[Marxism] Review of *Towards Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art*, by Tony McKenna | Sean Ledwith | Culture Matters

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https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/theory/item/3432-towards-forever


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[Marxism] The Story Behind the Lee Statue in Richmond, Virginia | Peter Rachleff | The Progressive

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https://progressive.org/dispatches/story-behind-lee-statue-richmond-virginia-rachleff-200707/


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[Marxism] CNN's Angela Rye: Thomas Jefferson No Better Than R. Kelly, "Patriarchal" Founding Fathers Are No Heroes Of Mine | Video | RealClearPolitics

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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/07/07/cnns_angela_rye_thomas_jefferson_no_better_than_r_kelly_patriarchal_founding_fathers_are_no_heroes_of_mine.html

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[Marxism] Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature

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The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John
Bellamy Foster’s seminal book *Marx’s Ecology* on its twentieth
anniversary. Join Niko, Ian, Matthew, and Remi as they discuss the context
of this work, and how it started a rediscovery of Marx’s ecological
politics. They discuss how ecology informed Marx’s understanding of the
world since his doctoral thesis, the relationship between Marx, Darwin, and
Malthus and the concept of metabolic rift.


https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/07/08/marxs-ecology-materialism-and-nature/

Richard Modiano
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[Marxism] Why Police Reforms Are Not Enough

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Why Police Reforms Are Not Enough
We must end capitalism to end war and police violence
By Bonnie Weinstein

We can and should fight for police reforms such as outlawing choke holds, stop 
and frisk laws, plea bargains, bail requirements, as well as getting police out 
of our communities and schools. But that will not end the fundamental 
reactionary role of police departments in capitalist society. 

The job of the police is to protect the fundamental core of capitalism that 
commandeers the wealth that we produce through our labor, while paying us the 
lowest wages they can get away with—including by outright slavery—still alive 
and well in our prison system.

Community occupation and control
The whole purpose of the police is to occupy communities of the working 
class—especially people of color—to enforce the basic economic foundation of 
capitalism that puts private wealth above life itself. 

The police don’t protect the innocent from getting killed. They don’t prevent 
rapes. And they rarely capture those responsible for these crimes—including, of 
course, those committed by their own officers or by the wealthy elite. 

Criminalizing the poor
Their job is to enforce obedience to laws that are designed to make even the 
smallest infractions punishable by death on the spot—a broken tail light 
(Sandra Bland who died mysteriously in her jail cell after being arrested); 
selling cigarettes without a tax license (Eric Garner died in a police choke 
hold while crying “I can’t breathe”); by allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit 
twenty dollar bill (George Floyd, murdered by police kneeling on his neck and 
chest for eight minutes and 46 seconds until he died); sleeping in bed (Breonna 
Taylor was shot eight times by police on a “no-knock” warrant. She was innocent 
of any wrongdoing), and on and on.

The prison industrial complex
The whole prison system is filled with people whose crimes are the product of 
poverty and racism. And the conviction rate is astronomical.

Ninety-seven percent of federal and 94 percent of state criminal convictions 
are obtained through plea bargains. 

In an August 8, 2019 NBC News article by Clark Neily titled, “Prisons Are 
Packed Because Prosecutors Are Coercing Plea Deals. And, Yes, It’s Totally 
Legal.”1

“America is the most prosperous country in the history of the world. We excel 
at innovation and mass production—and nowhere is that more true today than our 
criminal justice system, which features a streamlined process for transforming 
millions of suspects into convicted criminals quickly, efficiently and without 
the hassle of a constitutionally prescribed jury trial. It’s called coercive 
plea bargaining, and it’s the secret sauce that helps us maintain the world’s 
highest incarceration rate. The answer is simple and stark: They’re being 
coerced. Though physical torture remains off limits, American prosecutors are 
equipped with a fearsome array of tools they can use to extract confessions and 
discourage people from exercising their right to a jury trial. These tools 
include charge-stacking (charging more or more serious crimes than the conduct 
really merits), legislatively-ordered mandatory-minimum sentences, pretrial 
detention with unaffordable bail, threats to investigate and indict friends or 
family members, and the so-called trial penalty—what the National Association 
of Criminal Defense Lawyers calls the ‘substantial difference between the 
sentence offered prior to trial versus the sentence a defendant receives after 
a trial.’”

The wealthy are not only able to hire banks of lawyers if they are even accused 
of a crime, they pay the lawmakers to create laws that are to their advantage 
and to the distinct disadvantage of working people. 

These laws are designed to keep us in line—to instill in us the idea that we 
are powerless over them. 

The police are the enemy of the working class
Law enforcement unions have no place in the American Federation of Labor and 
Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO). The allegiance of police, 
prison guards, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to capitalist law and 
order sets them apart from, and in direct opposition to, the working class. In 
fact, law enforcement organizations have nothing in common with unions and no 
common interests with working people.

They accept the role of occupation of our communities—it’s their job and sworn 
duty. How else can they calmly keep a knee pressed to a man’s neck for eight 
minutes and 46 seconds without even grimacing—while stopping a human being from 
breathing?


Read more at:

http://www.socialistviewpoint.org
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[Marxism] Year of the Plague: A Capitalist Disaster in U.S. Prisons

[bonnieweinstein via Marxism]

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Year of the Plague: A Capitalist Disaster in U.S. Prisons
By Chris Kinder

The capitalist structure in the U.S. is in crisis, facing multiple challenges 
to its right to exist as it is. Masses are in the streets day after day, and 
around the world, attacking the U.S. ruling class for its racist police 
murderers, and proposing radical reforms up to and including abolition of the 
police. This is an uprising of unprecedented extent in the post-World War II 
environment in the U.S. It is an existential challenge to the system, and all 
in the context of a world-wide pandemic.

The capitalist state specifically is in crisis, as the official head of state 
has lost the confidence of a good portion of the ruling class, despite the 
favors he has heaped on them. Trump is under attack from many sides. Knowing he 
is in danger of losing his reelection bid, Trump openly eggs on a reactionary, 
racist minority of armed thugs, white supremacists, and conservatives 
generally; while his Republican toadies are accelerating a long-standing plot 
to steal elections through many forms of voter suppression chiefly aimed at 
Black and Brown urban communities, and now including efforts to prevent mail-in 
ballots right in the midst of the pandemic. Trump actually said that 
Republicans would “never” be elected again if it was easier to vote!

Mass protest movement 
demands change
Hundreds-of-thousands of protestors in the streets every day since the 
sickening, outright murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on the 25th 
of May have not only changed the dialogue considerably, but led to talk of 
reforms at local and state levels—some even being implemented—such as banning 
choke holds and preventing police from hiding their disciplinary records from 
public scrutiny. 

On June 19 dock workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union—shut 
down all 29 ports on the West Coast to demand an end to police murders of Black 
people, and honor the memory of Juneteenth, the day in 1865 that the slaves of 
Texas had finally been freed. This powerful show of workers’ power was 
accompanied by ten-to-15,000 militant protestors (very rough estimate) in a 
march and caravan—led by the ILWU motor cycle squad—from the port to the 
Oakland police headquarters and a rally at Oscar Grant Plaza (at City Hall).

Protestors add prisons 
to their agenda
Throughout the protests, many identify capitalism itself as the core of the 
problem that needs to be done away with. And prisons, like police, are an 
integral part of the capitalist state. And not just the capitalist state. The 
French Revolution, which overthrew the feudal nobility and their monarchy, 
began with the assault on the Bastille, a horrific dungeon/prison in Paris, on 
the 14th of July 1789. This revolution marked the coming to power of the 
capitalist class in Europe, but it did not mark the end of prisons!

Prisons are a product of any class society that must exploit and oppress the 
peasants (in older societies) and working classes, as well any minorities which 
might be “expendable” or a challenge to class rule. The U.S., as the 
imperialist monster extending its tentacles throughout the world and seeking 
“full spectrum dominance,” is also the most backward of the major capitalist 
nations. The U.S. has more incarcerated people per capita than any other 
country, and they are all in incubation centers for a highly contagious virus. 

Prisons are a petri-dish paradise for the virus
There are more COVID-19 cases in some U.S. prisons than in entire countries. 
According to one report, as of the early weeks of June, there were over 1600 
clusters of 50 or more cases of the coronavirus across the U.S., in prisons, 
nursing homes, meat packing plants, etc. The largest clusters were centered in 
either prisons or meat processing plants—which most meat packer workers see as 
entirely too similar to prisons. Overall, fewer people contracted coronavirus 
in the countries of Cyprus, Jamaica, and Iceland than they did in the 
Smithfield Foods pork processing facility in Sioux Falls South Dakota, the 
source of 1,098 cases. 

U.S. prisons are over-crowded hell holes. They have no ability to physically 
distance inmates, and they have inadequate supplies for hand washing, little or 
no personal protective materials, inadequate healthcare, and no way to deal 
with an expanding pandemic. The only solution for this is mass releases of 
prisoners, with provisions for places to live, get healthcare, food, and the 
other requirements of life, as well as adequate measures for safety among those 
who remain incarcerated. This includes obvious things like soap, sanit

[Marxism] Drivers Are Hitting Protesters as Memes of Car Attacks Spread

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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In recent days, one person was killed in Seattle and two people were
injured in Bloomington, Ind. Dozens of similar incidents have occurred
across the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/us/bloomington-car-attack-protesters.html

By Neil MacFarquhar 

July 7, 2020

The driver of a red Toyota first stopped, then unexpectedly accelerated
into a crowd of dispersing demonstrators in Bloomington, Ind., on Monday
night, injuring two of them in the latest of a disturbing rash of vehicular
attacks targeting protesters.

The demonstration, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, had sent
several hundred people marching through the college town, demanding the
arrest of a small group of men who had threatened a Black civil rights
activist.

Dramatic video footage of the attack showed a woman clinging to the car’s
hood and a man clutching the driver’s door handle as the vehicle zoomed
forward. The police were still searching for the hit-and-run driver on
Tuesday.

“It was terrifying,” said Rachel Glago, 28, whose friend, she said, had
jumped onto the hood to avoid being run over. “I wanted to stop the car, I
wanted to help her, I was screaming, I could hear other people screaming.”

Dozens of similar incidents have occurred across the United States in
recent weeks, although it is difficult to assess which attacks are
premeditated and which are prompted by rage when drivers find their route
blocked by crowds. The tactic has previously been mostly used by extremist
jihadist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, as well as Palestinian militants.

“It is not just an extremist thing here, but there are social media circles
online where people are sharing these and joking about them because they
disagree with the protests and their methods,” said Ari E. Weil, the deputy
research director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats of the
University of Chicago. “Sharing memes and joking about running over people
can lead to real danger.”

There have been at least 66 car attacks nationwide since George Floyd was
killed by the Minneapolis police on May 25, Mr. Weil said.

Seven of them have been by law enforcement officers, he said. That included
two in New York which Dermot Shea, the police commissioner, defended as an
appropriate use of force because he said the police vehicles were under
attack.

Prosecutors have brought charges in about 24 of the cases so far, Mr. Weil
said, including hate crimes, and have dismissed four as accidental.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of a car attack in the United States
is from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when
James Alex Fields Jr. killed Heather Heyer, a counterprotester.

Mr. Fields was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in
prison. Evidence at the trial included the fact that he had shared images
online of cars ramming into people before participating in the far-right
rally.

Some of the crashes at recent protests have also been fatal. Summer Taylor,
24, who worked at a veterinary clinic, died on Saturday after a man drove a
car through a march
 on a
Seattle highway. Another protester died after being hit in Bakersfield,
Calif., in June.

The driver in Seattle, Dawit Kelete, has not been charged but is being held
on $1.2 million bail, and the State Patrol announced it would ban
demonstrations from Interstate 5.

Supporters of far-right organizations — as well as the occasional
government official or law enforcement officer — have been circulating
memes and slogans online encouraging such attacks.

In Richmond, Va., a driver sought to intimidate protesters with his truck
and hit one demonstrator’s bicycle in early June, prosecutors said. The
driver, who was charged with assault, told the police he was a high-ranking
Ku Klux Klan official, court documents said.

In Seattle, the King County Sheriff’s Office announced that one officer had
been placed on administrative leave after posting a picture of a vehicle
hitting someone under the commonly shared phrase “All Lives Splatter” and
another line about moving off the road.

The officer, Mike Brown, is Gov. Jay Inslee’s cousin, and the governor said
in an interview that he was deeply disappointed by his cousin’s post. “It’s
never acceptable, but particularly now when we’re trying to heal the
divisions in our community between police and citizens,” he said.

Vehicular attacks have proliferated in recent weeks. Experts believe it is
because of the combination of widespread protests across the country and
the circulation of dangerous memes amon

[Marxism] White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S. Christianity

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity
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Re: [Marxism] How a Lincoln-Douglass Debate Led to Historic Discovery

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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The Wall Street Journal paywall blocking this article, which was posted by
Dennis Brasky, has been defeated.
Texting exchange by two professors led to Frederick Douglass letter on
Emancipation Memorial
ByTed Mann
July 4, 2020 9:30 am ET

WASHINGTON—It was a text-message debate that led Scott Sandage and Jonathan
White to discover a vital American artifact last weekend: a long-forgotten
letter showing how Frederick Douglass really felt about a statue of Abraham
Lincoln and a slave.

Messrs. Sandage and White are history professors who have been on opposite
sides of a dispute over the Emancipation Memorial near the U.S. Capitol,
which depicts Lincoln in the act of freeing a kneeling Black man.

Mr. White, who teaches at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, wrote
in a newspaper that the statue should be preserved, even while conceding in
passing that Douglass disliked the design.

Mr. Sandage, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania,
considered the statue “visually unredeemable” because of its depiction of a
Black man kneeling in a subservient position to Lincoln.

Both men sit on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and had been
debating whether the statue should remain or come down.

And so on the last Friday evening in June, sitting on the couch with his
wife watching “Gilmore Girls,” Mr. White was texting back and forth with
Mr. Sandage, pondering the alleged distaste for the statue by Douglass, who
had dedicated it with a famous address in 1876.

The account of Douglass criticizing the statue at its unveiling came from a
1916 book that included the recollection of activist John W. Cromwell, who
was in attendance.

Mr. White pointed out the account was secondhand from three decades later,
and could be apocryphal. Mr. Sandage had thought Cromwell’s account had
been corroborated and cited it in his own work in the 1990s. He went
searching for a corroborating account.

Last Saturday morning, Mr. Sandage started searching Douglass’s name and
the word “knee” in digitized newspaper archives at Newspapers.com. He found
no corroborating accounts of the remark, but something better: published
blurbs headlined “Frederick Douglass says” that referred to an 1876 letter
from Douglass criticizing the monument.

After 20 minutes, and narrowing the search using Douglass’s flashiest
adjective (“couchant”), Mr. Sandage uncovered Douglass’s letter itself.

Five days after the unveiling, in a letter to the editor of the National
Republican newspaper in Washington, Douglass had critiqued the statue’s
design and suggested how more dignified depictions of free Black people
would improve the park.

“The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude,” Douglass
wrote. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the
negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on
his feet like a man.”

Mr. Sandage said he didn’t at first realize the importance of his
discovery, but alerted Mr. White and texted an image of the letter to David
Blight, a Douglass biographer and history professor at Yale University.

Mr. Blight was “practically giddy,” Mr. Sandage said.

Mr. Blight in turn emailed Richard Fox, a Lincoln scholar at the University
of Southern California, who hadn’t seen the letter either.

“This all happened on Saturday morning,” Mr. Fox said. “None of us knew
until three days ago that there was any evidence in Douglass’s entire life
that he had actually said these things, and then there it was.”

Mr. White and Mr. Sandage weren’t done. Their searches also uncovered an
obituary for Charlotte Scott, the former slave whose $5 donation had kicked
off the fundraising to pay for the monument on the day of Lincoln’s death.

The statue was paid for by donations from former slaves, including Black
veterans of the Union Army, but the design was selected by the Western
Sanitary Commission, a St. Louis charity run by white people, according to
the National Park Service.

The commission selected the design by Thomas Ball, an American sculptor
living in Trieste, Italy, after years of appeals failed to raise sufficient
funds for a larger and more complex monument, historians said.

Messrs. White and Sandage also found a reference in the Washington Bee, a
Black newspaper in the city, to “the Charlotte Scott Emancipation statue in
Lincoln Park.”

Just like that, a document apparently unknown to Douglass’s biographers and
not found in the orator’s papers at the Library of Congress had landed
squarely in the middle of the debate that has swept the nation and the
neighborhood around Lincoln Park where the statue stands.

Amid the Black Lives Matter Movement a

[Marxism] [UCE] Episode 30: Dr. Michael Meeropol & Dr. Johnny Eric Williams | Washington Babylon

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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This week, Ken and Andrew speak with Dr. Micheal Meeropol, an economics and 
history professor with a long history of engagement in racial justice activism. 
His birth parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were political prisoners 
executed by the state, and his adoptive parents, Abel and Anne Meeropol, were 
progressive songwriters, with Abel authoring Billie Holiday’s classic 
anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit.” Andrew also has a brief conversation with 
Dr. Johnny Eric Williams about the spike of anti-racism book sales charted by 
the New York Times Bestseller List. And is that Unrepentant Marxist Louis 
Proyect making a cameo?

https://washingtonbabylon.com/podcast/episode-30-michael-meeropol-johnny-eric-williams/


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[Marxism] National Review is Trying to Rewrite its Own Racist History

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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 National Review invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into
building an intellectual edifice for segregation that could be bandied
about in polite society.

Clip - It was clear that the South couldn’t win the fight alone, and for
that, needed conservative allies in the North. The problem was that the
rest of the country, Northern Republican conservatives included, wanted
nothing to do with the explicit, raw racism on display in the South,
preferring the more subtle kind that is more familiar today.

But those Republicans did want something else: an end to the New Deal. In
order to forge the alliance between the racist Democrats in the South,
then, and the business wing of the Republicans in the North, they had to
fuse two, unlinked political movements — the drive for segregation and the
rollback of the New Deal. That required the South to go along with
attacking programs that were extremely popular with the people of the
South, and for Northern Republicans to get behind segregation and the
preservation of the white Southern way of life.

Getting each to accept the other was not inevitable, nor was it easy.
That’s where the National Review comes in.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-buckley-racism/
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[Marxism] 'Hamilton' and the historical record: frequently asked questions - part 1 of 2

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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The Disney+ filmed version has fans wondering what’s accurate. Historians
are fans, too, and they have answers, along with caveats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/movies/hamilton-musical-history-facts.html

When “Hamilton” premiered onstage in 2015, the musical attracted a big
following among historians, who were delighted by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s
unabashedly nerdy attention to primary documents and the scholarly
literature.

But historians being historians, they also offered plenty of footnotes,
criticisms and correctives
,
which weren’t always appreciated by the show’s ardent fans, who saw a bunch
of humorless, literal-minded scolds out to kill their buzz.

Now, with the filmed version

streaming
on Disney+, the critical questions about Alexander Hamilton and the show’s
depiction of him are back, and they aren’t just coming from the ivory tower.

On Friday, the director Ava DuVernay tweeted
 her appreciation for
Miranda’s artistry, along with a blast at the real-life A.Ham, who was not
the progressive paragon of multicultural democracy some who watch the show
may assume.


“Believed in manumission, not abolition,” she wrote. “Wrote violent filth
about Native people. Believed in only elites holding political power and no
term limits. And the banking innovation has troubled roots.”

Historians, many of whom took part in a Twitter watch party under the
hashtag #HATM (Historians at the Movies
), took a generally milder
tone, even as they reiterated some of their earlier caveats. Here’s what
some of them have been saying about “Hamilton” — and Hamilton — since
Miranda’s take on the “ten-dollar founding father” took America by storm.

*Hamilton wasn’t an abolitionist? I’m confused.*

Early in the show, Hamilton calls himself and his friends “revolutionary
manumission abolitionists,” a line that raised a lot of eyebrows among
scholars.

Hamilton was genuinely antislavery, even if some scholars say the intensity
of his opposition has been overstated. He was a founding member of the New
York Manumission Society
,
created in 1785, which among other things, pushed for a gradual
emancipation law in New York State. (Such a law was passed in 1799.)

Manumission involved voluntary release by enslavers. Abolition was a more
radical proposition, and Hamilton did not advocate it
. And while
he publicly criticized Thomas Jefferson’s views on the biological
inferiority of Black people, the Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed has
noted 
that
his record and his writings from the 1790s until his death in 1804 include
little to nothing against slavery.


As the show indicates, Hamilton did support John Laurens’s 1779 plan to
allow Black soldiers to fight in the Revolution (and many eventually did).
But that’s as far as he went.

“OK, Hamilton did not write pamphlets against slavery with Laurens,”
Gordon-Reed
tweeted  during
the #HATM watch party, adding: “I hate to be that historian.”
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[Marxism] How a Lincoln-Douglass Debate Led to Historic Discovery

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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 This article is behind a paywall

wsj.com/articles/how-a-lincoln-douglass-debate-led-to-historic-discovery-11593869400
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[Marxism] Bookselling America Out of Racism? Dr. Johnny Eric Williams Doubtful… | Washington Babylon

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://washingtonbabylon.com/nyt-racism-books-johnny-eric-williams/


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[Marxism] 'Hamilton' and the historical record - part 2

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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*So which characters in the show owned slaves?*

Most of them, actually. In one of the Cabinet rap battles, Jefferson extols
the South’s agrarian economy, and Hamilton slaps back. “Yeah, keep ranting.
We know who’s really doing the planting,” he sneers, dismissing Jefferson’s
argument as “a civics lesson from a slaver.”

But slavery was hardly just a Southern affair. In 1790, about 40 percent of
households immediately around New York City included enslaved people. Most
of Hamilton’s associates who toast freedom early in the show were
slaveowners, including Aaron Burr and Hercules Mulligan (whose enslaved
servant Cato

worked
alongside him in an anti-British spy ring).

The Schuylers, the prominent family Hamilton marries into, were major
slaveholders. In fact, the mayor of Albany announced last month that the
city would remove a statue of Philip Schuyler
,
Hamilton’s father-in-law, who at various points owned as many as 27 slaves.


Angelica Schuyler and her husband also owned slaves, and Hamilton, who was
a lawyer, helped them with their slavery-related transactions, including
the $225 purchase of a mother and child.

*Wait. Did Hamilton himself own slaves?*

Possibly. When his mother died in 1768, she left Hamilton and his brother
an enslaved boy but they were not able to inherit since they had been born
out of wedlock.

And there is some documentation suggesting that Hamilton may have owned
slaves later, after his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler. The historian
Michelle DuRoss, in a 2010 paper, noted that Hamilton’s grandson had said
Hamilton owned slaves
,
citing references in family ledgers.

But the evidence is ambiguous. Ankeet Ball, in a paper for the Columbia &
Slavery research project

, noted an 1804 letter

from
Angelica Schuyler regretting that Elizabeth and Alexander did not have any
enslaved servants to help them with a party.

Ball, echoing many other scholars, pointed out that Hamilton, however much
he may have hated slavery, acquiesced to it. “Hamilton ultimately accepted
protecting slavery in the Constitution to solidify the union of the North
and the South, which was crucial to the financial growth that Hamilton
envisioned,” Ball wrote.


*Was Hamilton pro-immigrant?*

“Immigrants, we get the job done,” sung by Hamilton (who was born in Nevis)
and the Marquis de Lafayette during the Battle of Yorktown, quickly emerged
as one of the biggest applause lines

in
the show. And while Hamilton, as a subject of the British crown moving from
one British colony to another, was not an immigrant in the contemporary
sense, he did see himself (and was sometimes seen by others) as an outsider.

As far as I know neither Jefferson nor Madison ever held Hamilton's status
as an immigrant against him. Hamilton, however, was part of what became a
pretty virulently anti-immigrant coalition of Federalists. #HATM


— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) July 4, 2020


But his views of immigrants and how they fit into America were complicated.
As the historian Joanne Freeman has pointed out
,
he wanted immigrant workers to fuel the manufacturing economy he
envisioned, but he worried about their impact on the nation.

In 1798, in the middle of naval hostilities with revolutionary France,
Hamilton and other Federalists supported the Alien and Sedition Acts
,
which extended the length of time immigrants had to wait to apply for
citizenship and allowed the president to deport immigrants deemed “enemies.”

Backlash against the laws, which were designed to weaken Jefferson’s
Democratic-Republican Party, contributed to Jefferson’s victory in 1800.
After the election, when Jefferson proposed loo

[Marxism] Inquisition Mode

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LRB, Vol. 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020
Inquisition Mode
Tariq Ali

Notebooks: 1936-47
by Victor Serge, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman.
NYRB, 651 pp., £17.99, April 2019, 978 1 68137 270 9

Mexico​ city, 6 July 1946. Victor Serge had a year to live. He had spent 
the morning, as he sometimes did, with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova. 
They had been writing a joint memoir of Trotsky; in it Natalia recalls 
her husband pacing up and down in his study at Coyoacán, engaged in 
heated imaginary conversation with old dead Bolsheviks, arguing about 
Stalin, and how and why they had been defeated by him. Serge noted that 
Sedova wasn’t looking well:


What gnaws at her in reality is an immense bereavement, infinitely 
greater than that of Lev Davidovich, which only finished her off. It is 
grief for an era and an uncountable crowd. And since I’m probably the 
only person to truly share this with her, our discussions are precious 
to us, but I nevertheless avoid touching on the numberless dead. Despite 
us, they rise up: the tomb of a generation is always present. This time 
... we recalled Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, who died in prison.


Serge also recalls an evening in Moscow around 1930, when Mandelstam had 
seemed nervous and uneasy. Serge asked him what was wrong. Mandelstam 
replied: ‘It’s that you’re a Marxist.’ Serge understood. ‘When I showed 
him a volume of photos of Paris by night, the strain between us quickly 
evaporated.’ On another occasion, he ‘stupidly attempted to commit 
suicide by throwing himself out of too low a window’. In 1935, the year 
before Serge was expelled from the Soviet Union, Mandelstam jotted down 
a few satirical lines about how all of them, ‘unpersons’ by this point, 
might be remembered:


What street’s this one?
– ‘This is Mandelstam Street.
His disposition wasn’t “party-line”
Or “sweet as a flower”.
That’s why this street –
Or, rather, sewer
Or possibly slum –
Has been named after
Osip Mandelstam.’
As a writer Serge has often been compared – foolishly, I think – to 
Koestler, Silone, Orwell, Camus. But he’s so much better. Liberalism, 
despite a few clumsy attempts, has not been able to appropriate him. 
Serge knew better than most how to interpret and record the hopes, fears 
and defeats that marked a political life dedicated to resistance and 
revolution. His life spanned the First World War, the Russian Revolution 
and its aftermath, the triumph and defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, the 
rise of Franco. These Notebooks, which include some recently discovered 
material, cover the last decade of his life.


Much has been written about Serge’s life, first and foremost in his own 
Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Susan Weissman provided a meticulous account 
in Victor Serge: A Political Biography, published in 2001. Born Victor 
Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, Serge was the son of 
poverty-stricken intellectuals who had fled tsarist Russia. The family 
name itself was suspect. One of his relatives, Nikolai Kibalchich, a 
chemist by training, had built the bomb that killed Alexander II in 
1881. Along with other members of the underground anarchist group which 
had planned and carried out the assassination – including Sophia 
Perovskaya, whose father, the governor general of St Petersburg, was 
responsible for the tsar’s travel and security arrangements – Kibalchich 
was hanged. But he was celebrated after the revolution and commemorated 
as a rocket pioneer on Soviet stamps of the 196os.


In his late teens, Serge, like Kibalchich, was attracted to radical 
anarchism. After moving to Paris, he joined the Bonnot Gang, a 
courageous but nutty group intent on committing violent acts, including 
bank robberies. After one confrontation, Serge was arrested, taken to 
the prison of La Santé and made an offer. If he gave an account of the 
group’s leaders he would be rewarded and released. He refused, and was 
given a five-year prison sentence for conspiracy. On his release in 1917 
he went to Barcelona, which is where he was when the news came of 
revolution in Russia. In Spain, factory workers and trade unionists 
rejoiced, and a Workers’ Committee was set up to prepare for a 
revolutionary general strike. Serge noted that in France too an 
‘intensely alive electric current was crossing from the trenches to the 
factories, the same violent hopes were coming to birth’. Militias were 
organised by workers in Barcelona and unions opened discussions with the 
Catalan liberal bourgeoisie, with the aim of getting rid of the monarchy 
– but the movement, isolated geographically and politically, was defeated.


Serge decided it was time for a visit to his an

[Marxism] Flailing States

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LRB, 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020
Flailing States
Pankaj Mishra on Anglo-America

‘The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote 
in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the 
coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain 
and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which 
proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and 
which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened 
progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. 
‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its 
aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test 
the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current 
crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus 
outbreak in Wuhan; strategies deployed by nations that responded early, 
such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. 
But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I 
think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 
March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned 
against shaking hands, Johnson boasted after a visit to a hospital 
treating coronavirus patients: ‘I shook hands with everybody, you will 
be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.’


Epidemiologists have become the idols of a frightened public and 
scientific rigour has gained a new status in large parts of the world. 
But the current regimes in the US and Britain gained power by fomenting 
hatred of experts and expertise. British ministers, chosen for their 
devotion to Brexit and loyalty to Johnson, have revealed themselves as 
dangerous blunderers. Trump, still promoting family, flunkeys and 
conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific 
authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his 
volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological 
vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both 
countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, 
rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. 
Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a 
period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely 
to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.


As a general insurrection erupts against America’s foundational 
inequities, and a British national identity propped up by fantasies of 
empire finally splinters, it isn’t enough to lament the ‘authoritarian 
populism’ of Trump and Johnson, to blame ‘identity politics’ and the 
‘intolerant left’, or to claim moral superiority over China, Russia and 
Iran. The early winners of modern history now seem to be its biggest 
losers, with their delegitimised political systems, grotesquely 
distorted economies and shattered social contracts.


Narcissistic intellectual habits, which credit moral virtue and 
political wisdom to countries such as India because they appear to 
conform to Anglo-American notions of democracy and capitalism, will have 
to be abandoned. More attention must be paid to the specific historical 
experiences and political traditions of Germany, Japan and South Korea – 
countries once described (and dismissed) as authoritarian and 
protectionist – and the methods they have used to mitigate the suffering 
caused both by manmade change and sudden calamity. The idea of strategic 
state-building, historically alien to Britain and the US, will have to 
be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies 
as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that 
countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at 
stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the 
social and economic fallout.


Germany, which successfully used a low-tech test and trace programme, is 
reinstating its Kurzarbeit (‘short-work’) scheme, which was first used 
in the early 20th century but proved particularly valuable after the 
2008 financial crisis. South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ 
booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location 
data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people – a 
tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort. Other East 
Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much 
better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus. China managed to curb its 
spread and has since dispatched medics and medical supplies around the 
world.


Anglo-America’s dingy realitie

[Marxism] Cooked: Survival by Zip Code | Video | Independent Lens | PBS

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A documentary that makes it clear that the heat-wave that killed black 
people disproportionately in Chicago anticipated COVID-19's trajectory.


https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/cooked-survival-by-zip-code/

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[Marxism] Notes Toward a More Global History of Capitalism – Spectre Journal

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Argues that it was the universal spread of commodities rather than free 
wage labor (as Brenner argues) that was key to the transition to 
capitalism. With references to India and China.


https://spectrejournal.com/notes-toward-a-more-global-history-of-capitalism/

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[Marxism] Nine out of 10 Americans say racism and police brutality are problems, poll finds | US news | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/08/americans-racism-police-brutality-problems-poll

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[Marxism] Transform Unions and Organize the Unemployed - Sam Gindin | theAnalysis.news

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://theanalysis.news/interviews/transform-unions-and-organize-the-unemployed-sam-gindin/

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