[Marxism] Bad Diet & Bad Hair Destroy Human CiBad Diet & Bad Hair Destroy Human Civilizationvilization

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  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.
*

by Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/11/bad-diet-bad-hair-destroy-human-civilization/

_
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


Re: [Marxism] free online streaming of "Let the Fire Burn"

2020-06-14 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

  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.
*


Alan Ginsberg wrote

It's an outstanding and harrowing documentary.

"We would like to share the extraordinary 2013 film *Let the Fire Burn*, 
a document of another tragic clash between government and citizens that 
occurred 35 years ago in Philadelphia. On May 13, 1985, a longtime feud 
between the city and the black liberation group MOVE came to a deadly 
climax when, by order of local authorities, police dropped 
military-grade explosives onto a MOVE-occupied rowhouse resulting in the 
tragic deaths of eleven people (including five children) and the 
destruction of 61 homes. It is a story that is worth revisiting in these 
current days of injustice, anger and grief.


*"Let the Fire Burn* will be available to watch for free here throughout 
the month of June. Please read the accompanying statement by Mike Africa 
Jr., member of the MOVE Organization about the film."


https://kinonow.com/let-the-fire-burn


Thank you, Alan, for sending this out. I finally got around to watching 
it. It adds important context to what we're seeing now.


The events shown here are harrowing, savage, masterfully assembled as 
documentary, searing beyond any rational conception of being human - 35 
years ago and counting. None of the perpetrators charged, none 
convicted, only those who spoke an irrefutable if garbled and seemingly 
primitive truth paid the price once again, the victims with their 
inoperable and legal display weaponry, killed or imprisoned, and these 
events subsequently submerged and ignored.


Nine repeat nine Move members convicted of the killing of one police 
officer back in 1978 and all but one still in prison - with inoperable 
weapons, imputations of friendly fire, and subsequent police vows of 
revenge.


To quote from many sources, "death by burning flesh, military-grade 
explosives and more than 500 cops firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition in 
less than 90 minutes. The nearly 500 police officers gathered at the 
scene were ludicrously well-armed — flak jackets, tear gas, SWAT gear, 
.50- and .60-caliber machine guns, and an anti-tank machine gun for good 
measure. Deluge guns were pointed from firetrucks. The state police had 
sent a helicopter to the scene. The city had shut off the water and 
electricity for the entire block. And as the public would soon learn, 
the police had explosives on hand. The police dropped an improvised bomb 
made of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex, an explosive gel used in 
underwater mining. This caused the house to catch fire, and ignited a 
massive blaze which eventually consumed almost 4 city blocks, 61 homes, 
left 240 homeless, and killed eleven Move members in all, including five 
children."


The duly appointed commission of inquiry found only "gross negligence" 
on the part of city officials, none of whom as said was ever charged. 
Gross negligence in law: "conscious and voluntary disregard of the need 
to use reasonable care, which is likely to cause foreseeable grave 
injury or harm to persons, property, or both." A mild rebuke if there 
ever was one under these circumstances, which also as a charge precludes 
in its implementation, if any, punitive damages.


After years upon years of this, with steady drumbeat of inflammatory 
rhetoric and steady build-up of police capacity to attack with impunity 
and with less and less restraint, in my view now, talk of defunding, 
reforming, retraining police can almost come from Trump's lips, as it 
strikes me, it so drips with hubris, hypocrisy and avoidance.


How can we not see the connection between inequality, exploitation, and 
what the police mandate is and which, without major systemic change, 
will continue to be?


If we are not coming somehow closer and closer to kicking over this 
system root and branch by now, then how long oh lord we have to ask 
every time.


Buried deep in the national subconscious and still denial everywhere, 
with graphic evidence such as this seen by pitifully few. And the easy 
tendency to rationalize all this away- particularly among us, the broad, 
buffering American middle class, since it's not us in those accounts - 
after all, the propriety, the composure and the property of respectable, 
middle class neighbors just like us were destroyed, though fueled by 
their own ill-considered complaints and misunderstanding - the easy 
tendency to just shake our heads, fold our hands and go on without any 
concerted, effective, active response whatsoever.


Nothing really different. The woods were burning then but the blaze is 
more fierce now by far. How many of us have even known about this 2013 

[Marxism] Adolph Reed Jr. blows his cool

2020-06-14 Thread Michael Yates via Marxism
  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.
*

Well, it was refreshing to see a maniac chime in. Man sure likes to write f**k 
in various forms. Shows he is more than a high-class professor. He is a man of 
the people.
_
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] Well Worth reading

2020-06-14 Thread Ken Hiebert via Marxism
  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.
*

And her book is also well worth reading.
ken h

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/11/algiers-third-world-capital-elaine-mokhtefi-review
 

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com


[Marxism] Well Worth reading

2020-06-14 Thread Anthony Boynton via Marxism
  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.
*

Panthers in AlgiersElaine Mokhtefi
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/elaine-mokhtefi>

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n11/elaine-mokhtefi/diary?utm_campaign=20200614%20DT65_content=usca_nonsubs_medium=email_source=LRB%20themed%20email
_
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] New generation of activists, deeply skeptical of Democratic Party, resists calls to channel energy into the 2020 campaign

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  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.
*

Washington Post, June 14, 2020
New generation of activists, deeply skeptical of Democratic Party, 
resists calls to channel energy into the 2020 campaign

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr.

TAMPA — Hundreds of young activists were massing on the streets below 
the downtown waterfront skyscrapers here this month for a silent 
"die-in" to call for change in the wake of the police killing of George 
Floyd when the city's mayor, a Democrat who has voiced support for the 
movement, rose and asked to address the crowd.


But before Jane Castor could speak, she was greeted by an organizer 
brandishing a bullhorn.


"Go home Jane!" yelled Bernice Lauredan, 28, an activist with Tampa 
Dream Defenders. "You are not welcome here."


More than a thousand miles away, Dennis Maurice Dumpson has been helping 
to organize strategy sessions with activists in Philadelphia, a city 
where Democrats hope protests will ignite massive voter turnout and 
propel presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden to victory in 
battleground Pennsylvania. But Dumpson, 36, has no intention of 
mobilizing his growing list of followers to help Biden or any other 
politician. The most he intends to do for the Democrats, if anything, is 
cast a reluctant vote.


"We've seen enough to know how this goes and how this plays out," 
Dumpson said. "I'm tired of going into the same old room with the same 
old council member and the same state representative who have the same 
old mind-set. It's why we keep getting the same old stuff."


Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis last month ignited protests in more than 
750 U.S. cities, an avalanche of outrage that echoes the moral overtones 
of the 1960s civil rights movement, with the added power of drawing 
support from participants of all races in every corner of the country.


The uprising is also a potential boon for Democrats, inspiring thousands 
of new grass-roots organizers, many in their 20s and 30s and new to 
activism, just as the party seeks to mobilize young voters and other 
core liberals to defeat President Trump and retake the Senate. Many of 
the country’s top Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, 
have exhorted the activists to channel their energy toward the election.


But the Democrats have so far failed to tap into the newly emerging 
protest movement, even turning off some activists who see early outreach 
efforts as hollow gestures, according to interviews with more than a 
dozen organizers who have been leading protests across the country in 
recent weeks. Many said they remain deeply skeptical of the traditional 
political system and the Democratic Party, which they said has a history 
of promising change and falling short.


Although the activists agreed that Trump is a racist who should be 
defeated, many said they think neither party is equipped to address the 
roots of the fury in America’s streets. That, they said, would require a 
willingness to embrace changes that have historically been deemed too 
radical by many mainstream politicians, such as defunding police forces 
that routinely target black communities and rolling back drug laws that 
lead to mass incarceration. Biden and Democratic lawmakers have said 
they don’t support defunding police, though they have backed redirecting 
funding for public safety programs.


“I don’t believe just having a ‘D’ by your name immediately makes you 
the savior,” said Lauredan, the organizer who shouted down the Tampa 
mayor. “And I would say that for every Democrat I know, we have to look 
at solutions that are really going to invest in our communities. . . . 
We need to change not just the surface-level issues.”


“[Politicians are] kneeling but not meeting with the organizations that 
are responsible for moving voters on the ground,” said Alicia Garza, 
principal for Black Futures Lab and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter 
movement. “When October comes along, they’re going to say can we have 
you on our [Instagram] live? Can we have you come to this fundraiser? 
And October is too late to start courting people. October is the time to 
begin capitalizing on the relationships you’ve made — not to start 
building them.”


Obama took note of the emerging tension between activists and Democratic 
political leaders earlier this month, when he urged protesters to get 
involved in politics.


“I’ve been hearing a little bit of chatter in the Internet about voting 
versus protest, politics and participation versus civil disobedience and 
direct action,” Obama said. “This is not an either-or — this is a 
both-and. To bring about real change, we both have to highlight a 
problem and make people in power uncomfortable.”



[Marxism] Young New Yorkers Want You to Know Why They’re Marching

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, June 14, 2020
Young New Yorkers Want You to Know Why They’re Marching
By Somini Sengupta

They are movement newbies.

Mostly in their 20s and 30s, emerging from different corners of New York 
City, they call this their personal turning point. No longer, they say, 
could they just post on Instagram, or just give money, or just vote. 
They needed to put their bodies on the street after the killing of 
George Floyd in Minneapolis.


So for roughly two weeks, they have protested. They have protested on 
bikes and skateboards. They have knelt. They have poured across the 
bridges, faced off with the police and gotten arrested, detained for 
hours in crowded precinct station houses. They come out and march again, 
in steamy heat and in downpours.


For many, it’s their first movement. It’s their chance to be a part of 
history, they say, and for some, a moment to examine who they are.


These young New Yorkers are part of a global generational revolt 
erupting at a time when strongman leaders have ascended around the 
world. Their peers were out on the streets in Hong Kong and India. 
Climate protests were led by schoolchildren worldwide last year.


In this country, too, there were young adults in the rank and file of 
Black Lives Matter since its inception in 2013. And in 2018, the school 
shooting in Parkland, Fla., spurred a surge of activism by teenagers for 
gun control.


The groups known as millennials and Generation Z are the United States’s 
largest and most racially diverse generations. According to opinion 
polls, they tend to be progressive, they are less likely that older 
Americans to think the United States is superior to other countries, and 
they embody a profound demographic shift: Among Americans in their 20s 
and 30s, about 40 percent are people of color, compared with about 25 
percent of those over age 60.


Here’s why a few of those who are new to protesting have taken to the 
streets:


“This is pretty much my life now,” Xavier Martinez, 21, said, fresh from 
a march in Manhattan and searching for another, in Brooklyn, on a night 
that the city was under curfew.


“I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I weren’t here,” his friend, 
James Luckey, 21, explained.


Mr. Luckey grew up on Staten Island. He was 17 when Eric Garner died in 
a police chokehold not far from where he lived. Mr. Martinez grew up in 
Queens. One of his relatives was a police officer. They met as students 
at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.


On a recent Friday, they snaked through Downtown Brooklyn, past Park 
Slope and onto Eastern Parkway. Mr. Luckey had been protesting nearly 
every day for a week. The faces on the streets were becoming familiar.


“Hey, I remember you,” Mr. Luckey said to two young women who were 
walking in his direction along Eastern Parkway. “Is it still going on?”


They recognized him, too. They told him how much further to walk to meet 
up with the night’s remaining protesters.


“Stay safe,” they said to each other. It’s the refrain of the streets 
now: “Stay safe.”


Neither Mr. Martinez or Mr. Luckey belong to an established 
organization. They follow no particular leader. There are many leaders, 
they say. Some are the bicyclists who whistle and clear the path for 
marchers. Others lead chants. Suddenly, in a crowd of hundreds, someone 
else will command the group to kneel in one of the busiest intersections 
in Brooklyn, bringing the streets to a startling near-silence.


“The first person who makes their presence known is the leader,” Mr. 
Martinez said.


Mr. Luckey was arrested last week and spent eight hours in police 
custody. He had taken a day off to recuperate and then headed out again.


He knows that people in the 1960s did this, too. “We’re doing all the 
things they were doing in the past,” Mr. Luckey said. “It’s different 
now because we do have a lot of allies.”


Adopted from Peru by a white American family, Belinda Stahl, 29, grew up 
in Maine, one of the whitest states in the country. As a child, most of 
her friends were white — otherwise, she laughed, she wouldn’t have had 
any friends.


Ms. Stahl moved to New York City to attend art school. She left, then 
came back, and by the time the coronavirus hit, she was juggling a 
series of restaurant and retail jobs while working on her passion, 
fashion design.

.
Police violence was not a new discovery to her, she said. But two things 
jolted her this time: the brutality of Mr. Floyd’s death, and on top of 
that, the timing.


“We are down and out,” she said. “We are in a pandemic. We don’t know if 
we are going to have our jobs back. At a point when everyone is not OK 

[Marxism] Adolph Reed Jr. blows his cool

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  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.
*

(A comment from the professor emeritus on my blog post.)

I usually don’t do this sort of thing, and I suspect some reaction is 
what he wants. Nevertheless, Proyect’s dishonest — e.g. he should know 
the line that he attributes to Debs is wrong; see William P. Jones, 
“‘Nothing Special to Offer the Negro:’ Revisiting the ‘Debsian View’ of 
the Negro Question,” ILWCH (2008) — and puerile — e.g., he asserts that 
I “turn a cold shoulder toward the the protests of the George Floyd 
murder” while discussing a 2016 essay — but I need to say one for the 
record. I’m beyond sick and tired of sanctimonious white assholes — and 
this includes you, Michael Yates — denouncing me for not understanding 
or caring about racism in the United States. If one wants to go around 
finding instances of racism all around — and that’s your politics, not 
mine — the hubris that tack displays couldn’t be a clearer example of 
it. Neither of you, nor the others who play this game know a fucking 
thing about me, my history, views, practice or life. For instance, if 
Proyect read what I’ve written on the monuments controversy in New 
Orleans, he’d know that I largely grew up under Jim Crow and lived its 
indignities for much of my formative life. My point in the piece from 
which he cherry picks quotes was to caution about the fact that the 
monuments’ removal was being interpreted by governing elites as a 
validation of current forms of neoliberal inequality, which also have a 
disproportionate impact on black people. So you two, and all the rest of 
the cretins whose play on the internet includes denouncing me, Cedric 
Johnson — another, albeit much younger black Lousianan whose experience 
of racial injustice is direct and unmediated by books — and others as 
“class reductionists,” especially at this moment when race-first 
politics has generated nearly $2 billion (and counting) of corporate 
support, including from an outfit as transparently hideous as ALEC, can 
go fuck yourselves. That that goes double, and in spades, for the white 
ones for whom this game suggests that, if they really want to find 
racism, they should just look in the motherfucking mirror.


_
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] Protesters face life in prison over police car attacks in NY

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  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.
*

For what? Torching a police car? These two radical lawyers got caught up 
in the misguided, counterproductive, ultraleft tactics that have 
infected the left ever since the Weathermen went nuts. In the 60s, the 
cops used agent-provocateurs to lure radicals into "bolder" actions. For 
what?


https://news.yahoo.com/protesters-face-life-prison-over-police-car-attacks-233639293.html

_
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] New York's Rising Tides: Climate Inequality and Sandy's Legacy | by Willa Glickman | The New York Review of Books

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  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.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/13/new-yorks-rising-tides-climate-inequality-and-sandys-legacy/

_
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] Community Control Vs. Defunding the Police: A Critical Analysis | Black Agenda Report

2020-06-14 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

  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.blackagendareport.com/community-control-vs-defunding-police-critical-analysis

_
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


Re: [Marxism] Lenin and 'Sacred Texts'

2020-06-14 Thread Dayne Goodwin via Marxism
  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.
*

A heritage of Stalin's m.o.: deify Lenin, redo history to appear to be
Lenin's 'closest comrade,' use Lenin's writings as scriptures to
validate your policies, call your contrived doctrine
"Marxism-Leninism," ignore Lenin's wishes and mummify his body for
display and worship in a public mausoleum.


On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 6:17 AM Aaron Kyereh-Mireku via Marxism
 wrote:
>
> I've recently read Christopher Read's excellent biography of Lenin. In it, 
> Read notes that Lenin was very uneasy about having his texts republished for 
> fear they would be treated like sacred scripture. Only reluctantly did he 
> agree to the project. Our present-day 'Leninist' sects clearly aren't aware 
> of this, since they do precisely what Lenin feared - treat his texts like 
> sacred scriptures torn from all context.

_
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