[Marxism] Trotskyist Mythology on Germany 1923

[Aaron Kyereh-Mireku via Marxism]

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August Thalheimer correcting Trotskyist mythology on Germany 1923:

http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/History/1923.html

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Re: [Marxism] How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump | The New Yorker

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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thanks, Louis -- VERY MUCH worth reading --- these capitalists in Greenwich
have no "real" class consciousness --- they are individual money-grubbers
---  and if they are what capitalists are becoming, they will have no one
to save them ---

Rosa Luxembourg was right -- SOCIALISM or BARBARISM (and barbarism is
winning now )


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-republicans-learned-to-love-trump
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[Marxism] Evangelical fundamentalists who openly defied social distancing guidelines are dying of COVID-19 | Salon.com

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.salon.com/2020/05/03/evangelical-fundamentalists-who-openly-defied-social-distancing-guidelines-are-dying-of-coronavirus_partner/

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[Marxism] How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump | The New Yorker

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-republicans-learned-to-love-trump

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[Marxism] Black Protest and the Revival of Folk Music in Ian Zack’s “Odetta” | Aaron Coats | Chicago Review of Books

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://chireviewofbooks.com/2020/05/01/odetta-ian-zack/


Sent from my iPhone


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[Marxism] Neil Davidson (1957-2020): an appreciation | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/03/neil-davidson-1957-2020-an-appreciation/

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Nepa on Kahrl, 'Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America's Most Exclusive Shoreline'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via 
https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
> Date: May 3, 2020 at 7:47:45 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]:  Nepa on Kahrl, 'Free the Beaches: The 
> Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America's Most Exclusive Shoreline'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> Andrew W. Kahrl.  Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the 
> Battle for America's Most Exclusive Shoreline.  New Haven  Yale 
> University Press, 2018.  376 pp.  $28.00 (cloth), ISBN 
> 978-0-300-21514-4.
> 
> Reviewed by Stephen E. Nepa (Temple University)
> Published on H-Socialisms (May, 2020)
> Commissioned by Gary Roth
> 
> Beaches Belong to the People!
> 
> In May 2018, Edward T. "Ned" Coll sat for an interview in his rural 
> Connecticut home. Wearing an oversized corduroy blazer, rumpled 
> shirt, and sporting a white beard, the 77-year-old activist spoke 
> wistfully of his founding in 1964 of Revitalization Corps (RC). 
> Inspired by the Kennedy administration's call on young Americans for 
> civic engagement, the Hartford-based RC functioned as a 
> "citizen-sponsored Peace Corps" and offered a range of social welfare 
> programs, from scholastic tutoring to heating oil delivery. In 
> then-fragile health, Coll went on to discuss his recent "God 
> Activism"--a blend of his devout Catholic faith and still 
> unquenchable thirst for a fight--and hailed himself "a prophet." A 
> local news site commented that while Coll attempted to mount a 
> political comeback, "current events suggest it hasn't caught on, but 
> one certainly wishes him well."[1] 
> 
> In _Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for 
> America's Most Exclusive Shoreline_, Andrew W. Kahrl resurrects a 
> story few people outside of Connecticut may recall. During the 1970s, 
> Coll made headlines staging "invasions" of the state's Gold Coast by 
> bussing to its beaches dozens of children from Hartford's black and 
> impoverished North End. The children, many of whom had never seen the 
> ocean, and Coll faced immediate hostility from affluent (and 
> overwhelmingly white) residents who claimed the beach as private 
> property. In exposing Connecticut's structural racism and challenging 
> politicians who upheld those property claims as inviolate, Coll's 
> "war for the shore" was waged against not just exclusion but the 
> "white liberal apathy" he thought guilty of perpetuating that 
> exclusion (p. 118). The author places this war amidst the maelstrom 
> of the urban crisis, environmental pollution, and the vicious racial 
> divisions of postwar America. But at the center of the story is Coll, 
> a white former insurance executive who after President Kennedy's 
> assassination quit his job, drained his bank account, and devoted 
> himself to promoting social justice. RC operated nationally at its 
> height, even prompting Coll into a quixotic run for president in 
> 1972. By the Reagan years, RC (and Coll) had virtually disappeared. 
> Through it all, his commitment inspired several. He alienated many 
> others. As for those coveting the Gold Coast shoreline, Kahrl 
> laments, "mostly they tried to ignore him. Today, they try to forget 
> him" (p. 8). 
> 
> Kahrl's earlier work examined black coastal landownership in the 
> South, and _Free the Beaches_ contributes further to historical 
> scholarship centering on race, class, and recreational spaces.[2] It 
> also moves the field's geographic scope beyond the Sun Belt region 
> examined by many previous studies.[3] Connecticut makes for a 
> compelling case. By 1950, 80 percent of the state's coastal acreage 
> lay in private hands. Although beaches themselves were public domain, 
> residents and their political allies for decades passed ordinances 
> that impeded access for nonresidents and "undesirable" visitors. 
> Homeowners fortified their beach frontage with jetties, groins, and 
> walls. Those practices formed what the author terms a "sand curtain" 
> separating gilded towns like Madison, Greenwich, and Old Saybrook 
> from decaying industrial cities such as New Haven, Bridgeport, and 
> Hartford. Meanwhile, poor families of color saw recreational 
> opportunities limited to opened fire hydrants, unkempt parks, and 
> polluted urban waterways. One of the most egregious examples was 
> Hartford's South Brook Park River, the so-called river of tears in 
> which several children drowned while swimming. Many well-to-do 
> residents professed concern over such 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-California]: Malka on Ryan, 'Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via 
https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
> Date: May 3, 2020 at 9:24:41 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-California]:  Malka on Ryan, 'Taking the Land to 
> Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> Mary P. Ryan.  Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History 
> of North America.  Austin  University of Texas Press, 2019.  
> Illustrations. 448 pp.  $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4773-1783-9.
> 
> Reviewed by Adam Malka (University of Oklahoma)
> Published on H-California (May, 2020)
> Commissioned by Khal Schneider
> 
> In this conceptually ambitious history of pre-Civil War Baltimore and 
> San Francisco, Mary P. Ryan seeks to understand what the history of 
> these two cities can reveal about the history of the American nation 
> of which they were both, eventually, a part. I say "ambitious" 
> because in the broadest sense Ryan advances several broad 
> historiographical arguments on the importance of urban history to 
> North American history: that large municipalities nurtured democracy 
> no less than did the supposed rugged individuals of the agricultural 
> frontier; that it was in cosmopolitan centers where capitalism was 
> propelled and, in occasionally surprising ways, altered; and that 
> metropolises like Baltimore and San Francisco provide an entirely 
> different vantage point to understand the political geography of the 
> Civil War era. But above all, this is a book about the simultaneous 
> making of cities and the formation of the United States, and about 
> how the two were often one and the same. For in Ryan's hands, cities 
> were more than mere sites where the US nation formed. They were, 
> perhaps, the essential sites. 
> 
> Ryan organizes _Taking the Land to Make the City _into four sections. 
> Part 1 looks at the geographic practices of the indigenous people who 
> inhabited the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bays for several thousand 
> years before European contact--the ancestors of the Powhatans and the 
> Ohlone, respectively--and then narrates how the English and Spanish 
> (again, respectively) took the land and began converting it into 
> individual parcels of private property. The brutal European 
> expropriation of Indian land did not produce the cities of Baltimore 
> and San Francisco immediately, but it did establish the social, 
> economic, and political foundations upon which such city making could 
> proceed. Part 2 then moves into the heart of Ryan's story, describing 
> how settlers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 
> centuries began to produce their urban spaces. Along the Chesapeake, 
> a mixture of public and private actors worked together, sometimes 
> tensely and other times harmoniously, to build the row houses, 
> impressive monuments, and orthogonal streets that characterize 
> Baltimore to this day. Meanwhile, around the bay of San Francisco, 
> _pobladores_ (settlers) like Francisco de Haro created what Ryan 
> calls "a new and distinctive landscape, one that extended out into 
> ranchland, came together around a plaza, and acquired the legitimacy 
> of a pueblo" (p. 173). Although they took different paths, and 
> although they drew from different geographic traditions, the local 
> inhabitants of these blossoming cities practiced a popular form of 
> self-government that had "lasting consequences" for both the Mexican 
> and US republics (p. 127). 
> 
> The second half of the book examines the rise of Baltimore and San 
> Francisco as modern, capitalist metropolises. Part 3, which consists 
> of two of the book's most fascinating chapters, narrates how by the 
> 1850s each city came to resemble the other in terms of power and 
> size. The paths they took, however, diverged. Baltimore's tale 
> involved an energetic municipality allied with an ever-growing 
> private sector: "as private corporations claimed their private rights 
> and privileges, the mayor, city council, and taxpayers were left with 
> a growing burden of public responsibilities" (p. 256). San 
> Francisco's tale, meanwhile, grew out of the US annexation of Alta 
> California, the Gold Rush, and the frantic land grab that followed. 
> The end result of all this rushing and all this grabbing was a 
> distinctly Californian urban landscape, one that did not replicate 
> Baltimore's grid so much as it wrote "a pattern of blocks, lots, and 
> an occasional public square" down the peninsula and toward 

[Marxism] Dennis Tourish on raising dissent in Leninist sects

[Aaron Kyereh-Mireku via Marxism]

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'Now, this case is not terribly significant in itself. It is only important in 
that many, many ex-members could tell similar stories – moreover, the 
ex-members of innumerable Marxist-Leninist organisations could do the same. 
Please note the pattern. There is never is a right way to go about raising 
dissent in the CWI, or any similar organisation. You inquire about how to 
openly raise an issue, but the big guns of the leadership try to talk you out 
of it, and tell you that you risk the destruction of your political credibility 
if you carry it forward. You talk to people informally (a perfectly normal 
activity) – this is a conspiracy. You write to them instead – you are 
by-passing official structures. You raise it on a committee – you should have 
informally discussed it first, rather than risk disorientating the membership. 
You submit a critical article to the Internal Bulletin, but are denounced for 
not discussing it informally (at the risk of starting a conspiracy!), before 
committing your views to writing. But whatever you do, it will be wrong. The 
trick is to make your despicable behaviour in how you express your dissent the 
issue, rather than engage with the dissent itself. The full weight of the 
apparatus is then mobilised to destroy the person concerned. Unless you are 
Peter Taaffe, Hadden or some other Leader, in which case whatever you want to 
do goes. I am certain that Finn and Clem faced similar pressures, and as busy 
people with a real life and above all a sense of proportion figured they had 
better things to do. I personally just felt demoralised, and left for a 
breather which has thankfully turned into a long and more satisfying 
alternative life.'-Dennis Tourish

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[Marxism] Pandemic brings Trump's war on science to the boil – but who will win? | Ed Pilkington | The Guardian

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/03/science-donald-trump-coronavirus


Sent from my iPhone

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[Marxism] Neil Davidson has died

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Posted on FB by Sebastian Budgen)

Neil Davidson - one of the kindest, most thoughtful, least pompous and 
one of the most brilliant comrades we will ever know - has left us, far, 
far two early. HM Books will, in due course, be publishing two of his 
new books and the journal will be making available his articles. A 
really terrible loss for us all.


From his partner Cathy:

Dear All - as you can see, this is to convey the sad news that Neil died 
this morning, peacefully here at home with me, eight months after his 
diagnosis with brain cancer.


We have been wonderfully supported during this last phase of his illness 
by our local District Nurses and West Lothian care teams, backed up by 
our GP practice, Marie Curie palliative care experts and others, all 
selflessly working on despite the pandemic.


Neil's funeral will be in Aberdeen so that his family can attend and of 
course, current restrictions mean this can only be a small private 
event. I know that many of you will want, as will I, to have a much 
fuller commemoration and celebration of Neil's life and exceptional 
achievements at a later date, and if possible when we can get together 
in person - I'll be happy to hear any ideas for that in due course. I do 
find myself in possession of a library still overflowing with books - 
and also red wine... So perhaps some redistribution of all that might 
feature in forthcoming plans!


My sister Helen came down from her home in Shetland just before the 
lockdown and remains an invaluable support and comfort - she will be 
staying here for the duration of the restrictions in any case, so I am 
not alone. Springtime in the garden is a great solace too.


The many expressions of kindness, concern, support and appreciation for 
Neil that have come in over recent months were very gratefully received 
and I managed to convey most of your messages to Neil, which meant a lot 
to both of us. We may borrow some of the fine words used by some of you 
in what we put together to be said at his funeral and I know that will 
be very helpful to his family too.


There is no need at all to reply to this e-mail. I have tried to send it 
to as many of Neil's (and my) friends and contacts as I have addresses 
for, but you may wish to pass it on to others I haven't reached. If you 
do wish to be in touch with me, e-mail or post is fine - but I'm sure 
you will understand if I am not responding to much correspondence 
meantime. Also, I would appreciate no phone calls/texts and no flowers 
etc. sent here at the moment. Thanks.


Let's remember the good times and keep working for better yet to come, 
as Neil would have wanted and did so much to inspire.


With best wishes to you all and hope you are keeping safe.

Cathy

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[Marxism] Coronavirus: scientific realities vs. economic fallacies | Lefteast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Which brings us back to the question of why we live in a socio-economic 
system that cannot afford to pause for a while.


The superficial answers are well known. Because the system is based on a 
constantly growing pile of debt, thus if debt payments stop, the whole 
system begins to unravel and everything falls apart. And because GDP 
growth is the highest goal, on which all macroeconomic and political 
decisions are based.


If the economy closes, private businesses run out of income, cannot pay 
their debts and dismiss their employees, who can no longer pay their 
rent, mortgages and other debts, all of which causes a cascade of 
defaults along the chain. Because everything is “optimized” so that the 
system pays workers only as much as to allow them to meet their daily 
needs but not to save, and because the businesses themselves have no 
reserves either, if the “pause” goes on for too long, where “too long” 
in many cases only means two to three months, the businesses close 
forever and the workers are left without the means to even buy food. 
What the latter will lead to remains to be seen.


As I said above, all of this is insanity, as there is no reasonable 
reason for it to happen if enough food is produced and the power grid, 
water and sewer systems work. There is currently no general physical 
problem that should lead to the complete disintegration of the system. 
If the system breaks down, it is entirely due to its own fundamental 
defects, thus the situation now should be a reason to reorganize the 
system, not to engage in futile attempts to save it, as it is obviously 
inherently broken.


full: 
https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/coronavirus-scientific-realities-vs-economic-fallacies/


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[Marxism] The scarring | Michael Roberts Blog

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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You would expect the Trump advisors and Wall Street chiefs to proclaim a 
quick return to normal (even though economists in investment houses 
mainly take a different view), but you may find it surprising that 
leading Keynesians agree. I think the reason is that any Keynesian 
analysis of recessions and slumps cannot deal with this pandemic. 
Keynesian theory starts with the view that slumps are the result a 
collapse in ‘effective demand’ that then leads to a fall in output and 
employment.  But as I have explained in previous posts, this slump is 
not the result of a collapse in ‘demand’, but from a closure of 
production, both in manufacturing and particularly in services.  It is a 
‘supply shock’, not a ‘demand shock’.  For that matter, the 
‘financialisation’ theorists of the Minsky school are also at a loss, 
because this slump is not the result of a credit crunch or financial 
crash, although that may yet come.


https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/05/02/the-scarring/

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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] [UCE] COVID-19, Capitalism, and Socialism – Political Animal Magazine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Victor Wallis.

https://secure-web.cisco.com/1zuLmJTXFaO9MdVae35oDlzAPmesiEmRoAMcmfCTgqEmg2bAqEx29KNPGD5DyOwj6nWihscSfwJ4OyNYK3_q8amzFThN_DDtvP3ifr1iAT_fAnk8lnrR_D7Q5pNQXXvnUJbZCOYhls4f_OUR3XWDBFoZhoGvZbMCA8382js2j2vx529N0tQYfjWA8Ma17uQ2zAPBCX114oSujBZ86bB0JB8coVOHWh-17eYOtYXdBfCVfego-vc2BfkqNrwEET2T_t6iuPZUoZSiHDi7ZteRvqqiVWvZzgz9IcCVDvREoIeOB_rcNCo0r_E73hznEVeKBWY48920ZbiSWf0U9_KW_OwzN57Mtw-pbZ2SGPi4JxUBYYXZGageMqpq_ESFw7L6nZvsN-T71f68c_1WLwoSEGQ/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicalanimalmagazine.com%2F2020%2F04%2F17%2Fcovid-19-capitalism-and-socialism%2F
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Re: [Marxism] COVID-19 debt crisis: Is Modern Monetary Theory a solution? (GLW)

[Dayne Goodwin via Marxism]

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Thanks Richard, reading the full Green Left article led me to a long
Doug Henwood article from February 2019:
Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t Helping
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/modern-monetary-theory-isnt-helping

which includes this pungent paragraph:
"And if we had a political movement strong enough to force
full-employment policies on the state, then why stop with a mere JG
[jobs guarantee]? What about democratizing the workplace, reorganizing
production to be ecologically sustainable, socializing property via
taxation and public spending, and eventually expropriating the
capitalist class? If you’re going to challenge ruling-class power, as
a JG would do, why stop there?"

Although readers of just the brief excerpt Richard quoted wouldn't
realize it, the Green Left author Neville Spencer is basically
defending Modern Monetary THEORY.  I agree with Spencer's concluding
sentence "When the COVID-19 crisis is over and we are told we can no
longer afford the increased unemployment payments, and that someone
now has to pay for the all debt that has accumulated, MMT provides
valuable arguments to draw on."



On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 9:17 AM Richard Fidler via Marxism
 wrote:
>
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> *
>
>  y-solution>
>
> "While MMT proposes a solution to the problem of unemployment, it is often put
> forward without sufficient cognisance of the fact that, for capitalism,
> unemployment is not necessarily a problem to be solved, but rather a valuable
> tool to maintain profits.
>
> Having a pool of workers who are poor and unemployed keeps up competition for
> jobs, which helps keep wages down. Economists even tend to define full
> employment as being when 4-5% of people are unemployed. Anything lower than 
> that
> is viewed as undesirable, because it strengthens workers' bargaining power.
>
> This doesn't mean that MMT should not be used to try to eliminate 
> unemployment.
> But, as long as capitalism exists, measures to eliminate unemployment will be
> met with a war and not a thank you.
>
> All the money and power of capital and its media and politicians will be 
> brought
> to fight against measures that would have all workers benefiting from decent
> standards of living.
>
> There are likewise problems if MMT were to be used as a solution to the
> environmental crisis, if the capitalist sector left to its own devices. If an
> army of job guarantee workers were enlisted to help save the planet while a
> capitalist sector is left to destroy it, the climate catastrophe would merely 
> be
> postponed.
>
> Also, on the environmental front, while MMT provides a means to solve
> unemployment by using the economy to capacity, the environmental crisis means
> that we may not want to use the economy to capacity."
>
>
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