Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Whatever becomes of the reforms, the point is people in massive numbers
have gone into motion and learned how to win victories.  That hasn't been
easily forgotten in the past and it won't be forgotten now.  Most likely,
there will be the usual processes--to get them off the streets so as not to
embarass Biden (over "defunding the police," etc.)  The other day, a whole
coven of corporate entities announced that they were going to throw massive
amounts of money into the fight against racism, which means astroturfing on
a grand scale.

But those hundreds of thousands who went into the streets will remember
what they've done, and will go back out there much more readily having done
it once.

The issue is leadership, of course.  There must be organization confident
enough to structure a demostratic dynamic that isn't there yet, something
that will actually spread that sense of gaining power through independent
actions.  The impulse for such a thing is going to come out of the current
movements, but they are a very mixed bag politically, and are going to
carry this to the next level unevenly.

But we--folks my age--should be feeling very fortunate to have lasted long
enough to see at least the start of something this promising.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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[Marxism] Minneapolis City Council

2020-06-08 Thread Anthony Boynton via Marxism
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IMHO the vote by this city council is historic, not because of what they
are going to do with it, but because of the benchmark it has set for all
politics one millimeter to the left of Joe Biden.

Of course, no city council will really abolish the police, but any shell
game reshuffle is bound to weaken the police, the politicians who propose
it, and all of those to their right.

This is great news!

On towards abolishing the police. Life is good!
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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread A.R. G via Marxism
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It is remarkable how irrelevant both the Leftist vanguard groupuscules and
the NGO industry have been with what is the first serious rebellion in
American history in probably 40 years. I am on another NGO-dominated
list-serv and seeing people post empty statements that provide no tangible
support as well as offering trainings over arcane legal topics that have no
relevance to what people on the street can do is quite hilarious. It's like
a struggle to pretend to be relevant. I suppose those of us who are serious
should learn from their mistake and start being more humble about our own
irrelevance. For me, that has meant trying to limit my involvement in lefty
causes to services I can actually provide (like legal defense).

I think if someone is interested in forming some sort of political party to
channel the revolutionary spirit it should be learned through looking at
the people in Minneapolis and how they have managed to organize themselves.
And then contrast that with the dual Leftist(TM) and 501(c)3-inc.
organizations that have corrupted and misguided people who want a better
future.

Amith R. Gupta


On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 6:04 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> On 6/8/20 7:57 PM, STEVEN ROBINSON via Marxism wrote:
> > But is there a party somewhere in all of that?  SR
>
> I don't even see the embryo of the embryo of one. That's a steep price
> humanity is paying for the idiotic vanguardist pretensions that we were
> guilty of in the 60s and 70s. There are thousands of unorganized
> Marxists in the USA today. God willing, they will rise to the occasion
> and cohere.
>
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[Marxism] How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19 | Don Fitz | Monthly Review

2020-06-08 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://monthlyreview.org/2020/06/01/how-che-guevara-taught-cuba-to-confront-covid-19/


Sent from my iPhone

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[Marxism] Moser submission on General Strike

2020-06-08 Thread Richard Moser via Marxism
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https://befreedom.co/2020/05/08/what-is-the-general-strike/ 





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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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On 6/8/20 7:57 PM, STEVEN ROBINSON via Marxism wrote:

But is there a party somewhere in all of that?  SR


I don't even see the embryo of the embryo of one. That's a steep price 
humanity is paying for the idiotic vanguardist pretensions that we were 
guilty of in the 60s and 70s. There are thousands of unorganized 
Marxists in the USA today. God willing, they will rise to the occasion 
and cohere.


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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread Michael Meeropol via Marxism
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GOOD PARALLEL, LOUIS ''

"This was our version of the Tunisian fruit vendor
self-immolating."

--- I do think some of the reforms might make life easier for African
Americans --- a few cops going to prison might work wonders ---

(David Levering Lewis who put together an anthology of lynching articles
--- AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN (I think) was the title ---once said
that lynching stopped when the forces of law and order actually were
willing to shoot people in lynch mobs --- that stopped the practice cold!)
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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread STEVEN ROBINSON via Marxism
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But is there a party somewhere in all of that?  SR

> On 06/08/2020 4:29 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism < 
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu > wrote:
> 
> 
>  Over the next decade the class struggle will conceivably deepen to the 
> point where you will see genuine manifestations of dual power, not soup 
> kitchens but total control over entire neighborhoods like Harlem or maybe all 
> of NYC. In such cases, people will resort to armed self-defense. I know all 
> thissounds far-fetched but who would have thought 2 years ago that we'd have 
> higher unemployment than in the Great Depression with massivemobilizations 
> against capitalist misrule over another black person being murdered by the 
> cops? This was our version of the Tunisian fruit vendorself-immolating.
> 

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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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On 6/8/20 6:35 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote:

ow up at all?

The only possible benefit of this reshuffle that I see is to mollify the 
liberal elements in the middle class, and the less checked-out among the 
afflicted, and to force the police union to back off and make a few 
compromises. But how long does that last? And to what end? How long, for 
instance, have liberal and neighborhood groups tried to implement 
community control, with no success and no change?


I don't expect any of these reforms to be meaningful. Over the next 
decade the class struggle will conceivably deepen to the point where you 
will see genuine manifestations of dual power, not soup kitchens but 
total control over entire neighborhoods like Harlem or maybe all of NYC. 
In such cases, people will resort to armed self-defense. I know all this 
sounds far-fetched but who would have thought 2 years ago that we'd have 
higher unemployment than in the Great Depression with massive 
mobilizations against capitalist misrule over another black person being 
murdered by the cops? This was our version of the Tunisian fruit vendor 
self-immolating.


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[Marxism] "Round Up The Green Hats": NYPD Accused Of Deliberately Targeting Legal Observers In Brutal Bronx Mass Arrest - Gothamist

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://gothamist.com/news/round-green-hats-nypd-accused-deliberately-targeting-legal-observers-brutal-bronx-mass-arrest

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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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John Reimann wrote

Here's an article of mine on the vote of the Minneapolis City Council to 
disband the police: 
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/06/08/minneapolis-city-council-votes-to-disband-police-will-they/




First of all, the move to defund or abolish the police department eludes 
and obscures the real problem: as John says, the class relations are 
going to remain the same.


And to add to what John notes here, the police have greatly increased in 
numbers from my childhood in the late twenties, when there was one cop 
in my neighborhood, walking a beat, and acquainted with and generally 
friendly received by most. That changed quickly as the Depression 
deepened, and with the coming of the patrol car and night sticks 
replaced by lethal weapons. And the police have been given increased 
latitude by the power-wielders over the years because the system has 
insurmountable problems in maintaining social control.


Just like the army, police are recruited from the working class or the 
otherwise 'expendables,' who are faced with poverty and have no other 
jobs available, and who are young, often rural and usually unaware of 
the workings of the world. Just like the army, in which I spent three 
miserable years, the police are taught to hate, then they're taught to 
kill those they've been taught to hate, and just like the army, then 
they're assured, as was Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, that the army 
looks the other way, in fact expects you to do exactly what you did, and 
you're home free, with a lifetime of PTSD. This in a system of rigid 
discipline, where the only answer is yes SIR, and where you're also 
taught that you're there to protect your buddies in a crowd control 
situation, whatever the effect on anyone else. So almost anything goes, 
and you know you have department and powerful police union backup. Above 
all, your mandate is to protect property, which absolutely doesn't mean 
house and property in a ghetto neighborhood, You're there to instill 
fear in an uncontrollable social situation. So who's going to call the 
out-of-control cops to 'protect and serve,' when they are most likely 
going to make things worse, if they show up at all?


The only possible benefit of this reshuffle that I see is to mollify the 
liberal elements in the middle class, and the less checked-out among the 
afflicted, and to force the police union to back off and make a few 
compromises. But how long does that last? And to what end? How long, for 
instance, have liberal and neighborhood groups tried to implement 
community control, with no success and no change?


Property, wealth and its unequal distribution, is the basic problem, 
obviously, as John notes. It's endemic and unavoidable in this system, 
where the poor exist in good part as a reserve army of labor, and as the 
inevitable result of any system of devil take the hindmost. And that's 
where the discussion should be going and where the pressure should be 
applied. Anything less is dragging out the problem, really just hiding 
problem and solution and making it worse. The impulsion toward 
increasing militarization of the police, as the jobs disappear, worker 
organizing becomes ever more difficult, and inequality escalates, is not 
going to go away under the system of capitalist exploitation and inequality.

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[Marxism] Syria Insight: Syria's collapsing economy threatens Assad's rule

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2020/6/7/syria-insight-syrias-collapsing-economy-threatens-assads-rule

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[Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread John Reimann via Marxism
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Here's an article of mine on the vote of the Minneapolis City Council to
disband the police:

"When the police make a high-profile arrest, they make him or her walk in
public through the throng of reporters. On June 6, Minneapolis’s reform
minded young mayor, Jacob Frey, refused to commit to disbanding the police
in a crowd of thousands. He was booed and forced to do a “people’s perp
walk” through the crowd and back to his condo. Shortly after that, the
Minneapolis City Council voted to disband their police force. This is
attracting a lot of attention. But what does it really mean?
Oaklandsocialist talked with a union steward and anti-police brutality
activist in Minneapolis. We will call him “Activist”. He warned: “We have
to be prepared for them to do some things we wouldn’t expect.” In other
words, not allow those steps to undermine or divert the power of the
movement. He explained: “they’re not going to get rid of policing… they’re
going to move to some unique form of policing. The class relations are
going to remain the same.…” He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if
“abolish the police would win a popular vote among high school students.”
He continued: “Because this has become a popular slogan, it will be
difficult to just dress up the MPD…. They’re going to have to do some major
changes….”"
Read full article:
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/06/08/minneapolis-city-council-votes-to-disband-police-will-they/

-- 
*“Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” *Felicity Dowling
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[Marxism] Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, June 8, 2020
Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms
By Ben Smith

Wesley Lowery woke up in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 14, 2014, his cheek sore 
from where a police officer had smashed it into a vending machine. He 
was also wondering how to get his shoelaces back into his boat shoes, 
after the police took them when tossing him in a holding cell the night 
before. Around 8:30 that morning, he dialed into CNN’s morning show, 
where a host passed on some advice from Joe Scarborough at MSNBC: “Next 
time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because 
you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.”


Mr. Lowery responded furiously. “I would invite Joe Scarborough to come 
down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he’s sitting sipping his 
Starbucks smugly,” he said on CNN, describing “having tear gas shot at 
me, having rubber bullets shot at me, having mothers, daughters, crying, 
having a 19-year-old boy, crying as he had to run and pull his 
21-year-old sister out of a cloud of tear gas.”


The outburst from a 24-year-old Washington Post reporter provoked eye 
rolls in Washington. But Mr. Lowery would go on to make his name in 
Ferguson as an aggressive and high-profile star, shaping a raw new 
national perspective on racial injustice. Six years later, few in the 
news business doubt Mr. Lowery’s premise: that American police are more 
brutal and dishonest than much of the media that came of age 
pre-Ferguson reported.


“I look at everything differently, and would never do that again,” Mr. 
Scarborough told me of his 2014 exchange with Mr. Lowery. “I should have 
kept my mouth shut.”


Historical moments don’t have neat beginnings and endings, but the new 
way of covering civil rights protests, like the Black Lives Matter 
movement itself, coalesced on the streets of Ferguson. Seeing the 
brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens up 
close, and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of 
reporters, most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned 
to their newsrooms.


And by 2014, they had in Twitter a powerful outlet. The platform offered 
a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to 
hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their 
tongues about racism.


Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in 
August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground 
between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience 
that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness 
on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.


The conflict exploded in recent days into public protests at The New 
York Times, ending in the resignation of its top Opinion editor on 
Sunday; The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose executive editor resigned on 
Saturday over the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” and the ensuing anger 
from his staff; and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And it has been the 
subject of quiet agony at The Washington Post, which Mr. Lowery left 
earlier this year, months after the executive editor, Martin Baron, 
threatened to fire him for expressing his views on Twitter about race, 
journalism and other subjects.


Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ “core value needs to be the 
truth, not the perception of objectivity,” as he told me, has been 
winning in a series of battles, many around how to cover race. Heated 
Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like “racially charged.” 
The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using “racist” 
and “lie” more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump’s behavior. 
The Times vowed to remake its Opinion section after Senator Tom Cotton’s 
Op-Ed article calling for the use of troops in American cities 
infuriated the newsroom last week.


Yamiche Alcindor said that when she saw on Twitter the news of the 
shooting and protests in Ferguson, she “thought it was something USA 
Today should be covering on the ground.”Credit...Curtis Compton/The 
Atlanta Journal Constitution


They Raised Their Hands

The press corps that landed in Ferguson after a black 18-year-old, 
Michael Brown Jr., was fatally shot by a white police officer, was 
blacker than most big American newsrooms. That wasn’t an accident — many 
reporters had raised their hands to cover a story that unfolded, first, 
on Twitter. Mr. Lowery, a new congressional reporter, asked if he could 
help out on The Post’s live blog chronicling the aftermath of the 
shooting, and instead found himself in the streets. Yamiche Alcindor, 
then 27, saw 

[Marxism] Mask Off: Crisis

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Richard Hunsinger & Nathan Eisenberg give an in-depth analysis of the 
current crisis where economic breakdown, pandemic, and mass revolt 
collide into a historic conjuncture that will forever shape the 
trajectory of world events.


https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/06/08/mask-off-crisis-struggle-in-the-pandemic/

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[Marxism] Fwd: protest in Hamilton Montana

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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(HT to Alan Ginsberg.)

This is fantastic

About 200 demonstrators lined both sides of Highway 93 at the Main 
Street intersection.


The protest was organized by a Corvallis High School senior and her friends.

https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/supporters-of-black-lives-matter-movement-protest-in-hamilton

Statistics re Hamilton

2018 pop. 4809

2010 -- 95% white, 0.3% African American

2013 "metropolitan" area pop -- 12,979

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton,_Montana#2010_census



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[Marxism] Is This the Trump Tipping Point?

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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(Clearly this article ends on a sour note by endorsing Biden but it is 
still a persuasive case being made by the wheels falling off the Trump 
wagon. As she puts it, "Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle.")


NY Times Op-Ed, June 8, 2020
Is This the Trump Tipping Point?
By Jennifer Senior

You never want to say that you’ve reached a tipping point with this 
administration. Donald J. Trump has proved to be the Nosferatu of 
American politics: heartless, partial to Slavs, beneath grace and thus 
far impervious to destruction.


Even when I read my colleague Jonathan Martin’s fine piece on Saturday, 
about how some high-profile Republicans refuse to vote for Trump or are 
struggling with publicly lending him their support, I thought: yes, but. 
They’re just a handful. They’re the usual suspects. Too few of them have 
coattails.


Yet something right now really is different. I think.

Before diving into the more entrancing developments, I’ll start with the 
obvious: Trump’s old tactics, once so reliable, are starting to fail 
him, utterly.


It was a winning strategy to crow about a border wall with Mexico, but 
it’s a loser — and a sign of pure cowardice — to build one around your 
own White House. He once basked in the reflected glow of “his generals”; 
now those generals are laying waste to him, with James Mattis, his 
former defense secretary, explicitly condemning Trump’s immature and 
divisive leadership, and John Kelly, the president’s former chief of 
staff, saying yep, sounds about right.


Maybe there was a time when religious conservatives would have applauded 
a photo of Trump standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Bible 
in hand. But using pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to clear 
anguished protesters out of the way backfired. The Episcopal bishop of 
Washington reacted in horror; Trump’s support among white Catholics 
slipped 11 points between April and May.


Maybe there was a time when stigmatizing all progressive protesters as 
invading marauders would have worked — bigotry, it gets the job done — 
but not now. His proposal to suppress the tumult with the military was 
greeted with disapproval by his current secretary of defense, Mark 
Esper, and disgust by Mattis; the Black Lives Matter movement now polls 
at an all-time high, with 66 percent of Americans disapproving of how 
Trump has handled the response to George Floyd’s death.


Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle. A historic health crisis, 
an economic crisis and a social crisis all at once — it’s far too much 
for a reality TV star to handle, no more manageable than it’d be for him 
to land an airplane. What this moment may have revealed, ironically 
enough, is that only in a time of stability and outrageous decadence 
could the United States have had the luxury of picking such a dark and 
divisive candidate with the intellectual firepower of a water gun. When 
Trump asked voters “What have you got to lose?” most never dreamed that 
the answer could be: Everything.


But now for the subterranean tremors that most beguile me — a suggestion 
that something deeper is afoot.


Trump, right now, is trying to stoke white fears about protests in the 
street. But he’s having little luck. On Wednesday, Lara Putnam, the 
chairman of the history department at the University of Pittsburgh, 
tweeted a modest but persuasive thread highlighting the easy victory by 
Summer Lee, a progressive African-American woman elected to the 
Pennsylvania statehouse in 2018, in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.


“Based on the history of the district — and the range of voters I’ve 
talked to there myself — it seemed entirely plausible that there would 
be white backlash against her in this moment,” Putnam told me.


If ever there were a moment for a backlash, she pointed out, this would 
have been it: Images of social unrest were all over Pittsburgh 
television the weekend before the primary, and Lee had been an outspoken 
proponent of the protesters. Voters could have selected her primary 
opponent, a moderate white borough councilman who had the backing of the 
county’s most powerful Democrat — and its Democratic Party.


Instead, voters doubled down. Lee was already winning on Election Day — 
we now know this, based on mail-in ballots — and as the ballot counting 
continued, she pulled even further ahead. Her victory suggested that the 
white suburban women and retirees in her district were unswayed by 
Trump’s demonizing and dog-whistling.


In these protests, it is possible we are seeing the rumblings of a new 
Democratic coalition. On Saturday, Putnam and two of her colleagues 
wrote that the scale and 

[Marxism] Is This the Last Stand of the ‘Law and Order’ Republicans? - POLITICO

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/08/last-stand-law-and-order-republicans-306333

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[Marxism] A Bitter Election. Accusations of Fraud. And Now Second Thoughts.

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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(Data reveals that there was no fraud in Bolivian election.)

NY Times, June 8, 2020
A Bitter Election. Accusations of Fraud. And Now Second Thoughts.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev and Maria Silvia Trigo

The election was the most tightly contested in decades: Evo Morales, 
Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, was running for a fourth term, 
facing an opposition that saw him as authoritarian and unwilling to 
relinquish power.


As the preliminary vote count began, on Oct. 20, 2019, tensions ran 
high. When the tallying stopped — suddenly and without explanation — 
then resumed again a full day later, it showed Mr. Morales had just 
enough votes to eke out a victory.


Amid suspicions of fraud, protests broke out across the country, and the 
international community turned to the Organization of American States, 
which had been invited to observe the elections, for its assessment.


The organization’s statement, which cited “an inexplicable change” that 
“drastically modifies the fate of the election,” heightened doubts about 
the fairness of the vote and fueled a chain of events that changed the 
South American nation’s history. The opposition seized on the claim to 
escalate protests, gather international support, and push Mr. Morales 
from power with military support weeks later.


Now, a study by independent researchers, using data obtained by The New 
York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities, has found that the 
Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.


The conclusion that Mr. Morales’s share of the vote jumped inexplicably 
in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate 
statistical techniques, the researchers found.


“We took a hard look at the O.A.S.’s statistical evidence and found 
problems with their methods,” said Francisco Rodríguez, an economist who 
teaches Latin American studies at Tulane University. “Once we correct 
those problems, the O.A.S.’s results go away, leaving no statistical 
evidence of fraud.”


Mr. Rodríguez conducted the study with Dorothy Kronick, an expert on 
Latin American politics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nicolás 
Idrobo, a doctoral student at the same university who is the co-author 
of a textbook on advanced statistical methods. Their study is a working 
paper that has not yet been peer reviewed.


To be sure, the authors said their analysis focused only on the O.A.S.’s 
statistical analysis of the voting results, and does not prove that the 
election was free and fair. In fact, there were a lot of documented 
problems with the vote.


In an attempt to quell the protests set off when he claimed victory, Mr. 
Morales called on the O.A.S. to conduct a “binding” election audit.


The resulting 100-page report, published in December, contained evidence 
of errors, irregularities and “a series of malicious operations” aimed 
at altering the results. These included hidden data servers, manipulated 
voting receipts and forged signatures, which the organization said made 
it impossible for it to validate the election’s results.


The O.A.S. found evidence of tampering with at least 38,000 votes. Mr. 
Morales claimed outright victory by a margin of 35,000 votes.


“There was fraud — we just don’t know where and how much,” said Calla 
Hummel, a Bolivia expert at the University of Miami who witnessed the 
election and analyzed the O.A.S.’s findings.


“The issue with the O.A.S. report is that they did it very quickly,” Dr. 
Hummel said. That shaped the narrative of the election before data could 
be properly analyzed, she said.


That initial claim by the O.A.S. is specifically what the academics are 
disputing in their study.


Mr. Morales’s downfall paved the way to a staunchly right-wing caretaker 
government, led by Jeanine Añez, which has not yet fulfilled its mandate 
to oversee swift new elections. The new government has persecuted the 
former president’s supporters, stifled dissent and worked to cement its 
hold on power.


Seven months after Mr. Morales’s downfall, Bolivia has no elected 
government and no official election date.


The O.A.S. said it stood by its statistical analysis, because it 
successfully detected early initial indications of fraud.


“It’s a moot point,” the organization’s head of electoral observations, 
Gerardo De Icaza, said in response to questions raised by the new study. 
“Statistics don’t prove or disprove fraud. Hard evidence like falsified 
statements of polls and hidden I.T. structures do. And that is what we 
found.”


The organization’s initial accusation came right after Bolivia’s most 
disputed elections since the return of democracy in the 1980s. To run 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-CivWar]: Cornish on Brown, 'Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America'

2020-06-08 Thread Andrew Stewart via Marxism
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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
Date: Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 10:08 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-CivWar]: Cornish on Brown, 'Civil War Monuments
and the Militarization of America'
To: 
Cc: H-Net Staff 


Thomas J. Brown.  Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of
America.  North Carolina  University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
384 pp.  $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-5374-7.

Reviewed by Rory T. Cornish (Winthrop University)
Published on H-CivWar (June, 2020)
Commissioned by G. David Schieffler

As an international student at Davidson College in the 1970s I took
every opportunity to visit American Civil War battlefield parks and
came to admire many of the public monuments commemorating Confederate
soldiers in southern cities. Particularly impressed by the equestrian
statutes of General Robert E. Lee in both Richmond and
Charlottesville, as well as the statue depicting General P. G. T.
Beauregard in New Orleans, I wondered why Americans were much better
at memorializing and recording their past than we were in Britain. In
retrospect, one may be forgiven for not foreseeing the controversy
these particular statues, together with the many others dedicated to
Confederate soldiers, would generate, for as Thomas J. Brown notes,
in 1998 only four individuals turned up at a New Orleans rally to
urge the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue that towered above Lee
Circle. Just fourteen years later, however, New Orleans would become
"the epicenter" of a powerful movement that resulted in fifteen
southern communities taking down their outdoor Confederate monuments
by 2017 (p. 289). This movement, which the author believes echoes the
iconoclastic removal of the equestrian statue of George III in New
York City at the birth of the Republic in 1776, is not the dominant
theme of this study but the epilogue to an investigation of why Civil
War monuments began to proliferate across the American urban
landscape from the 1870s, and how this impacted American historical
memory. More importantly, Brown suggests, the growing
memorialization, which extended well into the 1920s, greatly enhanced
the militarization of American society, to the extent that antebellum
distrust of the military as an agent of corruption and the despoiler
of innocent youth was gradually replaced by an assumption that
patriotism, the flag, and military discipline enhanced American civic
virtue.

The subject of the Civil War and American memory has been explored by
a number of other historians, including David W. Blight, Robert Cook,
Gary W. Gallagher, Tony Horwitz, and Michael Wilson Panhorst.[1] In
2015 Professor Brown published _Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate
Memory in South Carolina_, an examination on how South Carolina's
commemoration of the Civil War era helped white southerners negotiate
their shifting political and social perceptions. This new study
expands his investigation nationwide and offers a detailed and
engaging account of the changing patterns of memorial building, the
motivations behind the artists involved, how various agencies
promoted the process, and how the dedication of these monuments
captured public attention. In 1890, for example, 100,000 people
attended the unveiling of the Lee monument in Richmond, while in 1891
not only did some 250,000 witness the dedication of the Ulysses S.
Grant statue in Chicago, but in the decades following 1897 an
estimated 500,000 people annually visited the Grant Monument in
Washington, DC. It is no surprise to learn that President Theodore
Roosevelt himself was an avid booster for such memorials, for he
participated in the unveiling of statues to generals William T.
Sherman, Philip Sheridan, Henry Warner Slocum, and George B.
McClellan, together with several other soldier monuments. Advocating
that the war itself had been an unsurpassed example of the
"exaltation of a lofty ideal over merely material well-being,"
Roosevelt proclaimed that the characteristics that produced a good
soldier were exactly those "qualities needed to make a good citizen"
(p. 172). In this new study Brown highlights three distinct, yet
overlapping periods of memorialization: statues to the ordinary
citizen soldier, monuments to military leaders, and later, victory
monuments, such as the triumphal arch celebrating the achievements of
both Union soldiers and sailors created in 1901 at the entrance to
Prospect Park, Brooklyn. The sense of triumphalism that characterized
these later northern monuments was replicated in many Confederate
monuments, which hardly resemble, the author notes, the _revanchiste
_monuments of a defeated France during the same period. 

[Marxism] How White Crime Writers Justified Police Brutality

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times Op-Ed, June 8, 2020
How White Crime Writers Justified Police Brutality
We don’t need any more novels or TV shows about cops who do the wrong 
thing for the “right” reason.

By John Fram

It’s happening again. It took a fraudulent 911 call, the deaths of three 
citizens — Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd — and tweets 
from the president endorsing lethal force against a protest movement, 
but finally the slow-moving American conscience is recoiling in horror.


Whites everywhere are describing their “shock” and “disgust.” As they 
were shocked and disgusted at the murder of black citizens last year. 
And the year before that. And the year before that.


This white shock, is it genuine? Perhaps. But why are whites repeatedly 
rediscovering a fact that people of color have always known: that the 
police are often as dangerous as the criminals they allegedly protect us 
from?


As a writer of crime fiction, I’ve become convinced that white writers 
like me bear some responsibility.


Some of our first organized police systems were designed to catch 
runaway slaves, keep tabs on Native American populations, break up riots 
and protect the private property of the white and wealthy. The police 
were the main weapon deployed against black Americans after slavery was 
abolished and white property owners — suddenly bereft of free labor — 
exploited a loophole in the 13th Amendment that was just wide enough to 
march a chain gang through.


But most Americans have never been stopped and frisked, or had their 
door kicked in by an officer serving a warrant, or been put in a 
chokehold. Their exposure to the police comes from books and TV shows, 
and these stories condition them to think police violence is normal. 
Think about “Dirty Harry,” “Lethal Weapon,” “Blue Bloods” — police 
officers are always beating people up to get information out of them. 
That can translate into people thinking excessive force is justified, 
perhaps especially if a suspect is black.


Crime fiction tends to favors “a return to order from chaos,” said Steph 
Cha, the author of the novel “Your House Will Pay.” “It requires an 
assumption that the justice system resolving this chaos is a functioning 
system, which, clearly, it isn’t.”


Early crime fiction, to its credit, often viewed law enforcement with 
skepticism. Justice came at the hands of private investigators. Sam 
Spade, Philip Marlowe and the other great P.I.’s found the police 
corrupt or incompetent.


This started to change in the 1950s. Richie Narvaez, the author of 
“Hipster Death Rattle” and an adjunct assistant professor of English who 
teaches mystery and crime fiction at the Fashion Institute of 
Technology, told me that during that “time of newfound prosperity and 
moral superiority,” the police procedural crime novel began to gain 
popularity. In Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” and series like it, police 
officers fought “against a city blighted by moral decay, juvenile 
delinquency and ethnic violence.”


Radio shows, TV series and movies followed. “Dragnet,” the grandfather 
of the TV procedural, began life as a radio show before jumping to the 
small screen in 1951. The show’s detectives were reasonable, well 
intentioned and usually correct in their assumptions about a suspect.


It’s no coincidence that “Dragnet” was more or less co-produced by the 
Los Angeles Police Department, even as the department was embroiled in 
countless allegations of police brutality, in effect turning the show 
into a piece of police propaganda.


“Filming in Los Angeles requires a heavy police presence,” said Hannibal 
Tabu, the author of the comic “Project Wildfire: Street Justice” and a 
co-head of the communications team for Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. 
“Ultimately, it leads to a great deal of mutual interest between the 
police and the TV studios.”


David Slack, a television writer and producer who wrote a few episodes 
of “Law and Order,” told me: “We had wonderful consultants — truly good 
and kind people within the N.Y.P.D. But there was also always the sense 
that if we told stories that reflected too badly on the police, the 
N.Y.P.D. could make it very difficult for us to shoot in New York.”


The next time you pick up a popular crime novel, flip to the 
acknowledgments page and see how quickly the author thanks the police 
for ride-alongs in squad cars or answering questions about guns or 
forensics. The economics of publishing mean that many authors need to 
publish a novel every year or two; that’s a lot easier to do when you 
have steady contacts on the police force who are happy to talk to you.


This has brought us to a world where 

[Marxism] Introduction to Marxist Economics

2020-06-08 Thread Ken Hiebert via Marxism
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The International Bolshevik Tendency has on their website an Introduction to 
Marxist Economics http://bolshevik.org/ 
I am not qualified to judge it from the point of view of theory, but I am happy 
to say that there is a spark of creativity in some of their material, in their 
use of graphics.
It’s not that long ago that I said to myself that the IBT gave new meaning to 
the word “moribund.”  I can no longer say that.
ken h


Imperialism
https://twitter.com/IBT1917/status/1264642578059755523?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Eembeddedtimeline%7Ctwterm%5Eprofile%3AIBT1917_url=http%3A%2F%2Fbolshevik.org%2Fwhats_new.html
 


* * * * * *

You may want to read Ernest Mandel’s An Introduction to Marxist EconomicTheory
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/intromet/ch01.htm 

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[Marxism] New York Times senior editor resigns amid backlash over controversial op-ed | Media | The Guardian

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/07/new-york-times-editor-resigns-tom-cotton-oped-protests

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[Marxism] Using MLK to Quell Outrage Distorts His Legacy | Jeanne Theoharis | AAIHS

2020-06-08 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://www.aaihs.org/using-mlk-to-quell-outrage-distorts-his-legacy/


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[Marxism] Syracuse #GeorgeFloyd Actions: Last Chance for Change | Howie Hawkins for President | Angela Walker for Vice President

2020-06-08 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://howiehawkins.us/syracuse-georgefloyd-actions-last-chance-for-change/

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[Marxism] Racism, Not Genetics, Explains Why Black Americans Are Dying Of COVID-19 | Clarence Gravlee | Scientific American

2020-06-08 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/racism-not-genetics-explains-why-black-americans-are-dying-of-covid-19/


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