[Marxism] Cuba Has Sent 2, 000 Doctors and Nurses Overseas to Fight Covid-19 | Ed Augustin | The Nation
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[Marxism] From the Philippines and South East Asian Left: Capitalist pandemic and socialist solutions
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://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 _ 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] One in five in England think Covid 19 caused by Jews or Muslims
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.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 _ 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] Keynes: socialist, liberal or conservative? | Michael Roberts Blog
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[Marxism] Excerpted comment - John Smith on the crisis 2020
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 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: _ _
[Marxism] Marx and Keynes
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 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 _ 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] Trump's Economic Adviser Calls Americans Facing Unemployment 'Human Capital Stock' | HuffPost
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[Marxism] Dariush Mehrjui’s “The Cow”, the film that launched the Iranian New Wave | 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. * 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/ _ 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] The contradictions of the Council on Foreign Relations
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. * 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
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[Marxism] Killing for coffee
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. * 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. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEKLY TLS NEWSLETTER 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