[Marxism] Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’ Stops Short of Class War | The Nation
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. * Here, then, is where Parasite takes us: not to the ledge of class war but to a shrug over inequality. The parasitic family members of his film have embraced a long con because the system itself is a con. Yet their suffering, in housing and work, is rationalized by their vulgarity and unscrupulousness. The rich family’s lifestyle, meanwhile, is never questioned. What bothers Bong is not the fact of poverty and unjust distribution; he only wants our social arrangements to feel a bit kinder. Never mind that a truly mixed society would demand slicing off the extremes. This is not to plead for agitprop. Bong is too good a filmmaker for that. It’s simply to temper our political expectations of Parasite. If anything, his earlier movies offered more in the way of straightforward social critique. The Host, for instance, which introduced him to Western audiences, is a monster flick partly about American militarism and environmental crimes. Caricatures of capitalism and state power run through Snowpiercer, a postapocalyptic allegory set on a segregated train, and Memories of Murder, based on an unsolved string of real-life rapes and killings in a rural area of South Korea. (Last month, the police announced that they located a likely perpetrator in that case.) These films put humor and overstatement to more provocative use. South Korea’s best filmic interpreter of class and social inequality is not Bong but Lee Chang-dong, who made last year’s elegiac Burning as well as Poetry (2010) and one of my all-time favorites, Peppermint Candy (1999). But Lee is too understated to draw the kinds of audiences that Bong can. Asked about his hopes for Parasite, Bong said that it “is in parts funny, frightening, and sad, and if it makes viewers feel like sharing a drink and talking over all the ideas they had while watching it, I’ll wish for nothing more.” Which ideas does he have in mind? Inequality, betrayal, and a kind of we’re-all-doing-our-best both-sides-ism are most apparent. The film doesn’t push us further—to mull Korea’s crisis of affordable housing, discrimination against the poor, fetishization of English and Western commodities, and glut of overeducated, underemployed youth driving the parasitic family’s scheme. full: https://www.thenation.com/article/parasite-bong-joon-ho-review/ _ 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] Julian Assange’s Extradition Process Is ‘A Charade’
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 many human rights groups are deeply political, Amnesty International never made Chelsea Manning a prisoner of conscience. A really disgraceful thing. Chelsea Manning, who was effectively tortured in prison, and they haven’t, as you say, they haven’t elevated Julian’s case. Why? Well, they’re an extension. They’re an extension of an establishment that is now almost systematically coming down on any form of real dissent. In the last five, six years, the last gaps, the last bolt holes, the last spaces in the mainstream media for journalists, from average journalists for the likes Assange, not only Assange, for the likes of people like even myself and others, have closed. The mainstream media, certainly in Britain, always held open those spaces. They’ve closed, and there is generally I would think a fear, right throughout the media, a fear about opposing the state on something like the Assange case. You see the way the whole obsession with Russia has consumed the media with so many nonsensical stories. The hostility, the animosity towards Julian. My own theory is that his work shamed so many journalists. He does what journalists ought to have done, and don’t do any more. He’s done the job of a journalist. That can only explain it. I mean when you take a newspaper like The Guardian, which published originally the WikiLeaks revelations about Iraq and Afghanistan, they turned on Julian Assange in the most vicious way. They exploited him for one thing. A number of their journalists did extremely well with their books, and Hollywood scripts, and so on, but they turned on him personally. It was one of the most unedifying sights I think I’ve ever seen in journalism. The same thing happened in the New York Times. Again, I can only surmise the reason for that. It’s that he shames them. We have a desert of journalism at the moment. There are a few who still do their jobs; who still stand up against establishment power; who still are not frightened. But there’re so few now, and Julian Assange is totally fearless in that. He knew that he was going to run into a great deal of trouble with the state in Britain, the state in the United States–but he went ahead anyway. That’s a true journalist." Full: https://therealnews.com/stories/julian-assange-extradition-process-charade -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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] When Lions Become Lambs; The Queen Elephant | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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. * Two documentaries about African elephants. https://louisproyect.org/2019/11/05/when-lions-become-lambs-the-queen-elephant/ _ 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] Iraqis Rise Against a Reviled Occupier: Iran
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. * NY Times, Nov. 5, 2019 Iraqis Rise Against a Reviled Occupier: Iran By Alissa J. Rubin BAGHDAD — It started quietly a month or so ago with scattered protests. Those steadily expanded until last week more than 200,000 Iraqis marched in Baghdad, raging against the Iraqi government and a foreign occupier — not the United States this time, but Iran. While the current leaders of the Iraqi government cower inside the Green Zone, where officials running the American occupation once sheltered, the protesters outside direct their anger against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which they now see as having too much influence. “Free, free Iraq,” they shout, “Iran get out, get out.” On the streets and in the squares of Iraq’s capital, in the shrine city of Karbala — where protesters on Sunday threw gasoline bombs at the Iranian Consulate — in back alleys and university hallways, a struggle is taking place over who will shape the country’s future. Iraq, along with Lebanon, another heavily Shiite country that has been roiled by protests, is part of a developing revolt against efforts by Shiite-dominated Iran to project its power throughout the Middle East The protesters, he said, were fed up with corruption and the Shiite militias, some of which have evolved into mafias running extortion rackets. But more than that, he added, this is “a revolution with a social dimension. In Iraq, patriotism was always political, now it has a social justice component.” While Iran is the immediate target of the protesters’ wrath, the fight is larger than that. It is a struggle between younger Iraqis and an older, more cautious generation, between a political elite and a rising cohort that rejects their leadership. It is a struggle, above all, between those who have profited handsomely since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, and those who are struggling to get by and look on with fury as the political parties, some with ties to Iran, distribute payoffs to the well connected. “It was exactly 99 years ago that the last great Iraqi revolution took place, it was totally Iraqi born,” said Laith Kubba, an adviser to the government. While the 1920 revolution was ultimately defeated, the sentiment that drove it, the rejection of foreign influence, remains embedded in the Iraqi psyche. A century ago the target was the British; in the early 2000s, it was the Americans that ran afoul of Iraqi nationalism; now it is Iran. The system put in place after the 2003 invasion, although crafted by Iraqis and enabled by the Americans, enshrined a system of dividing political power along religious and ethnic lines. Iran exploited that framework, using it to embed itself in Iraqi politics. As the United States retreated from Iraq after 2009, the Iranian-linked parties extended their networks inside the government. In 2014 when the Islamic State invaded, it was Iran that rushed to Iraq’s rescue, helping form militias to fight the militants and by 2018 becoming so powerful that political parties linked to Iran became the kingmakers in the government. It was an influential Iranian general, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who brokered the deal that created the current government. Meanwhile, at the grass-roots level and among the country’s young people, there was a growing sense that Iran was profiting at the expense of Iraq. While often exaggerated, the complaints have become part of the political backdrop to the protests. “All of our budget goes to Iran to support” the Revolutionary Guards, said Ali Jassim, a construction worker, as he washed tear gas out of his eyes below the Jumhuriya Bridge, where the demonstrations are focused. “All the ministries, all the civilian facilities in Iraq are run by Iran,” he said, but, “still our passports are not good in almost any country. We want to get rid of this government, we want our country back, we want an independent president.” “When we were growing up our parents said, ‘Shut up, the walls have ears,’” said Mohammed al-Amin, a second-year medical student who was working at one of the first aid stations, treating protesters suffering from tear gas and pepper spray exposure. “But we have internet, we have traveled. We can see what the world is like and we want a different life. We want to be like the other countries, we want our rights,” he said. The demands of the demonstrators — to get rid of corruption, end political parties, create a presidential system instead of a parliamentary one — seem at once reasonable and almost impossible to realize; at least, not
[Marxism] Biden, Warren, Sanders defeating President Trump in head-to-head matchups, Washington Post-ABC News poll finds - The Washington Post
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[Marxism] Dammed Good Question about the Green New Deal | Green Social Thought
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. * Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest question that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the backup for energy if it proves impossible to get off of fossil fuels fast enough. An August 2019 forum on the GND included representatives from the Sunrise Movement, Renew Missouri and three of us in the Green Party. Rev. Elston McCowan asked, “What does the Green New Deal say about rivers and dams?” I said “That’s a dammed good question” and went into some of the issues below. Howie Hawkins and Dario Hunter, both candidates for the Green Party presidential nomination, told of their participation in local efforts to block dam construction. But trying to defeat a single dam begs the question of what policy a political organization has toward them. [1] GND proposals from the Democratic Party, like those of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ignore both nuclear power and dams. Yet dams have ominous implications for the world’s rivers. full: http://greensocialthought.org/content/dammed-good-question-about-green-new-deal _ 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] Between The Bearable and The Unbearable: The Lebanese Revolution to Come | Lefteast
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[Marxism] Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and Europe’s Islamophobes: An Unsavory Alliance – LobeLog
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[Marxism] US rate of profit measures for 2018 | Michael Roberts Blog
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://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/04/us-rate-of-profit-measures-for-2018/ _ 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