[Marxism] Cuba Has Sent 2, 000 Doctors and Nurses Overseas to Fight Covid-19 | Ed Augustin | The Nation

2020-05-25 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/cuba-doctors-covid-19/


Sent from my iPhone


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[Marxism] From the Philippines and South East Asian Left: Capitalist pandemic and socialist solutions

2020-05-25 Thread Reihana Mohideen via Marxism
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https://angmasa.org/2020/05/20/the-capitalist-pandemic-and-socialist-solutions/
https://angmasa.org/2020/05/20/capitalist-pandemic-socialist-solutions/

And on 'transforming our infrastructure systems to face pandemics'.
https://angmasa.org/2020/05/23/transforming-our-infrastructure-systems-to-face-pandemics/
-- 
Reihana Mohideen
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[Marxism] One in five in England think Covid 19 caused by Jews or Muslims

2020-05-25 Thread John Reimann via Marxism
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https://www.newsweek.com/covid-19-conspiracy-theories-england-1505899

"Nearly half of people in England believe in conspiracy theories about
COVID-19, according to a survey carried out by psychologists at the
University of Oxford, with nearly 20 percent agreeing separately that
either Jews or Muslims were responsible for spreading the virus.

In a survey of over 2,500 people, almost half of those questioned endorsed
to some degree the idea that "COVID-19 is a bioweapon developed by China to
destroy the West" and around one-fifth endorsed to some degree that "Jews
have created the virus to collapse the economy for financial gain".

Nearly 20 percent of those asked also agreed to some extent with the
statement that "Muslims are spreading the virus as an attack on Western
values."

Approximately 59 percent of adults in England believe to some degree that
the Government is misleading the public about the cause of the virus and 62
percent agree to some extent that the virus is man-made, according to the
study."

-- 
*“Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” *Felicity Dowling
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] Keynes: socialist, liberal or conservative? | Michael Roberts Blog

2020-05-25 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/06/05/keynes-socialist-liberal-or-conservative/

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[Marxism] Excerpted comment - John Smith on the crisis 2020

2020-05-25 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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This is from an interesting talk by John Smith (author of Imperialism in 
the 21st Century, MR Press 2016), given to a New Zealand Marxist group 
and the zoom of which was recently distributed by Phil Ferguson. The 
talk is in two parts, one on the bailout and the other on the effects of 
the pandemic and its economic consequences on the poorer countries in 
the global south. I have excerpted a few salient remarks.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzK5sFrhIEg
*
...*why the US government could not adopt the simple route of just 
printing that money and spending it, rather than going through this 
farrago of issuing Treasury bills**and then buying two-thirds of it 
themselves...[because] printing money and spending it to purchase bonds 
and other forms of corporate debt, "monetizing the debt," it**is 
feared...would lead to a complete collapse of confidence in the US 
currency...If investors saw the US government just printing money 
without this exercise of taking vast amounts of debt onto its balance 
sheet, they would lose confidence in the money, and with good reason, 
because all that this money is, basically, is just abstract labor.

*
*capitalists cannot find anywhere to put their money apart from US 
Treasury bonds. So the US government borrows this money from them and 
then uses it to do what those investors refuse to do, namely to purchase 
private corporate bonds, or even to spend on wages to replace the demand 
which, if the corporate investor were to spend it anywhere, would 
actually increase demand. Whatever it was they'd spend their money on.


...they don't print money. They borrow it, by issuing US Treasury bonds. 
So as they issue US Treasury bonds, they soak up what spare cash there 
is in the economy...*


*We've heard of QE1 and QE2...one of the correspondents in the Financial 
Times says that we now have not 1, not 2, but QE infinity...the US 
government is prepared to print as much money as it feels it needs to, 
to purchase however many bonds it needs to issue, in order to replace 
demand and to replace the corporate bonds which private investors refuse 
to purchase.


...they will therefore be buying their own debt.

...why can't they just cancel that debt?

...you can't just cancel a debt; you have to imagine that debt as a 
quantity of negative energy. You can't just cancel that negative energy 
unless you cancel an equivalent amount of positive energy. You would 
need to spend some of your cash, to use some of your assets in order to 
cancel that liability. In other words, debtors cancelling the debt is 
not just the same as tearing up a piece of paper. To cancel that 
negative force, you need to cancel an equivalent positive force...


this is reaching the end of the road. It cannot continue. Capital cannot 
continue to rule in the same way...it has been traveling since the 
crisis of the 1970s, and it cannot continue in the direction in which it 
has been traveling since the 2007-2009 crisis. All they've done, all of 
this accumulation of debt, has been to kick the can down the road and to 
postpone the day of reckoning, and to make sure that when that day of 
reckoning comes, it will be even more cataclysmic.



Impact on Africa, Asia and Latin America:

Financial Times:

   With Europe and the United States, the virus arrived first, forcing
   a public health response, and then - as the enormity of the crisis
   struck home - a massive fiscal and monetary injection. In much of
   the developing world, the sequence has happened in reverse, with the
   economic devastation of the corona virus arriving before the
   epidemic itself.

   Emerging market assets have been dumped on a scale never seen
   before. According to the Institute of International Finance, foreign
   investors have withdrawn $95 bn from stocks and bonds since they
   woke up to the crisis on January 21. That is four times the outflows
   in the same period after the start of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Asia, Africa and Latin America were already largely in stagnation...it 
is a crisis that truly is global. It's not just affecting the 
imperialist countries; it's affecting the whole world...causing 
collapsing currencies, collapse in remittances from their workers who 
had gone to rich countries, hundreds of millions in the global south who 
are completely dependent on remittances from their family members, and 
those remittances have plummeted in the recent time, while tourism is 
very important for many, many countries in the global south, which has 
come to a complete halt.


foreign investors have withdrawn $95 bn from stocks and bonds since 
January 21


Financial Times: _
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[Marxism] Marx and Keynes

2020-05-25 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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In the latest issue of Catalyst, there's an effusive review by James 
Mongiovi of James Crotty's new book "Keynes Against Capitalism: His 
Economic Case for Liberal Socialism".  Titled "Was Keynes a Socialist", 
it makes the case that his writings are definitely anti-capitalist but 
avoids pinning the label socialist on him. If you are going to write 
such a review, you have to deal with the obvious differences between 
Marxian socialism and the "liberal socialism" that Keynes defended in 
interviews with The Nation and other magazines. Mongiovi quotes Keynes 
on Marx:


“My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the 
Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many 
people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and 
containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me 
inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, 
academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as 
material for the purpose.”


Since, as far as I understand it, both Crotty and Mongiovi are 
post-Keynesians, or at least straddle Marxism and post-Keynesianism, 
this is a quote that might make the case for Keynes as a socialist of 
any sort rather untenable. Here's how Mongiovi explains it away:


"Keynes was never quite willing to give Marx his due on the matter of 
aggregate demand. His distaste for Marx appears to have been an 
aesthetic reaction rather than ideological or scientific in nature; I 
suspect that Keynes was allergic to Marx’s dense Teutonic prose. Be that 
as it may, Crotty, without explicitly making the point, enables us to 
see that Keynes was an instinctive dialectician."


I am not sure about an instinctive dialectics. I studied Hegel in some 
depth when I was in graduate school and I rather doubt any of his 
methods that influenced Marx so much can be put on the same level as the 
sex drive or any other instinct. As for aesthetic reaction and dense 
Teutonic prose, I find Marx much clearer than Keynes myself:


"Our normal psychological law that, when the real income of the 
community increases or decreases, its consumption will increase or 
decrease but not so fast, can, therefore, be translated — not, indeed, 
with absolute accuracy but subject to qualifications which are obvious 
and can easily be stated in a formally complete fashion — into the 
propositions that ΔCw and ΔYw have the same sign, but ΔYw > ΔCw, where 
Cw is the consumption in terms of wage-units. This is merely a 
repetition of the proposition already established on p. 29 above."


https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch10.htm

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[Marxism] Trump's Economic Adviser Calls Americans Facing Unemployment 'Human Capital Stock' | HuffPost

2020-05-25 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kevin-hasset-economy-human-capital-stock_n_5ecb395fc5b61967c333b309

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[Marxism] Dariush Mehrjui’s “The Cow”, the film that launched the Iranian New Wave | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2020-05-25 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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About a month ago, Shalon Van Tine, the young and brilliant Marxist film 
critic that joined me in an interview by Eric Draitser, messaged me on 
FB: “I had a lot of fun talking to you on the podcast today! Since you 
like Iranian cinema, have you ever seen The Cow? I absolutely love that 
one.” I messaged her back: “Never saw ‘The Cow’ but am familiar with its 
importance. Loved doing the show with you, btw. Our tastes are very 
similar.”


About a week ago, I decided to see if the film was available as VOD. Not 
only was it available, it was just one of a vast library of Iranian 
films, many with subtitles like “The Cow”, that are archived on the 
IMVBox website. It is entirely free without subtitles and only $2.49 
with. There are 323 films with English subtitles, including “The Cow”. 
For anybody with the least bit of interest in one of the world’s great 
filmmaking industries, IMVBox is indispensable.


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/25/dariush-mehrjuis-the-cow-the-film-that-launched-the-iranian-new-wave/


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[Marxism] The contradictions of the Council on Foreign Relations

2020-05-25 Thread John Reimann via Marxism
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As the foremost representative of US capitalist strategists, "Foreign
Affairs" (of the Council on Foreign Relations) is an interesting mix. Their
articles on US strategy tend to be simply the most muddled, idealistic
nonsense. For example, there is one article on proposed US policy in the
so-called "Middle East" on line now. On the other hand, their analyses of
events tend to be quite serious. Here is one example, with key sections
quoted below. The article is on "The Coming Post-Covid Anarchy":

"“Yet despite the best efforts of ideological warriors in Beijing and
Washington, the uncomfortable truth is that China and the United States are
both likely to emerge from this crisis significantly diminished. Neither a
new Pax Sinica nor a renewed Pax Americana will rise from the ruins.
Rather, both powers will be weakened, at home and abroad. And the result
will be a continued slow but steady drift toward international anarchy
across everything from international security to trade to pandemic
management. With nobody directing traffic, various forms of rampant
nationalism are taking the place of order and cooperation. The chaotic
nature of national and global responses to the pandemic thus stands as a
warning of what could come on an even broader scale.

As with other historical inflection points, three factors will shape the
future of the global order: changes in the relative military and economic
strength of the great powers, how those changes are perceived around the
world, and what strategies the great powers deploy. Based on all three
factors, China and the United States have reason to worry about their
global influence in the post-pandemic world.
Contrary to the common trope, China’s national power has taken a hit from
this crisis on multiple levels. The outbreak has opened up significant
political dissension within the Chinese Communist Party, even prompting
thinly veiled criticism of President Xi Jinping’s highly centralized
leadership style. This has been reflected in a number of semiofficial
commentaries that have mysteriously found their way into the public domain
during April. Xi’s draconian lockdown of half the country for months to
suppress the virus has been widely hailed, but he has not emerged
unscathed. Internal debate rages on the precise number of the dead and the
infected, on the risks of second-wave effects as the country slowly
reopens, and on the future direction of economic and foreign policy.
The economic damage has been massive. Despite China’s published
return-to-work rates, no amount of domestic stimulus in the second half of
2020 will make up for the loss in economic activity in the first and second
quarters. Drastic economic retrenchment among China’s principal trading
partners will further impede economic recovery plans, given that
pre-crisis, the traded sector of the economy represented 38 percent of GDP.
Overall, 2020 growth is likely to be around zero—the worst performance
since the Cultural Revolution five decades ago. China’s debt-to-GDP ratio
already stands at around 310 percent, acting as a drag on other Chinese
spending priorities, including education, technology, defense, and foreign
aid. And all of this comes on the eve of the party’s centenary celebrations
in 2021, by which point the leadership had committed to double China’s GDP
over a decade. The pandemic now makes that impossible.

As for the United States’ power, the Trump administration’s chaotic
management has left an indelible impression around the world of a country
incapable of handling its own crises, let alone anybody else’s. More
important, the United States seems set to emerge from this period as a more
divided polity rather than a more united one, as would normally be the case
following a national crisis of this magnitude; this continued fracturing of
the American political establishment adds a further constraint on U.S.
global leadership.
Meanwhile, conservative estimates see the U.S. economy shrinking by between
six and 14 percent in 2020, the largest single contraction since the
demobilization at the end of World War II. Washington’s fiscal
interventions meant to arrest the slide already amount to ten percent of
GDP, pushing the United States’ ratio of public debt to GDP toward 100
percent—near the wartime record of 106 percent. The U.S. dollar’s global
reserve currency status enables the government to continue selling U.S.
treasuries to fund the deficit. Nonetheless, large-scale debt sooner or
later will constrain post-recovery spending, including on the military. And
there’s also risk that the current economic crisis will metastasize into a
broader financial crisis, although the 

[Marxism] Coronavirus, the economic crisis and Indian capitalism | Michael Roberts Blog

2020-05-25 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/05/25/coronavirus-the-economic-crisis-and-indian-capitalism/

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[Marxism] Killing for coffee

2020-05-25 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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TLS, May 22, 2020
Food & drink|Book Review
Killing for coffee
The villains behind a hot drink
By Judith Hawley

COFFEELAND
A history
448pp. Allen Lane. £25 (US $30).
Augustine Sedgewick

“Towards the end of his life”, reports Augustine Sedgewick, Goethe 
“could see in his mind the invisible connections that bound the world 
together.” “In nature”, Goethe observed, “we never see anything 
isolated, but everything in connection with something else before it, 
beside it, under it, and over it.” That is precisely how Sedgewick sees 
coffee, and in the impressive Coffeeland – ostensibly a history of the 
rise of one coffee producer, James Hill, who in the late 1800s founded a 
huge estate on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador – he 
demonstrates the significance of coffee as an archetypal global 
commodity. When Sedgewick was writing, coffee was the world’s most 
valuable trading commodity after oil. Like oil, it is a vector for the 
transmission of energy. And, like oil, it has been responsible for the 
degradation of the environment and the oppression of some people, as 
well as the enrichment and pleasure of others. It is, Sedgewick sums up 
in the subtitle to the US edition of his book, “our favorite drug”. As 
this review goes to press – after a pandemic-induced price war has 
slashed the price of crude oil – coffee might yet claim the commodities 
crown.


Sedgewick’s story begins and ends in 1979, in the early days of El 
Salvador’s thirteen-year civil war, with the kidnap of a 
third-generation coffee baron, Jaime Hill Jr. Marxist-Leninist rebel 
groups had stepped up their campaign against the American-backed 
military dictatorship and were targeting businessmen and government 
personnel. The state, meanwhile, was deploying death squads to terrorize 
and “disappear” suspects. “The state was built on killing and coffee”, 
says Sedgewick. He explains how this dire situation arose, delineating 
El Salvador’s increasingly fraught connections with the wider world in 
the decades after the arrival of the nineteen-year-old James Hill in 
1889. Hill had escaped the Manchester slums and aimed to make his way as 
a textile salesman, but marriage to the daughter of a wealthy local 
coffee farmer set him on a more lucrative path. He benefited from the 
Salvadoran government’s promotion of coffee as a cash crop through 
generous subsidies to planters and the forced privatization of communal 
land that had been vital to the subsistence of the peasant and 
indigenous Pipil population. He continued to profit despite frequent 
fluctuations in prices caused by natural disasters, including 
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and competition from Brazilian 
producers. Brazil – which depended on slave labour until 1889 and 
thereafter tried to maintain its dominance by growing inferior Santos 
beans and employing sharp practice – emerges as a minor villain in 
Sedgewick’s tale.


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A more important player is the United States, and Sedgewick does not 
oversimplify the country’s role. For much of the nineteenth century, the 
US was a useful market to El Salvador. Americans had become major 
consumers of coffee after independence (when tea was suddenly harder to 
come by because of the rupture with the British Empire), and continued 
to rely on the beverage during times of mass mobilization caused by 
events such as the Civil War, Gold Rush and First World War. Coffee was 
also the drink of the “huddled masses” of European immigrants, who could 
barely afford to eat but needed energy to work. When the First World War 
disrupted Atlantic trade and limited Brazilian exports, importers and 
roasters based in San Francisco were able to open up Pacific trade 
routes. Central American coffee producers profited.


The turning point in US–El Salvador relations was the Spanish–American 
War of 1898, after which America increasingly exercised imperial 
ambitions in Central America. It also gained new coffee-producing 
colonies: the Philippines and Puerto Rico. In a description of the 
Pan-American Exposition that opened in Buffalo in May 1901 – two years 
late, thanks to the war – Sedgewick interweaves several strands of the 
narrative. Coffee was central to the exposition – a display of coffee 
from “blossom to cup” ran for three-quarters of a mile. “The 
‘effectiveness’ of the coffee exhibit,” Sedgewick argues, “was in 
depicting the hemisphere as a kind of seamless economic collaboration, 
business as nature.” The Republican President William McKinley – 
nicknamed “Coffee Bill” for his heroic delivery as a teenaged commissary 
sergeant of hot coffee to exhausted