence until about age twenty-five. Young was thrilled to matriculate at Columbia University in 1958, and at the time, he was certain he was leaving rural life behind for good. Academically and socially, he thrived, and eventually he became the Daily Spectator’s editor-in-chief. Meanwhile, he began demonstrating his enviable knack for meeting or befriending various successful, well-known, or otherwise interesting people. One of the lifelong friends he made at Columbia was the great historian Eric Foner; another is Mic
[Marxism] Washington Babylon Podcast Episode 7: Ben Affleck's Celebrity Charity and Dr. Shawgi Tell on Rochester Public Schools
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[Marxism] You Can’t Have Democracy When You Put the Truth in Prison: The Fourteenth Newsletter (2019).
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. * You will open this newsletter and read it just a few days before Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will wake up in the Federal police headquarters in Curitiba (Brazil) on 7 April, the one-year anniversary of his incarceration. You will go ahead with your day, perhaps reading bits and pieces of this newsletter or saving it to read later. Lula will likely eat what he ate on his first day in prison: bread and butter with his coffee. He will know that across the planet there will be demonstrations in his name. ‘Lula Livre’ (Free Lula) the people will cry out. You’re not alone, they will say, você não está sozinho. It will give him hope. https://mailchi.mp/e93fcfd5d84b/you-cant-have-democracy-when-you-put-the-truth-in-prison-the-fourteenth-newsletter-2019?e=77bd6c9887 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Notes on the Dissolution of the ISO | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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[Marxism] DSA gains in Chicago
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[Marxism] Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy | Boston 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. * Capitalism, like the United States itself, has a mythology, and for five decades one of its central characters has been the nineteenth-century maverick cigarette entrepreneur, James B. Duke. Duke’s risk-taking investment in the newfangled machine-made cigarette, so the story goes, displaced the pricey, hand-rolled variety offered by his stodgy competitors. This, in turn, won Duke control of the national, and soon global, cigarette market. Repeated ad nauseam in business and history journals, high school and university curricula, popular magazines, and websites, the story has taught that disruptive innovation drives capitalist progress. full: http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/nan-enstad-debunking-capitalist-cowboy _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Are the Humanities History? | by Michael Massing | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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. * Who is going to save the humanities? On all fronts, fields like history and English, philosophy and classical studies, art history and comparative literature are under siege. In 2015, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities was down nearly 10 percent from just three years earlier. Almost all disciplines have been affected, but none more so than history. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of history majors nationwide fell from 34,642 in 2008 to 24,266 in 2017. Last year, the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, facing declining enrollments, announced it was eliminating degrees in History, French, and German. The University of Southern Maine no longer offers degrees in either American and New England Studies or Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, while the University of Montana has discontinued majors and minors in its Global Humanities and Religions program. Between 2013 and 2016, US colleges cut 651 foreign-language programs. The primary cause of these developments is the 2008 financial crash, which made students—especially the 70 percent of whom are saddled with debt—ever more preoccupied with their job prospects. With STEM jobs paying so well—the median annual earnings for engineering grads is $82,000, compared to $52,000 for humanities grads—enrollments in that area have soared. From 2013 to 2017, the number of undergraduates taking computer science courses nationwide more than doubled. A study of Harvard students from 2008 to 2016 found a dramatic shift from the humanities to STEM. The number majoring in history went from 231 to 136; in English, from 236 to 144; and in art history, from sixty-three to thirty-six, while those studying applied math went from 101 to 279; electrical engineering, from none to thirty-nine; and computer science, from eighty-six to 363. full: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/02/are-the-humanities-history/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Report from Rojava: What the West Owes its Best Ally Against ISIS | by Debbie Bookchin | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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[Marxism] Panelists suspect Turkish government pressure was behind Columbia's choice to cancel event
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[Marxism] Algeria’s Unrest Unsettles the Saudi/UAE-led Bloc – LobeLog
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 2011, there was much optimism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that the so-called Arab Spring revolts would make the region more democratic. Yet over the past eight years, the MENA region has become increasingly authoritarian. This year, Egypt’s head of state is essentially securing his presidency for life while Sudan cracks down on protestors, Gulf monarchies grew more autocratic, and the Arab world is basically accepting Syria’s regime back into the regional diplomatic fold. The idea that the Arab Spring is “dead” provides a sense of comfort to the Gulf leaders who shuddered at the earlier wave of revolutionary activism. Officials in Riyadh and other Gulf capitals are determined to prevent a repeat of 2011. The crackdown on dissenters and oppositionists (both Islamist and secular) in these counter-revolutionary countries since 2011 has been especially harsh. But the leaders of the Saudi/United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led bloc of “counter-revolutionary” states have done much more than tighten their grip at home. In the words of Marc Lynch, this anti-revolutionary bloc has “rewired the entire region trying to prevent another Arab Spring.” So, for instance, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi provided diplomatic, economic, and military support for Bahrain’s Al Khalifa rulers in 2011, bankrolled the Egyptian coup of 2013, sponsored Libya’s General Khalifa Haftar, and blockaded the only “pro-Arab Spring state” in the Gulf, Qatar. full: https://lobelog.com/algerias-unrest-unsettles-the-saudi-uae-led-bloc/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Pluralism in economics: mainstream, heterodox and Marxist | Michael Roberts Blog
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[Marxism] (15) The campaign to silence Max Blumenthal - YouTube
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. * So a couple of bookstore readings for Max Blumenthal's new Verso book have been cancelled because there were complaints about his pro-Assadism. This, according to his pals, is the biggest attack on free speech since Joe McCarthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTjLDM_TwD4 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
