[Marxism] These Sex Scandals Are Pushing The Country Further To The Right | Washington Babylon

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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http://washingtonbabylon.com/these-sex-scandals-are-pushing-the-country-further-to-the-right/


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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Re: [Marxism] These Sex Scandals Are Pushing The Country Further To The Right | Washington Babylon

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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How can you be so fundamentally wrong about the meaning of words that are so 
simple and uncomplicated? I'm astounded that you derive a set of moral 
judgements from observations that have nothing but factual points. 

Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

I couldn't disagree more strenuously! Masses of women are emboldened - for the 
first time - to speak out against crude, lewd and offensive behavior. There is 
nothing about this that can aid the rightwing. If the first chips to fall are 
liberal Democrats (in Franken's case, not so liberal, him supporting 
Bush/Cheney's destruction of Iraq), so be it. This is another argument against 
the faux progressiveness of that rotten corporate party.

Implying that liberal Democrats going down to defeat or resignation is a 
victory for the right and therefore the Left should protect them is an echo of 
"lesser evilism. Attacking Republican sex offenders like Trump and Roy Moore 
while making excuses for liberal Democrats is the mark of the double standard, 
which discredits the Left.

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism 
wrote:
> 
> http://washingtonbabylon.com/these-sex-scandals-are-pushing-the-country-further-to-the-right/
> 
> 
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[Marxism] What is the Green Party missing?

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/28/what-is-the-green-party-missing/

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Andrew Stewart
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Re: [Marxism] What is the Green Party missing?

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I'd like to just push back on this sentence in particular, "Andrew's
article overlooked this important aspect.   The CPUSA was also not a
democratic decision making group, or welcomed members holding different
views and being critical thinkers - just "loyal followers"."

The record is quite clear in recent scholarship and demonstrative of quite
the opposite. Since the 1960s and the New Left's 'social history' prism was
developed it has been beyond dispute that things were not as simple as that
statement would suggest. Most of the material I have seen is emphatic that
the mass membership base either paid the mildest lip service to or just
blatantly ignored the dictates of the leadership superstructure, be it in
America or Moscow. This claim is fundamentally one that is derived from the
Theodore Draper line of historiography on the party, which is a very right
wing discourse and devoted to viewing the party as a homogeneous grouping
rather than heterogeneous. Draper did not differentiate between the New
York and California parties, though they were extremely different in style
due to their proximity to the national leadership, or articulate the fact
that Wm. Z Foster brought to the party from the beginning a syndicalist
vision that was different from the praxis of other national parties.

-Andrew Stewart


Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2017 13:24:45 +
From: John Obrien 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: [Marxism] What is the Green Party missing?
Message-ID:


The main thing the Green Party in the United States is missing - is a
democratic decision making membership structure

instead of presently many states structures based on small cliques and
opposed to a mass membership.


Andrew's article overlooked this important aspect.   The CPUSA was also not
a democratic decision making group,

or welcomed members holding different views and being critical thinkers -
just "loyal followers".


This article's focus was more on opportunist tactical strategy and not the
core problem of building a needed mass based

democratic decision making party of our Class.  Not just a few seeking
personal power control and "making some political

points over their opponents in political Left currents", that historically
are meaningless.


We have seen opportunism and tailism often.  We have seen numerous small
arrogant elitist vanguard groups representing

a small leadership clique and substituting loyalty to them and how to
"serve them", instead of the difficult but needed

task of organizing our Class (not just deciding what is politically
acceptable to the "recognized leaders" who aspire to be

Lenin )   The 2017 United States is not 1917 Russia, or 1917 Untied States.


A mass based labor party is needed in the United States and the current
Green Party "leaders" appear incapable of that,

in part because they are made up of religious pacifists, middle class
artisans and professionals not wage laborers and a

mixture of old Stalinists from the CPUSA and COC.  The Green Party leaders
are mainly older in age and not focused on

welcoming youth and allowing them to provide leadership.   Also the Rhode
Island Green Party seems not representative

of most of the other Green Party state organizations that are self-electing
small cliques.
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Re: [Marxism] What is the Green Party missing?

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Correct on all points. It comes down to the fact that there are a lot of
left liberals who are not interested in getting into the streets and
joining with the poor and marginalized communities of color in their
battles against the system. Part of it is overt racism and indifference,
part of it is being scared of their own shadows, part of it is plain
stupidity bred by decades of suburban malaise. In Providence we have three
or four different organizations that serve as the locations for struggle by
the urban minority community and the white liberals wouldn't know how to
say hello if they were given cue cards.

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart

The Green party doesn't have members in most places.  I don't think I've
every pointed anyone their direction without the movers and shakers
chucking rocks at them.  :-)  There are some states better off than others,
but the vast majority consist of tiny cliques organized around the
principle of keeping control of the organization.

Recent discussions about adopting a membership-based
organization--analogous to the swallow reflex for any viable body--has
apparently been treated to a fearful letting alone.

ML
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[Marxism] What is the Green Party missing?

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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You are correct about the left liberal bit to a point. The problem is that
the Cobb faction from 2003-04 is still deeply entrenched within the
leadership positions that end up being the determination for every
political matter of true importance within the party's national
organization. They are deeply delusional, egotistical, and disconnected
from reality. This is because the structure of the party nationally is such
that it is all smoke and mirrors, just a collection of about 50 state
parties with wildly different and varied statuses in terms of everything
from membership qualifications to ballot status to outreach and political
impact in the wider landscape. The RI party can fit its meetings into a
telephone booth and New York has the ability to register as a Green in the
state!

I wouldn't dismiss them all as left liberals or even suggest that the Green
Party has no further uses.  The problem is that, in the end, the leadership
of the Greens seem to invariably defer to the worst among them.

That said, the Greens remain the best available option until those who want
something better decide to get together and build it.

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Does anyone understand what the hell this writer is talking about?

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://aeon.co/essays/has-the-time-come-for-a-quantum-revolution-in-economics

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Political Gingervitis: Episode 19-Margaret Kimberley and Dr. Tony Monteiro

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Margaret Kimberley discusses the death of Erica Garner and the future of
the Green Party in American politics. Dr. Tony Monteiro discusses W.E.B. Du
Bois, *Darkwater*, the short story ‘The Comet’, and Philadelphia Read Du
Bois.

https://rimediacoop.org/podcast/political-gingervitis-episode-19-margaret-kimberley-and-dr-tony-monteiro/

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-AmIndian]: Feller on Snyder, 'Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson'

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: January 16, 2018 at 5:31:19 PM EST
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-AmIndian]:  Feller on Snyder, 'Great Crossings: 
> Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Christina Snyder.  Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in
> the Age of Jackson.  New York  Oxford University Press Inc, 2017.
> 416 pp.  $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-939906-2.
> 
> Reviewed by Daniel Feller (University of Tennessee)
> Published on H-AmIndian (January, 2018)
> Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe
> 
> Noble dream or grand delusion?  The tale of Choctaw Academy
> 
> Some stories are too incredible not to be true. The tale of Richard
> Mentor Johnson and his Choctaw Academy would tax the imagination of a
> novelist. Imagine a rough-and-tumble frontier politician who vaults
> to national fame in the early republic as the slayer in single combat
> of a legendary Indian warrior--and then uses that fame to establish a
> school at his home for Indian youths that becomes the spearhead of a
> national movement. The politician goes on to become vice-president of
> the United States and a credible aspirant for the presidency itself,
> all while cohabiting openly with a slave woman and raising their two
> daughters to marry and assimilate into white society. The Indian
> academy becomes a triracial mixing ground and finally a cauldron,
> where all of Jacksonian America's complexities and contradictions of
> race, class, and gender play out in public view. And what should be
> the name of this place--this microcosm of an entire nation's grand
> aspirations and crippling flaws, this exemplary crossroads in its
> racial and social trajectory? Why, Great Crossings, of course.
> 
> The story is true, and Christina Snyder's _Great Crossings_ tells it
> exquisitely. She sets her stage at a public exhibition at Johnson's
> Choctaw Academy at his home at Great Crossings, Kentucky, in 1827.
> The idea of education as a vehicle for elevating, "civilizing," and
> assimilating Indians was in full youthful flower, and a host of
> illustrious and curious visitors--parents and chiefs, ministers,
> politicians, dignitaries, military men--gathered to watch Johnson's
> pupils perform their exercises. Slave servants, under the watchful
> eye of Johnson's bedmate and site manager, Julia Chinn, tended to the
> guests. Choctaw Academy was right to attract attention, for it
> embodied a number of important firsts: the first federally funded
> school outside of West Point; the first Indian academy under secular
> control; and the first to serve a pan-Indian clientele (though
> Choctaws took the lead in its establishment, the school eventually
> served students of seventeen Indian nations). Like Robert Owen's New
> Harmony community in southern Indiana, established in the same year
> of 1825, it embodied the hope of an almost infinitely malleable
> future, the promise that here in the still-crystallizing society of
> the American West, solutions could be found to the country's, and the
> world's, most vexing problems--problems of race and class, of
> economy, of social organization.
> 
> Google "Choctaw Academy" today, and stories come up about despairing
> efforts to save the last crumbling structures at a forsaken and
> nearly forgotten site. Great Crossings as a distinct community no
> longer exists. What went wrong?
> 
> Snyder's search for answers takes us into the heart of the academy
> experience. The school was founded on what appeared a happy
> conjunction of motives. Choctaw leaders had embraced education as
> their way for the future, and had secured funds for it in a federal
> treaty. Previous experience with overbearing missionaries had soured
> them on religious schools. Richard M. Johnson was a well-connected
> Kentucky senator of enlarged social views, famous not only for
> slaying Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 but for
> championing the abolition of imprisonment for debt. While Johnson
> steered clear of antislavery politics, his racial egalitarianism was
> also advanced for the time. His long-standing liaison with Julia
> Chinn was to appearances both a genuine love match and an efficient
> practical partnership, a companionate marriage in all but name. One
> benefit for Johnson of siting an academy at Great Crossings was the
> chance to educate their two teenaged daughters on the side.
> 
> For a time, all seemed to go well at Choctaw Academy. The student
> population, which included some local whites, ballooned in ten years
> from twenty-one to nearly two hundred, as

[Marxism] A CORRESPONDENCE AND READING PROJECT FOR 2018: Black Marxism by Cedric J Robinson

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Hi all

Apologies for not immediately taking up the reins regarding this effort,
have a busy work schedule.

For those who missed this column, here is the project announcement at The
North Star 

I wanted to start off with the title and structure of the book, which
itself provides a very robust discussion.

I have previously encountered individuals who think the book is a catalog
of Black Marxists or something to that effect, usually in the form of
faulting Robinson for not including a given personality.

This is not what is going on here at all. Instead, the book is a
philosophical critique of Orthodox Marxism that uses historical materialism
in its most pure and non-sectarian form to offer the analysis. Robinson's
use of CLR James, WEB Du Bois, and Richard Wright are for Hegelian purposes
in that he forms a triad with them that culminates in the ending chapter of
the book.

In this regard, the title functions this same way. It is a triad of 'Black'
+ 'Marxism' = 'The Black Radical Tradition'.

After writing this book, Robinson wrote a volume titled 'An Anthropology of
Marxism', which is extremely rare and costly. Avery Gordon has written an
essay that serves as a useful substitute primer <
https://layncal.blogspot.com/2006/07/cedric-robinsons-anthropology-of.html>

I also have posted here two videos related to the book that I found useful <
https://rimediacoop.org/2017/06/11/cedric-j-robinson-black-marxism/>.

If folks are interested in moving forward, would it be amicable to set a
date by which to have completed reading the front matter of the two
prefaces and introduction?

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] In Russia, ‘The Death of Stalin’ Is No Laughing Matter - The New York Times

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https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/movies/death-of-stalin-banned-russia.html?smid=fb-share&referer=https://m.facebook.com/


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] The Horror, the Horror | by Gary Saul Morson | The New York Review of Books

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/isaac-babel-horror-the-horror/


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Labelle on Grigas, 'The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 7:07 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Labelle on Grigas, 'The New Geopolitics of
Natural Gas'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Agnia Grigas.  The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas.  Cambridge
Harvard University Press, 2017.  416 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-674-97183-7.

Reviewed by Michael Labelle (Central European University)
Published on H-Diplo (January, 2018)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

The New Geopolitics of Our Times

Energy resources and geopolitics are intertwined in our modern
economies. _The New Geopolitics of Gas_ by Agnia Grigas exposes the
shift from continental geopolitics to the emerging global market in
natural gas. Grigas provides a thorough accounting of the politics,
economics, and events marking the rise of gas as a key element in a
low-carbon energy system. The book provides detailed discussions on
issues like the shale gas revolution in North America and geopolitics
in central eastern Europe. It also addresses lesser known stories
behind developments like the rising imports to China, Russia's
take-over of Crimea, and the export and trading hub of Qatar. _The
New Geopolitics of Gas_ is a valuable account of the new geopolitical
order in gas, serving as a foundation to understand daily events and
provoking thoughts for further research. The timeliness of the book,
as populist political tendencies rise, serves as a reminder of the
benefits of international trade in a commodity.

The order of the book is along regional divisions, which spreads
analysis of technical developments and international relations
throughout the reading. This serves as a good order to understand why
gas is entering a new global phase of geopolitics. Between 2005 and
2015 there were significant developments in the United States: the
development of hydraulic fracturing technology, the boom in shale oil
and gas, and the construction of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export
terminals. These events are now upending the regional division of gas
markets. The production of copious amounts of shale gas is keeping US
domestic prices low while allowing for gas exports. This gives the
United States sufficient quantities to enter the global LNG trade
dominated by traditional allies and foes. Deliveries to Asian
countries, such as Japan, represent strengthening commercial and
political ties, while deliveries to Poland offer up geopolitical
conflicts with Russia.

There are three key themes running through the book: 1) US shale gas
output; 2) LNG technology; and 3) Russia and Gazprom. Between 2005
and 2015, the extraction of shale gas in the United States
underpinned shifts in the global gas trade. As chapter 1 covers,
there are price differentials in regional markets, such as between
Asian and European markets, which emerge as opportunities for US LNG
exports to enter. These markets, such as in the Asian LNG market
between Australia and China, are dominated by regional LNG
deliveries, or pipeline gas from Central Asia. At the same time, as
noted above, politically significant deliveries can occur, like US
LNG shipments to Poland, a traditional dependent of Russian gas.
While US volumes are small in terms of the global LNG trade, there is
high political and economic significance to these deliveries.

Developments in LNG technology enabled the US shale gas revolution,
facilitating US entry into the global gas trade. Grigas provides a
detailed description of this technology and how it is inserted into
existing gas infrastructure and markets. The transport and financial
aspects of LNG make it a game-changer for countries formerly reliant
on domestic or regional supplies. Whether gas is used for heating
homes (as in eastern Europe) or power generation (such as in western
Europe and Japan), the technological and economic fit with an
existing system is well explained throughout the book.

The role Russia and Gazprom play in representing pipeline gas is
explained in detail in chapter 3. Russia's involvement and building
of its LNG export capacity is described in detail, but it is the
descriptions of European pipeline projects like North Stream I and
South Stream that provide the balanced perspective of how gas is used
as a political tool by Russia. Grigas avoids explicit political
summations of Russia's use of its "energy weapon" to exercise
political domination. Arguments exist on the side of Russia and
Gazprom for their economic activities and protection and involvement
in markets, which can be construed as protecting economic interests,
rather than just politics. She provides a fair assessment and
discussion of these arguments. No

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Matsusaka on Paine, 'The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: January 28, 2018 at 2:07:33 PM EST
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]:  Matsusaka on Paine, 'The Japanese Empire: 
> Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> S. C. M. Paine.  The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji
> Restoration to the Pacific War.  Cambridge  Cambridge University
> Press, 2017.  220 pp.  $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-107-67616-9; $74.99
> (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-01195-3.
> 
> Reviewed by Tak Matsusaka (Wellesley College)
> Published on H-Diplo (January, 2018)
> Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
> 
> An examination of Japan's multiple wars in Asia during the late
> nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries is essential to
> understanding the recent history of international relations as well
> as the modern Japanese experience. S. C. M. Paine's _Japanese
> Empire_, designed as an analytical survey, offers an informative
> treatment of the subject accessible to nonspecialists. Covering an
> era spanning the founding of the Meiji state (1868) and Japan's
> surrender in World War II (1945), it complements works of a similar
> genre, such as W. G. Beasley's _Japanese Imperialism: 1895-1945_
> (1987) and Michael Barnhart's _Japan and the World since 1868_
> (1993). Despite the title, the book does not deal with the topic of
> Japanese imperialism in the manner of Beasley's work, nor does it
> touch on colonialism. Instead, it explores Japan's relentless pursuit
> of great power status that produced a succession of armed conflicts
> in Asia, the first two apparently successful, but the last, a
> catastrophic failure. It frames its overarching concern by asking,
> "Although the goal to become and remain a great power had not
> changed, the conflicts produced antithetical outcomes. The question
> is, why?" (p. 2). This puzzle, in its various iterations, has
> provided one of the main engines of Japan-related historiography
> since the end of World War II. As Edwin O. Reischauer, the postwar
> dean of American Japan specialists put it, "what went wrong?"[1]
> Paine reiterates some long-established answers but also adds fresh
> insight through two thematic emphases.
> 
> First, the author sees Japan's quest for great power status facing
> two divergent choices from the outset: whether to develop as a
> maritime power or as a continental power. "The Industrial Revolution
> brought trade of global scope and wealth of unimaginable scale. It
> heralded an incoming maritime world order, which gradually supplanted
> the outgoing continental world order of empires underlying so many
> great civilizations. Formerly, land had been the currency of power.
> It produced the agricultural commodities to be sold and the peasant
> conscripts to field mass armies. In the nineteenth century, commerce
> became the juggernaut of wealth creation, which in turn underwrote
> high standards of living and expensive ambitions, armaments, and
> allies." Geography had blessed Japan with the opportunity to pursue
> the maritime route, but in the end, Japanese elites of the Meiji era
> (1868-1912) opted instead for continental power. "The Meiji
> generation lived at the transition between two global orders but they
> charted a course to the outgoing one, then at high tide, because they
> and so many others did not yet apprehend the incoming one just beyond
> the horizon" (p. 77). The book delves into this pivotal choice, its
> repeated reaffirmation across decades despite growing signs of
> miscalculation, and its consequences for Japan and its wartime
> adversaries. Although the conclusion that Japan's catastrophic defeat
> in 1945 might be understood as the path-dependent outcome of
> decisions made by the Meiji elite is hardly new, Paine offers an
> enlightening perspective based on a reassessment of Japan's
> performance in its first two wars. Japan overcame China in 1894-95
> and Russia in 1904-5 not because of a prodigious strategic
> superiority but because its adversaries had failed to exploit the
> vulnerabilities inherent in a Japanese bid to dominate the Asian
> mainland. The perception of success, however, led the Japanese elite
> to draw erroneous lessons about the viability of Japanese continental
> power in the twentieth century.
> 
> The second thematic emphasis lies in what Paine calls "grand
> strategy," defined in the following way: "Grand strategy, in
> distinction to military (or operational-level) strategy, integrates
> all relevant elements of national power" (p. 7). The successful
> conduct of war requires the

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Booth on Hogeland, 'Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion that Opened the West'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 8:39 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Booth on Hogeland, 'Autumn of the Black
Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion that Opened the West'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


William Hogeland.  Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the
U.S. Army and the Invasion that Opened the West.  New York  Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2017.  464 pp.  $28.00 (paper), ISBN
978-0-374-90177-6.

Reviewed by Ryan W. Booth (Washington State University)
Published on H-War (February, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

The eyes of the nation rested on the fate of the Old Northwest in
1794. Americans obsessively worried about it either falling into
British hands or becoming a permanent homeland for increasingly
hostile Native Americans. The twin goals of opening the West to
American settlement at the expense of indigenous peoples, and the
creation of regular army to protect and expand that enterprise,
coalesced in the 1790s to create the US empire. William Hogeland's
_Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the
Invasion that Opened the West_ provides a fresh narrative on this
pivotal period. The author's main thesis is that the creation of a
permanent military force, tested by war with the Miami Confederacy
and their vanquishing of the same, set the United States on the path
of "industrial and imperial power that, with victory in its first
war, the United States did go on to achieve" (p. 375). The Battle of
Fallen Timbers emerged as the moment that turned the US from nascent
weakling republic into a powerful empire intent on western expansion.


Hogeland's work is divided into three parts that follow a cause,
course, and consequences framework. Part 1 explores the various
machinations by British Americans to gain access to the Ohio Country.
The work pays special attention to George Washington and his exploits
both in real estate and with the Virginia militia during the Seven
Years' War. The author also reconstructs the lives of Blue Jacket and
Little Turtle as well as their tribal claims to their homelands. Part
2 focuses on the fledgling US and its various attempts to organize
its settlement claims to the Old Northwest and the people therein. As
the country grappled with its newly won independence, the
consequences of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and British intransigence
around the Great Lakes, the Americans frequently found themselves
between a rock and a hard place. They lacked the resources, prestige,
and strong military to project power into their newly acquired
territory. The problems were further compounded by botched treaty
negotiations and ruinous military expeditions led by Josiah Harmar
and later by Arthur St. Clair. Part 3 focuses on the efforts of
Anthony Wayne and his newly created and permanent US Army to avenge
St. Clair's defeat and establish American hegemony over the Native
peoples of the Ohio Country. With Wayne's successful battle at Fallen
Timbers, the remaining Indian confederates found no protection from
British forces and their coalition fractured. Thus, the United States
established its dominion over the Old Northwest and ended any serious
threats from Native Americans in the territory.

The book's strengths lie in the author's extensive research on
various figures such as George Washington and Anthony Wayne.
Washington's biography is well-trod territory, but Hogeland holds a
strong line to focus exclusively on his interests in the Northwest
Territories. His Washington appears as a calculating puppet master
intent on western land speculation. Where Washington was calculating,
Wayne appears every bit the rough-and-ready character that he was.
His troubles seem innumerable, from being a lady's man and terrible
planter to his sullen outbursts at perceived slights. This is all the
more remarkable given his "mad" skills of disciplining and training
an army; in this way, Hogeland draws on Alan Gaff's work in _Bayonets
in the Wilderness_ (2004). Other figures leave an impression, but are
even less edifying, such as Henry Knox, who seems only concerned with
lining his pockets at the government's expense. James Wilkinson
emerges as the most perfidious spy in US history, as well as
archenemy of "mad" Anthony.

The other main contribution is to revive the literature on the
conundrum of a standing army in the early republic. Most of the
founders also acknowledged that the militia was wholly inadequate to
the task of providing a consistent and disciplined system of
protection against all foreign and domestic enemies. This debate,
however, is not new and is fully explored in Richard K

Re: [Marxism] Fw: The Assad regime: a response to Marcel Cartier (Links)

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I think that using the term inter-imperialist rivalry and trying to bring
in the connotations circa 1914 and World War I misses the mark drastically.
The quality of life and purchase power within Germany as opposed to Great
Britain was a matter of equivalence. The poverty experienced by Russians to
this day because of the neoliberal pillage of the public sector after the
collapse of the USSR makes their purchase power and quality of life
significantly lower as compared to the Western neoliberal empire. This is
indicated further by the repeated statements in public by Putin over the
years. He has always tried to claim America as a partner and collaborator,
most obviously when he and Obama spoke at the UN on the same day several
years back. Suggesting contrary is flying in the face of demonstrable
matters regarding the Russians. They have a military that is nowhere near
as large as the combined forces of NATO and their invocation of Great
Russian nationalism within the right element of their voting population is
nothing in comparison to the strength that can be and is mustered by their
Western contemporaries when nationalism is invoked by someone like Michael
Flynn.

-AS


Message: 1
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 19:57:19 +
From: Chris Slee 
To: "marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu" 
Subject: [Marxism] Fw: The Assad regime: a response to Marcel Cartier
(Links)
Message-ID:


Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"


http://links.org.au/syria-rojava-assad-marcel-cartier

In a recent article, Marcel Cartier denounces the Turkish invasion of Afrin
and calls for solidarity with Rojava

I fully agree with Cartier's call for solidarity with Rojava revolution,
but I disagree with some other points in the article.

Cartier rightly condemns the Assad regime for oppressing the Kurds and
other ethnic minorities   But he gives the regime undue credit in some
other respects.

Cartier claims that Assad is popular with a large part of the population

I believe this is overstating Assad's popularity.  It is true that many
Syrians, particularly religious minorities such as the Christians, support
Assad as the lesser evil compared to some of the Sunni-sectarian rebel
groups.  But that does not mean that they regard him as progressive.  The
lesser evil is still evil

Cartier also gives Assad credit for being anti-imperialist

It is true that Assad has in some ways defied US imperialism, particularly
by supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon.  But in other ways he has at times
collaborated with US imperialism - e.g. by torturing prisoners sent to
Syria by the CIA.

>From the point of view of the US ruling class, Assad is a less than ideal
ruler of Syria. He has long been allied with Russia and Iran

No doubt the US would prefer to see a more consistently pro-Western
government in power in Syria.  When the rebellion started, the US talked of
replacing Assad, and supplied some aid to the rebels (though not enough for
them to win).

Since then, however, talk of replacing Assad has largely disappeared

When Cartier talks about "the machinations of imperialism towards a
government that defied its diktat", he is referring to the actions of the
US and its allies.  But in my view Russia is now an imperialist power too.

Hence when we talk of imperialist intervention in Syria we should include
Russia as one of the intervening powers.  Because of inter-imperialist
rivalry, Russia may intervene in a different way than the US.

Russia's military aid to Assad in suppressing the rebels is a form of
imperialist intervention.

Russia has also intervened diplomatically, by hosting discussions between
the Assad regime and Turkey.  This has resulted in Turkish troops entering
Syrian territory without meeting any opposition from the Syrian armed
forces or the Russian air force.  First Turkey invaded the Jarablus area in
2016.  Now they are invading Afrin.  In both cases there appear to be
trade-offs.  Turkey has persuaded, pressured or ordered some of the rebel
groups it supports to withdraw from the battle front against Assad in order
to fight against Rojava.  This has helped Assad regain control over much of
the territory previously held by the rebels.


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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] FYI Syria watchers: Syrian War Spirals in Trump's Dangerous New Phase (Pt.1/2)

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https://youtu.be/zbRaj2KPNlM


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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Albion]: Southcombe on Goldie, 'Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 3:31 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Albion]: Southcombe on Goldie, 'Roger Morrice and
the Puritan Whigs'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Mark Goldie.  Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs.  Rochester
Boydell Press, 2016.  462 pp.  $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-78327-110-8.

Reviewed by George Southcombe (Wadham College, Oxford)
Published on H-Albion (February, 2018)
Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth

The publication in 1990 of _The Politics of Religion in Restoration
England_ marked an important historiographical moment. It was edited
by two scholars then at the beginning of their careers, Tim Harris
and Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie, who had supervised Harris's
doctoral thesis. If not quite the ur-text of the modern study of the
Restoration, not least because of important other work that had
already been published by its editors, it has proved profoundly
influential. The three propositions that underpinned the analyses
offered--that the late seventeenth century was best understood in
relation to the early seventeenth century; that religion continued to
play a vital role in political life; and that politics "out-of-doors"
represented an important area of study--have shaped the terms of the
debate for now nearly thirty years. It was also in 1990 that Robin
Gwynn brought Mark Goldie aboard a long-standing project. Gwynn's was
the third attempt of the twentieth century to produce an edition of
Roger Morrice's _Entring Book _(1677-91), and in 1996, the year in
which Gwynn chose to leave academia for politics in New Zealand, a
board was formed to bring this project to fruition. This was
triumphantly achieved in 2007 when, under Goldie's general
editorship, a six-volume edition was published by Boydell and Brewer
(a seventh volume, the index, appeared in 2009). Four volumes
contained the 925,000 words of the _Entring_ Book,meticulously edited
by leading historians of the Restoration. The picture it painted of a
society riven by religious division, shaped by the experience of
civil war, and hungry for news provided powerful support for the
general lines of argument proposed in _The Politics of Religion_.
Indeed, in many ways the _Entring Book _can be seen as the
culmination of the process of research and interpretation heralded by
that collection of essays. The full extent of its own impact remains
to be seen. Its sheer weight, and cost, have perhaps meant that it
has not been as fully assimilated into more recent works as might
have been expected.[1] It is to be hoped that the book under review
will encourage its greater use.

The first volume of the published _Entring Book _contained Goldie's
monograph, _Roger Morrice and_ _the Puritan Whigs_. It is this which
has now been reprinted, with a new introduction but without the
appendices, as a stand-alone paperback. Boydell and Brewer are to be
praised for taking this step, which has made a remarkable book
accessible to a much wider audience. As has been the case with some
past introductions--we might in particular think of Austin Woolrych's
contextualization of some of Milton's later prose--Goldie's work
transcends its genre and takes on an importance of its own.[2] The
new introduction provides a survey of recent work, and Goldie casts a
wry eye on some historiographical tendencies. He warns that
"historians are best advised not over-zealously to chase intimations
of modernity in either Anglicans or Puritans," and he notes the
"immense prevailing preoccupation with textuality, with writing and
reading as if they were the primordial forms of human agency" (pp.
xxii, xxx). He concludes by suggesting that the weight of recent
study has been to overturn the old conceptualization of the
Restoration as a period of defeat for Puritanism: "the Puritans of
Restoration England cannot (and despite their own threnodies) be
construed merely as slaves under Egyptian taskmasters or wanderers in
Sinai" (p. xxxvii). The chapters that follow are unaltered from the
2007 publication (to the extent that they still include references to
the appendices). It is likely, though, that they will now be read in
different ways.

Undergraduate readers are likely to fall upon the three chapters in
which Goldie outlines an interpretation of English political and
religious history from the 1640s into the 1690s and beyond. And so
they should. Each is a masterpiece of compression, developing an
argument about the continued political significance of Puritanism in
the period 1660-89, and also a subtle case about its decline
thereafter. The general argument that Puritan political positions,
developed and 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-SHERA]: Nordgaard on Ashby, 'Modernism in Scandinavia: Art, Architecture and Design' (With Love and Kisses to the Staff of Jacobin Magazine)

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 11:39 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-SHERA]: Nordgaard on Ashby, 'Modernism in
Scandinavia: Art, Architecture and Design'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Charlotte Ashby.  Modernism in Scandinavia: Art, Architecture and
Design.  London  Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.  256 pp.  $29.95 (paper),
ISBN 978-1-4742-2430-7.

Reviewed by Ingrid Nordgaard (Yale University)
Published on H-SHERA (February, 2018)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha

In scholarly accounts of European modernism, Scandinavia is often
viewed as peripheral to the cultural centers of France, Germany, and
Spain--a side note in the grander histories and stories of modernism
as a movement. In her book, _Modernism in Scandinavia: Art,
Architecture and Design_, Charlotte Ashby challenges this viewpoint
and offers a fascinating introduction to more than eight decades of
modernist culture in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.
Ashby's study exhibits the diversity of expressions found among
Scandinavian artists, architects, and designers, paying special
attention to the period 1890-1970, and her monograph aims to be a new
history of modernism in Scandinavia. Rather than focusing exclusively
on internationally acclaimed figures such as Edvard Munch and Alvar
Aalto, Ashby includes lesser-known artists whose contributions must
be considered to understand the full magnitude of Scandinavian
modernism. Throughout the book's five chapters, Ashby convincingly
presents the unique nature of every artwork she explores. Instead of
heralding individual artists as prominent exceptions, however, Ashby
continuously foregrounds the importance of looking at the bigger
picture and explores artistic communities, networks, and social
settings in order to explain the significance of each work. In such a
fashion, Ashby is also able to convey how Scandinavian modernist art,
architecture, and design respond to historical changes, social
concerns, and modernity at large.

In her introduction, Ashby argues that the art historical label of
modernism should be expanded to embrace the multitude of artistic
expressions that appear in different times and places. Ultimately,
Ashby views modernism as an "accumulation of impulses, events,
discussions and objects" (pp. 2-3), and the study as a whole reveals
how various art forms play a role "in mediating societies' and the
individual's experience of past, present and future" (p. 4).

Apart from the first chapter in the book, which introduces the
decades prior to 1890, the four remaining chapters each cover twenty
years of artistic production. Each chapter is structured by a series
of case studies through which Ashby explores both visual and applied
arts in relation to their respective locations and historical
contexts. The artworks discussed reflect "the surrounding
infrastructure of influential cultural institutions, the
professionalization of art and design practice and the markets within
which works were produced" (p. 3). Ashby's case studies offer formal
analyses that strike an impressive balance between commenting on the
artworks in their own right as aesthetic objects and as objects of
sociocultural significance. As a result, the reader is encouraged to
contemplate the intricate interplay between various artworks and
their function in society.

In the first chapter, Ashby indirectly comments on the foundations
that were needed for modernism to develop: new institutions, an urban
middle class who invested in art, and public and private
organizations that stressed culture as ideologically significant. The
chapter highlights artworks that exemplify how late
nineteenth-century culture responded to the desire to modernize but
also looked backward to explore the cultural roots of the nation.
Scandinavian art and design of this period sought to encourage new
achievements while simultaneously reaffirming ties with the past.
This manifested itself in works that combined different styles and
art historical orientations to create objects that reflected both the
old and the new, the national and the international. Especially
interesting in this chapter is Ashby's case study of the Norse
Revival vase, designed by August Malmström and produced by the
Gustavsberg porcelain company in Sweden between 1872 and 1883.
Through the concept of Norse Revival, designers such as Malmström
looked back to Scandinavia's Viking heritage and celebrated the era
by drawing on its aesthetics. Ashby's analysis sheds light on the
changing relationship between fine and applied arts, and reveals how
art was theorized in response to nationalism and national culture.

I

[Marxism] Black Panther movie editorial by Bruce Dixon

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Great piece herein

https://blackagendareport.com/black-panther-movie-and-limits-our-imagination

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[Marxism] Black Panther: Afrofuturism Gets a Superb Film, Marvel Grows Up and I Don’t Know How to Review It

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/21/black-panther-afrofuturism-gets-a-superb-film-marvel-grows-up-and-i-dont-know-how-to-review-it/


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Re: [Marxism] Black Panther: Afrofuturism Gets a Superb Film, Marvel Grows Up and I Don?t Know How to Review It

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I grew up in the 1990s and so the span of Marvel Comics that were part of
my childhood, as well as the several cartoons, were pretty different than
what we have been getting since the first IRON MAN from Marvel Studios.
Marvel was always extremely high on both the melodrama and the social
justice parables, sometimes to the extent of being unbearable. My frame of
reference for the canon therefore is including that stuff. Indeed since
Marvel Studios emerged, it has been pretty obvious that Marvel and DC  have
effectively switched roles, now it is DC-based films like the Batman
pictures and Superman with all the pathos while Marvel is pretty bubblegum
in comparison.

Speaking specifically about the Panther titles, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been
writing it for the past several years and the result have been interesting.

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart



Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 06:41:13 -0800
From: DW 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: Re: [Marxism] Black Panther: Afrofuturism Gets a Superb Film,
Marvel Grows Up and I Don?t Know How to Review It
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Andrew, one of the better reviews. I *still* think you, like many of us
political types, are taking the film way too seriously. I can't disagree
with what you say but you do fail in one area: trying to rely what the
*comic* book was all about and how this film reflects, or not, the original
idea of The Black Panther. I always judge a work of art (even a cartoon)
based on the canon of that film. You to touch on it be far too briefly. The
Black Panther fits into the Marvel Universe/Marvel Cinematic Universe
franchise (Thor, Avengers, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.
etc. etc.).

These comic books were all conceived as or were eventually integrated into
this universe(s) and in fact our Black Panther character and his general,
played by the wildly popular (because of her starring role in The Walking
Dead as Michonne, the sword wielding and general bad-ass Zombie killer)
Danai Gurira are in the upcoming Avengers film "Avengers: Infinity". Both
characters are part of the ensemble of super-heroes out to save the planet.
The 'social significance' of this I have to assume is irrelevant beyond the
rather flaccid attempt at liberal globalization and "anti-racism" exhibited
in The Black Panther.

Lastly, I enjoyed the attempt to humanize the characters beyond their 2
dimensional presence with cute banter between them. This is not unique to
this Marvel film as  they have been doing this in the last few years by
giving the characters a little levity in their lines. Of course the
amazingly wonderful Guardian of the Galaxy serious is *entirely* based on
such banter and it works well (not to mention that the two Guardian films
have simply the best sound track of any film ever made. EVER. :)

David Walters
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Bogdan on Davies and Kent, 'The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:58 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Bogdan on Davies and Kent, 'The Red Atlas:
How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


John Davies, Alexander J. Kent.  The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union
Secretly Mapped the World.  Chicago  University Of Chicago Press,
2017.  Maps. 272 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-38957-8.

Reviewed by Nina Bogdan (University of Arizona)
Published on H-War (February, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

The story of how John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, the authors of
_Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World_, gained
access to the "secret" Soviet maps showcased in their book is both
familiar and somewhat anticlimactic--as the Soviet Union
disintegrated, pieces of it went up for sale, to include cartographic
productions. The suddenness of the collapse created opportunities to
make a quick ruble (or, more likely, dollar), particularly in places
like the Baltic states, where Soviet rule was thrown off as
expeditiously as possible. Given the culture of secrecy around all
map production and cartography in the Soviet Union throughout its
history, it is no wonder that the individuals who had access to the
maps in bulk (and who coincidentally also needed money) were former
Soviet military personnel. However, as the authors describe, despite
the efforts of various parties to get their hands on them, a huge
number of maps were simply destroyed. For example, Aivars Zvirbulis,
a Latvian orienteer (orienteering is a sport that combines racing and
navigation), negotiated to buy one hundred tons of maps out of _six
thousand tons_ set for destruction as waste paper, but in the end
acquired only two or three tons as "local children" set fire to the
rest (p. 132). The fact that the painstaking work of Soviet
cartographers ended up all over the world in private hands, scholarly
institutions, and museums, then, is something to celebrate, given the
work and craft that went into creating these maps. There is no end to
the irony that Western military forces used Soviet-made maps of
Afghanistan prior to invasion in 2001. Not only were these maps
incredibly accurate but they were also the only such maps available.

The authors have compiled an atlas, which, though it provides some
interesting insights and explanations, raises a host of broader
questions: What was the purpose of creating detailed maps in the
Russian language of places with seemingly little military or
intelligence interest? Was it part of a plan to take over the world?
If so, what does this say about the supposed threat of nuclear
annihilation posed by a perennially aggressive, according to Western
discourse, Soviet state, a threat that led directly to a central
doctrine of US foreign policy during the Cold War: the concept of
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)? Why create maps of places that
theoretically would no longer exist in the event of nuclear
holocaust? Was it because the Soviet government considered a nuclear
exchange survivable? Or did the Soviet political and military
leadership remain convinced that a conventional war was possible and
thus drew up contingency plans that included "mapping the world" to
assist their reconnaissance forces? Or was the global mapping project
simply part of Soviet efforts to maintain domestic full employment?
There are no answers to these questions in the book; instead, the
authors present the maps as curious examples of the focus and
activity of a secretive repressive regime--a seemingly obsessive
attempt between 1950 and 1990 to collect detailed topographic
information literally from everywhere in the world and to create
accurate high-quality maps of those locations. The military purpose
of the mapping is clear and indubitable as the authors point out time
and again: much of the information included in the maps is militarily
oriented. Details such as navigability of rivers, carrying capacity
of bridges, and number of tracks in railroads may interest some
tourist travelers but are not details generally included in tourist
maps or even standard maps for administrative purposes.

The book is divided into four chapters and includes eight appendices,
but, at 234 pages, the text takes second place to the graphics: a
significant portion of the book is dedicated to the maps, which are
reproduced at a high level of quality. In the foreword, James Risen
notes both the beauty and craft of the maps, as well as the mystery
behind their production. And though the authors point to the age of
the maps reproduced to account for problems of quality, the a

[Marxism] Andrew Stewart's Review of "Young Karl Marx" – RI Relevant

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http://www.rirelevant.com/lifestyle/andrew-stewarts-review-young-karl-marx/


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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Rutherford on Moorhouse, 'The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact With Stalin, 1939-41'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 11:19 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Rutherford on Moorhouse, 'The Devils'
Alliance: Hitler's Pact With Stalin, 1939-41'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Roger Moorhouse.  The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact With Stalin,
1939-41.  New York  Basic Books, 2014.  432 pp.  $29.99 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-465-03075-0.

Reviewed by Jeff Rutherford (Wheeling Jesuit University)
Published on H-War (March, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

By June 1941, the European continent lay firmly under German
dominion. The battlefield revolution created by the Germans' adroit
exploitation of the potential offered by tanks and planes operating
in tandem served as one cause of this. Just as important, however,
was a diplomatic revolution that allowed the Germans to concentrate
their forces on one front at a time. At a stroke, the signing of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact on August 23, 1939, fundamentally altered European
Great Power politics, and instead of the Soviet Union acting as check
on German ambitions--as its predecessor had during the First World
War--Moscow supported German policies, while simultaneously pursuing
its own revisionist agenda.

Despite its significance in shaping not only the war itself, but
indeed the postwar settlement as well, historian Roger Moorhouse
argues that "the pact is simply not a part of our collective
narrative of World War II" (p. xxiii). In his new book, _The Devils'
Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941_, Moorhouse aims for
the agreement and its results "to be rescued from the footnotes and
restored to its rightful place in our collective narrative of World
War II in Europe" (p. xxvi). In particular, he believes "it is
frankly scandalous" that the Sovietization of those areas annexed by
Moscow "does not find a place in the Western narrative of World War
II" (p. xxvi). While Moorhouse's presentation does not offer a
dramatic revision of how historians understand the events from 1939
to 1941, he does provide a readable overview that should appeal to
broad audience not as well versed in the topic.

Moorhouse offers a conventional narrative approach that covers all of
the major events during the pact's relatively brief existence: German
foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's visits to Moscow in August
and September 1939, Sir Stafford Cripp's ill-fated May 1940 journey
to the Soviet Union, Nazi deputy führer Rudolf Hess's spectacularly
misjudged attempt to end the war between Germany and Great Britain by
flying to the British Isles, Soviet foreign minister's Vyacheslav
Molotov's stormy and ultimately unsuccessful meeting in Berlin in
November 1940, and the various foreign policy and military
machinations of the two states in the area stretching from Finland
down through the Balkans. His eye for detail and his artful
descriptions of the leading protagonists and their beliefs keeps the
relatively well-known narrative moving at a brisk pace.

Three major themes emerge in his treatment of the period. First, he
is determined to shine a bright light on Soviet occupation policies
in the annexed areas of the Baltic states, eastern Poland,
Bessarabia, and Bukovina. Of course, this is not _terra incognito_.
Jan Gross's _Revolution from Abroad_ (1988), Alexander Prusin's _The
Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992
_(2010), and Timothy Snyder's _Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and
Stalin_ (2012) have all examined the events surrounding the pact and
its results based on serious archival research, and Soviet behavior
in these areas constitutes an important component in the work of one
of Moorhouse's former collaborators, Norman Davies, in his _No Simple
Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945 _(2007). Nonetheless,
Moorhouse effectively mines memoirs and other secondary source
material, including that published in the Baltic states, to vividly
recreate the terror caused by the mass arrests, deportation, and
murder unleashed by the Red Army and NKVD. In sixteen months, the
Soviets organized four separate major deportations from their
occupied section of Poland. Citing the Polish historian Zbigniew
Siemaszko, Moorhouse suggests that the generally agreed upon number
of one million deported might be a significant underestimation of the
true number, as it fails to include those whose fate remained outside
the written record. The well-known murderous events at Katyn were
complemented by smaller scale shootings of officers; clearly, Poland
suffered greatly under its 22-month Soviet occupation. The other
areas incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result of the pact
fared no bet

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Burton on Bjerk, 'Julius Nyerere'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: March 20, 2018 at 5:15:35 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]:  Burton on Bjerk, 'Julius Nyerere'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Paul Bjerk.  Julius Nyerere.  Athens  Ohio University Press, 2017.
> 168 pp.  $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8214-2260-1.
> 
> Reviewed by Eric Burton (Universität Wien)
> Published on H-Socialisms (March, 2018)
> Commissioned by Gary Roth
> 
> Paul Bjerk's short political biography of Tanzania's first and
> long-time president Julius K. Nyerere (1922-99) is a highly welcome
> and urgently needed addition to the historical literature on African
> politicians. It appears in the series Ohio Short Histories of Africa
> which has already brought forward brief volumes on political figures
> such as Steve Biko, Haile Selassie, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba,
> and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. For few of them do we have well-researched
> biographies, and the same has been true--with the exception of his
> early years--for the case of Nyerere.[1]  Well written and accessible
> to a broad audience, Bjerk's contribution charts Julius Nyerere's
> rise from being one of many sons of a chief in rural Tanganyika (as
> the country was called before its union with Zanzibar in 1964) to
> becoming a leader of the nationalist movement which made Tanganyika
> the first independent country in East Africa by 1961. As Bjerk
> emphasises, this was a notable strategic achievement, as independence
> was still thought to be decades away in 1958 and was eventually
> achieved without bloodshed or any major conflicts with the British.
> 
> Following a slightly unfocused introduction ("Mwalimu Nyerere: A
> Study in Leadership"), Bjerk takes the reader through five chapters
> following Nyerere's life chronologically, beginning with his early
> years in Tanganyika and educational journeys to Uganda and Scotland
> ("Coming of Age in an African Colony, 1922-53"). The second chapter
> shows how Nyerere paved his country's road to independence and
> mitigated threats to the sovereignty of the young nation from within
> and without ("TANU and Tanzanian Independence, 1954-64"). The
> succeeding chapters detail Nyerere's turn to authoritarianism as he
> tried to implement a home-grown socialist model of development
> ("Ujamaa and the Race for Self-Reliance, 1965-1977"), his failure to
> recognize the effects of the failing economic policies on the fabric
> of society ("Confronting a Continent in Crisis, 1978-1990"), and his
> activities as an elder statesmen of regional importance ("An Unquiet
> Retirement, 1991-1999").
> 
> Pressed between the covers of a book of 150 pages, the crucial
> question is how Bjerk approaches a life as rich and influential as
> Nyerere's. The answer is: through national politics. Bjerk treats
> Nyerere "as a symbol of leadership and its perils," as an example
> that shall "serve as a case study of an African country confronting
> the challenges of its independence, as seen through the life of one
> of the era's most creative and thoughtful politicians" (p. 10). To be
> sure, the book does point out repeatedly Nyerere's regional and
> global roles as a pan-Africanist supporter of liberation movements
> and champion of nonalignment who struggled for the unity of the poor
> global South against the rich global North, wanting to change the
> rules of the world economy. For the most part, however, the biography
> places Nyerere in Tanzanian debates, tensions, and dynamics--which,
> in turn, were so much shaped by him. The book thus also serves as an
> introduction to Tanzania's postcolonial politics, albeit one that,
> quite understandably given the limited space, privileges the
> president's views and mentions other Tanzanian politicians or social
> and cultural aspects only in passing.
> 
> Every biographer renders a verdict, and Bjerk is careful to base his
> judgement on several factors. Nyerere is portrayed as a benevolent,
> even humanist dictator whose power relied more heavily on ideology
> than on intimidation or violence. His major faults, in Bjerk's view,
> related to his stubbornness and an inadequate understanding of
> economic issues and their impact on society. Bjerk finds that Nyerere
> responded to the economic crisis "as a moralist" by blaming
> individuals for their misbehavior rather than adjusting flawed
> policies (p. 107). As president, he failed to come up with viable
> alternatives to the recommendations of the International Monetary
> Fund and showed little understanding for the creative strategies of
> Tanzanians to make ends meet when b

[Marxism] Social democracy abandoned workers; now, workers are doing likewise – People's World

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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It seems like CPUSA has rebranded its news outlet to mimic the praxis of Labor 
Notes while maintaining their Popular Front politics. Ergo not a hint of irony 
in this article about how social democracy failed at the end of the Cold War to 
materialize as the alternative to capitalism in the west...

http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/social-democracy-abandoned-workers-now-workers-are-doing-likewise/


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Venable on Boylan, 'Losing Binh Dinh: The Failure of Pacification and Vietnamization, 1969-1971'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 11:45 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Venable on Boylan, 'Losing Binh Dinh: The
Failure of Pacification and Vietnamization, 1969-1971'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Kevin M. Boylan.  Losing Binh Dinh: The Failure of Pacification and
Vietnamization, 1969-1971.  Lawrence  University Press of Kansas,
2016.  365 pp.  $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-2352-5.

Reviewed by Heather P. Venable (Air Command and Staff College)
Published on H-War (March, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Kevin M. Boylan's _Losing Binh Dinh: The Failure of Pacification and
Vietnamization, 1969-1971_ seeks to test the revisionist claim that
the United States was winning the Vietnam War through its
pacification efforts after the Tet Offensive but lost anyway because
policymakers did not stay the course. Boylan does this by focusing on
a particular province to explore the interrelationships between
pacification and Vietnamization, arguing that they worked at cross
purposes, ultimately failing both to prepare South Vietnamese troops
to fight independently and to eliminate the VietCong insurgency.
Vietnamization, in particular, could not succeed because of poor
South Vietnamese leadership, which also challenges the revisionist
claim that indigenous leadership improved significantly after Tet.

Kevin Boylan draws on his dual background as a defense analyst
concerned with Iraq, among other issues, and as a graduate with a PhD
in military history from Temple University, where he studied under
Russell Weigley. The author recently left his position as a history
professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh to support his
wife's academic career.[1]Overall, Boylan challenges revisionist
approaches, claiming they rely excessively on top-down assessments
made by high-ranking policymakers and overly sweeping views of South
Vietnam. By contrast, Boylan takes a bottom-up view focused on the
specific province of Binh Dinh in order to better understand the
localized and multifaceted nature of insurgencies. While certainly
not the first to take this approach, he has chosen a province that
represents a geographical aberration in South Vietnam, which made it
especially challenging to pacify. In particular, it had poor soil
that made it difficult to sustain its overpopulated numbers.
Communist ideology thus found a receptive population, becoming
entrenched as early as World War II, when the Viet Minh filled a
power vacuum enabled by French defeat and gained a reputation as
nationalists for battling the Japanese. In short, the province could
be considered the Appalachia of South Vietnam.

Ironically, early pacification efforts made significant headway,
offering hope that they might be successful. From April 1969 to
December 1970, the 173rd Airborne worked in Binh Dinh to "secure
individual hamlets" while providing training to the Territorial
Forces that ultimately would replace it (p. 8). In this way, the
approach certainly represented a more population-centric method of
counterinsurgency than the United States previously had attempted in
Vietnam, although it would be dangerous to draw many comparisons to
recent US COIN efforts in Iraq and elsewhere because this program did
not attempt to win "hearts and minds". Rather, it represented a
"quick fix" designed to regain "military control of enemy-dominated
communities" (p. 48). This approach rested on policymakers'
assumptions that villagers were "apolitical" (p. 287). By contrast,
the VietCong had a more targeted policy of maintaining their
"_psychological _grip" on those villagers most likely to be active in
leading their communities (p. 289), which provided them with an
important advantage.

If Communist morale and activity did suffer greatly in 1969, however,
those gains resulted from the efforts of US rather than South
Vietnamese troops. Moreover, all of the US military effectiveness in
the world could not counterbalance the local government's political
shortcomings. Simultaneously, the Phoenix program failed to destroy
the Vietcong infrastructure even as the Communists increasingly
responded to pacification's successes by engaging in acts of
terrorism against local government officials. By 1970, policymakers
problematically sought to both enlarge and consolidate pacification,
effectively working at cross purposes. The exodus of US troops from
the country only made this even more unrealistic.

Meanwhile, the United States hoped optimistically that _more_
training of the Territorial Forces might turn the tide. But Boylan
compellingly argues that all of the training in the world could not
solve the r

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-FedHist]: Jeffreys-Jones on Durbin, 'The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: March 26, 2018 at 3:15:10 PM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-FedHist]:  Jeffreys-Jones on Durbin, 'The CIA and 
> the Politics of US Intelligence Reform'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Brent Durbin.  The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform.
> Cambridge  Cambridge University Press, 2017.  338 pp.  $99.99
> (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-18740-5.
> 
> Reviewed by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh and
> Scottish Society for the Study of America)
> Published on H-FedHist (March, 2018)
> Commissioned by Caryn E. Neumann
> 
> Brent Durbin, a government professor at Smith College who obtained
> his doctorate from University of California, Berkeley, sets out to
> explain the variations in success rate of a series of historical
> efforts to reform the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By reform he
> means the improvement both of the agency's efficiency and of its
> civil rights responsiveness.
> 
> Durbin sees an inverse relationship between external tensions and the
> propensity of Congress to press for civil liberties reform: "As the
> external threats to the country become greater, individuals come to
> value national defense more highly and concede a certain amount of
> liberty to its protection An inverse dynamic governs constituent
> interests as outside threats wane" (p. 266). Thus, for example,
> during the détente of the 1970s there was a congressional challenge
> to the CIA, but in the wake of 9/11, Capitol Hill went along with the
> USA PATRIOT Act and other measures that curtailed civil liberties and
> enhanced the powers of the intelligence community. Durbin feels that
> the congressional role in shaping the CIA has been underestimated,
> and that legislators had an impact on efficiency reforms as well as
> on civil liberties. He believes that if only Congress had been more
> assertive at the time of the agency's founding in 1947-9, a period of
> acute Cold War tension, the CIA might have done a better job of
> intelligence coordination in its early years, perhaps anticipating
> the Korean crisis instead of allowing the nation to be taken by
> surprise.
> 
> A well-researched figure on page 13 in some ways provides historians
> with food for thought, showing as it does value-adjusted fluctuations
> on the intelligence budget from the 1960s to the present. It looks
> like an upward ratchet movement but with lower-level plateaux in the
> 1970s and 1990s, perhaps supporting a parallel theme that the
> government spends more on intelligence in tenser periods. On the
> following page, though, the author offers a cautionary extrapolation,
> for although the intelligence budget increased from twenty-eight
> billion dollars in 1965 to seventy billion dollars in 2014, it
> decreased from 4 percent to 2 percent of overall federal expenditure.
> In a table on page 50, Durbin offers a theoretical model. Looking at
> selected cases in periods from 1941 to 2015, it suggests that
> political consensus at home correlates with reform. The only
> exception was in the 1970s, when muckraking journalism was a
> substitute driving force.
> 
> Those who read _The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform_
> may well be reminded of the work of the distinguished political
> scientist Harry Howe Ransom, the author of a classic work, _The
> Intelligence Establishment_ (1970). Durbin does not cite Ransom, and
> appears to be unaware of his respected essay on the CIA's "search for
> legitimacy," in which he presented a figure, titled "US-USSR
> Relations, 1948-80," that anticipates Durbin's finding on the
> relationship between foreign policy and libertarian reform of the
> CIA.[1] Ransom did not employ the multidimensional approach taken by
> Durbin, took no heed of congressional contributions to CIA
> efficiency, and gave no explicit attention to issues of consensus,
> even if they were implicit in his analysis. On the other hand, by
> comparison with Ransom, Durbin tends to over-complicate, his book
> abounding with phrases like "political overseers" and "information
> asymmetries" (p. 256).
> 
> Depending on your point of view, Durbin either takes a firm line on
> certain points of historical interpretation or writes with dogmatic
> certainty while ignoring what others have said. He is an adherent of
> the "miracle" theory of the CIA's genesis. Contrary to post-official
> historiography, he writes that American intelligence was in bad shape
> before World War II but British intelligence was brilliant and came
> to the rescue; William Donovan responded by creating the Off

[Marxism] Antisemitism as a “blindspot” for the Left | The Charnel-House

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://thecharnelhouse.org/2018/03/26/antisemitism-as-a-blindspot-for-the-left/#more-45596


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Podcast: Political Gingervitis: Episode 22-David Roediger and John Holmwood

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Figured you might get a chuckle from this new podcast I did.

A special episode about racism and the welfare state. First we talk with David
Roediger , author of *The Wages of Whiteness*
and *Class, Race, and Marxism*, about the white working class (if such a
thing even exists). Then we discuss with John Holmwood a recent article
coauthored with Gurminder K. Bhambra titled *Colonialism, Postcolonialism
and the Liberal Welfare State*
 and published in the
January 2018 issue of* New Political Economy*.

https://rimediacoop.org/podcast/political-gingervitis-episode-22-david-roediger-and-john-holmwood/

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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] CPUSA article on Norman Finkelstein

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http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/hopeless-in-gaza-a-talk-with-scholar-norman-finkelstein/

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[Marxism] How Scholars Sustained White Supremacy - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Scholars-Sustained-White/243053?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=4253b85ddb834383bcebe81e1cf17ef6&elq=a1c7e257e0e844888f96a403a39acc82&elqaid=18511&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8322


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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Beilinson on Mëhilli, 'From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 3:10 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Beilinson on Mëhilli, 'From Stalin
to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Elidor Mëhilli.  From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist
World.  Ithaca  Cornell University Press, 2017.  346 pp.  $39.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-1415-3.

Reviewed by Orel Beilinson (Tel Aviv University)
Published on H-Socialisms (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Gary Roth

Albania's Socialism

The general reader does not have a rich library on Albania. Tajar
Zavalni's _History of Albania _(2015), written originally over fifty
years ago, ends in Albania's turn toward China. Fred C. Abraham's
_Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe _(2015)
only covers the most recent period, since 1985. Miranda Vickers's
compact _The Albanians: A Modern History_ (1995) is a textbook-like
survey and is now slightly out-of-date. Recently, two significant
books enriched the opportunities given to the English reader: an
English translation to Blendi Fevziu's wonderful biography of _Enver
Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania _(2016) and the subject of this
review, Elidor Mëhilli's _From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the
Socialist World_. Both shed light on two complementary aspects of
Albania in the second half of the twentieth century: the former looks
at the top of the hierarchy--a single person--while the latter
analyzes the country in its regional and transregional context. In
six chapters, Mëhilli tells Albania's history under socialism
through its exchanges--cultural, scientific, and economic--and
manages to shed new light on fundamental themes that are important to
our understanding of the period.

Marching chronologically, Mëhilli's first chapter focuses on the
transition from a kingdom to communism, proceeding through brief but
meaningful periods under Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Using urban
planning as a case study, he demonstrates that the Italian influence
on Albania stretches back long before 1939 and did not end in 1943.
Instead, it was carried on into the communist period. Using "the
corporatism of the Italian occupation and the command economy of the
Germans," the postwar government embarked on a series of far-reaching
reforms, with the Agrarian Reform of 1945-46 being the key cause for
change in the countryside (p. 23). In the international arena,
Albania vacillated while attempting to find its place between the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia as the Tito-Stalin split gained traction.
As the author notices (but might be overstating his case here),
"yesterday's friends turned out to have been enemies all along" (p.
53).

If the story of the 1940s is told largely through the lens of urban
space, "the Sovietization of Albania," we learn, "is a story of
machines" and also of "new horizons," at least culturally (p. 55).
The author suggests that we look at Sovietization not through the
prism of its success or failure but rather "as a kind of opening, as
a field of interaction." In this interaction, Albanians adopted "a
socialist lens" and began to interpret it in their own terms, while
the socialist world headed by Stalin had to translate their knowledge
of Albania to their own typology and understanding of the world (p.
56). The cultural and professional opportunities offered by the new
proximity to the Soviet Union were "a patriotic duty," later
qualified and restricted, and parts of the socialist world (such as
Poland and Hungary) were deemed dangerous, especially as Albanians
abroad occasionally did not return (p. 89).

In the third chapter, Mëhilli concentrates on the machines, or more
precisely, the realization of a communist economy. His rich
descriptions take us to the fields and factories, allowing us to
glimpse the daily life of workers in a newly created proletariat.
Albania's "forced industrialization in an agrarian setting," coupled
with "all-consuming aspirations for a better life," was embodied in
the "Stalin mills" and the _metoda sovjetike _(Soviet method), both
of which were supported by a constant movement of experts, whose role
as special guests was rather ambiguous (p. 109). As this chapter
convincingly shows, the Soviet method was a show of performative
value as much as an actual array of methods. Powerful symbolically to
the building of socialism, the Soviet method was backed by the
concerted successes of the Soviet Union and also fed on its prestige.
But at the same time, it was also local, or localized, and the word
"Soviet" became much more of a label than a meaningful category,
"recognizably Soviet, just as it was unmistakably

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Judaic]: McGinity on Mehta, 'Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 12:11 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Judaic]: McGinity on Mehta, 'Beyond Chrismukkah:
The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Samira K. Mehta.  Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith
Family in the United States.  Chapel Hill  University of North
Carolina Press, 2018.  274 pp.  $90.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-1-4696-3635-1; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-3636-8.

Reviewed by Keren R. McGinity (Hebrew College, Brandeis University,
and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute)
Published on H-Judaic (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Katja Vehlow

Hybrid Family Identities and Race in American Religious Life

Samira K. Mehta's first book, _Beyond Chrismukkah: The
Christian-Jewish Family in the United States_, is a welcome addition
to the scant qualitative scholarship on interfaith marriage. Focusing
her research and analysis primarily on Christian-Jewish families,
which she argues are the archetypal kind, Mehta uses contemporary
ethnography to advance understanding of lived experiences that are
considerably more complex than the word "interfaith" implies. She
uses data gleaned from interviews with fifty families and religious
professionals; explores the Jewish Reform movement's institutional
positions, Catholic policies and theologies about marriage, and _The
Christian Century _magazine of the Protestant mainline; analyzes
select advice and children's literature; and looks at key examples of
television and film. The result is a multilayered narrative that
illuminates how, in her words, "thinking about religion and culture
as strategic terms provides a new paradigm for understanding
interfaith families, but it also advances our understanding of how
American society defines and uses those concepts and encourages
scholars to continue to explore and question how we draw those
boundaries" (p. 3). Amen, sister.

Unlike most monographs about Jewish intermarriage, this volume is not
concerned with the continuity question, that is, whether marriage
outside of the group will lead to loss of identity and a decline in
the population, and therefore free from trying to determine whether
interfaith marriage is "good or bad for the Jews." This flexibility
allows the author to venture into unchartered behavioral waters and
to see with fresh eyes how religious institutions that prioritized
education and affiliation outside of the home neglected to provide
for "children of interfaith marriage raised in homes that saw
themselves as Jewish, but existed outside of institutional
structures" (p. 90). Moreover, the Reform tendency to mark Jewish
identity by the absence of Christian practice (such as having a
Christmas tree) as much as the presence of Jewish practice (lighting
Shabbat candles) did not account for the reality of Christian-Jewish
families who created "their own pastiche of practices" and a "moral
framework that anchors their choices" (pp. 13, 110; see also p. 141).
Mehta effectively illuminates and defines for her readers a new
category of interfaith families, as it relates to American culture,
including consumption of food and objects, which is "inherently
hybrid" (p. 13). "When previously religious objects--like a menorah
or a crèche--become cultural," she writes, "they then become
equivalent, within and across groups" (p. 140).

While the fourth chapter titled "Chrismukkah" likely inspired the
book's title and has the best explanation of this new holiday that I
have had the privilege to read, the previous chapter is actually this
work's greatest contribution to intermarriage scholarship. Mehta
explains the advent (no pun intended) of Chrismukkah as follows: "Two
trends allowed interfaith families to draw selectively from their
Christian and Jewish backgrounds in order to create a mosaic of
household practices that formed new, hybrid identities: the
development of a 'seeker' mode of religion and the rise of
multiculturalism as a theoretical and lived concept intersected with
a consumer-based mode of identity formation to create new
possibilities for interfaith families. Specifically, the seeker
religion model enabled a shift between religious traditions that
combined practices from multiple religious traditions, a religious
reality that was deeply shaped by consumption Chrismukkah itself,
then, serves as a (sometimes minimally) reconfigured holiday that
points to 'cultural' heritages rather than 'religious' truths,
allowing interfaith families to shape a family-based, multicultural
practice" (p. 137). The multiculturalism of the 1990s played a
definitive role, although, as Mehta 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-FedHist]: Sommer on Valsania, 'Jefferson's Body: A Corporeal Biography'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 7:04 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-FedHist]: Sommer on Valsania, 'Jefferson's Body: A
Corporeal Biography'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org


Maurizio Valsania.  Jefferson's Body: A Corporeal Biography.
Charlottesville  University of Virginia Press, 2017.  280 pp.  $35.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-8139-3969-8.

Reviewed by Heather Sommer (Miami University of Ohio)
Published on H-FedHist (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Caryn E. Neumann

Historians, students, and history buffs alike have long struggled to
make sense of Thomas Jefferson and his conflicting philosophies, with
egalitarian rhetoric clashing with patronizing sentiments toward
nonwhites and women. Despite frustrations and a diverse multitude of
heated opinions, we keep trying to untangle the Gordian knot that is
Jefferson himself, for he resonates with Americans up through this
day because his persona in many ways is an embodiment of the United
States. It is both this figurative and literal embodiment that
Maurizio Valsania takes as his focus in _Jefferson's Body: A
Corporeal Biography_, examining Jefferson and all his complications
through a somatic lens in an attempt to cut the knot. While this
nuanced approach may not entirely solve the puzzle of the third
president, Valsania uses corporeality to provide clarification to the
enigma.

While the majority of Jefferson scholarship focuses on his intellect
and philosophy, _Jefferson's Body_ is devoted entirely to his
corporeal understandings of himself and others. Through the
reexamination of primary sources written by or about Jefferson,
Valsania reveals how Jefferson's consciousness, beliefs, and deepest
emptions were shaped by his corporeality and corporeal interactions,
and how he in turn sought to comprehend and master his own and
others' bodies in order to construct an ideal republican society. As
an astute observer and Enlightenment devotee, Jefferson recognized
the very paradoxes in his logic that twenty-first century critics
chastise him for, but saw them as unavoidable consequences of the
natural order. Jefferson's views of the body were ingrained in his
belief in natural simplicity, but this "natural state" or status
depended on an individual's sex and race. The author argues that
Jefferson's dialectal perspective or idiosyncrasies emerged from a
corporeal view of self, described in the appropriately titled first
section, "Self," and how he applied notions of the natural body to
others through both interaction and observation, detailed in the
again appropriately named second section, "Others." As a result of
this binary approach, the structure and content of the book reflect
and demystify Jefferson's dualities. Yet the tables are now turned;
rather than Jefferson observing corporeality, he is the one being
corporeally observed, providing both context and deeper insight into
eighteenth-century challenges and limitations that shaped his
sphinxlike attitudes.

In "Self", Valsania discusses how Jefferson sought to command his
mind and body, striking a balance between physical and mental
exertion in order to obtain optimal corporeal and intellectual
capacity. Jefferson looked to nature to find this equilibrium which
he used to define his personal, political, and philosophical ideals
as well as his own body, for he believed balance imperative for both
an individual and society to flourish. This moderation allowed
Jefferson to become corporeally innovative and progressive. He
snubbed the traditional stiff, militaristic, masculine European body,
whose artificiality failed to adapt to natural bodily needs. Instead,
he embraced natural simplicity of both the body and mind, achieved
through flexibility and fluidity. Through this private endeavor, he
came to understand republicanism as the ideal form of government, for
he saw its adaptability as a counter to the unnatural rigidity of
Europe's stagnant aristocratic societies that could not change to
meet the needs of the people. In addition, the ways in which he
moderated himself reflected how he wished to model the national
identity of the United States, and as a leading figure in the nascent
years of the nation, he consciously used his body and image to create
the political ideology of the early American republic. Jefferson
sought to advance civilization through his own personal progression
and the innovations of those like him who he believed were naturally
positioned to contribute to society: the virtuous, talented white
upper-class males who, by moderating first themselves and then the
body politic, could liberate society from "the strictures of history
and cir

[Marxism] Serialized form of Taxi Searchers: John Wayne, Robert De Niro, and the Meaning of America

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Hey there

Today I am starting to serialize my book Taxi Searchers. It is a combination of 
Film Studies scholarship about two Hollywood classics, THE SEARCHERS (1956) and 
TAXI DRIVER (1976), combined with insights derived from the theories about 
colonialism created by Frantz Fanon in his book 'Black Skins White Mask'. The 
intention is to provide a critical discussion about race and racism to white 
voters who desperately need a serious amount of political education about these 
issues. In this sense it is not geared towards people of the Left as much as 
the politically disengaged who require such education.

http://taxi-searchers.com/

Please share via your social media, blogging, and other platforms, such help 
would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Disability]: Handley-Cousins on Casey Jr., 'New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture'

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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Tue, May 8, 2018 at 5:42 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Disability]: Handley-Cousins on Casey Jr., 'New
Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century
American Literature and Culture'
To: 


John A. Casey Jr.  New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran
in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture.
Reconstructing America Series. New York  Fordham University Press,
2015.  Illustrations. 248 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8232-6539-8.

Reviewed by Sarah Handley-Cousins (University at Buffalo SUNY)
Published on H-Disability (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

The American Civil War has generated veritable mountains of
scholarship, and yet the trope remains that it was an "unwritten
war." Unlike World War I, which is often understood to have inspired
a generation of writers to make sense of the war through novels and
poetry, scholars have long argued that no such wave of literature
followed the Civil War. Where, literary scholars bemoaned, were the
Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of the late nineteenth century? Of course,
plenty was written about the Civil War, but it was easily dismissed
as sentimental tripe, with nothing substantial to add to our
understanding of the conflict or its aftermath.

John A. Casey's book, _New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the
Veteran in Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture_,
demonstrates quite the opposite. In this book, we see how literature
became the landscape in which veterans worked to find their
identities as "new men," forever changed in ways both positive and
negative by their military service. For the first time in American
history, Casey argues, men began to understand their military service
as an "experience" rather than an "event," and war service
transformed from just one moment in a man's life to its central,
defining occurrence (p. 9). Literature became the space in which
veterans and civilians alike tried to understand, defend, and in some
cases, reject that new identity. _New Men _aims to bring a literary
perspective to Civil War veteran studies. While the field has been
burgeoning in recent years, it has not as yet included a work that
has focused specifically on analyzing literature by and about
veterans, and so this new work is a welcome addition. Casey's
analysis of both well-known and less-studied novels in particular
will be useful for historians of the Civil War era.

Casey uses both fiction and nonfiction sources. In one sense, this is
enormously useful, allowing him to compare the ways that veterans
explored issues within the safety of fictional worlds in contrast to
the ways that veterans described their experiences in realistic terms
in memoirs. This also serves to further explode the idea of an
"unwritten war," as the inclusion of nonfiction sources shows just
how much postwar Americans turned to the written word in their
attempt to understand the experience. However, the inclusion of
nonfiction does bring up the question of choice. What does Casey
believe "counts" as war literature? What might the addition of Robert
Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel's edited collection
_Battles and Leaders of the Civil War _(1884), or the many articles
written by former soldiers and officers published in popular
magazines, or the publications of veterans' organizations and
regimental historians, or even the massive two-volume postwar project
edited by Joseph K. Barnes, _The Medical and Surgical History of the
War of the Rebellion_ (1870-1888), have added to this study? This is
perhaps less a weakness than an opportunity for further study.

Some chapters of _New Men _are more successful than others. The third
chapter, in which Casey explores the ways that some veterans grappled
with traumatic experience in literature, feels out of step with Civil
War trauma scholarship. This is partly a timing issue--the book was
published in 2015, just as a major historiographical conversation
about trauma studies was taking place among Civil War scholars. Casey
relies largely on literary scholarship regarding trauma and fails to
include important historical work, such as that by Diane Miller
Sommerville, David Silkenat, and Frances Clarke.[1] Since Casey is a
literary scholar, this decision is justifiable but detracts from the
chapter's ability to make a serious historical intervention. Further,
while Casey's reading of _Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
_(1889) does convincingly demonstrate that Sherman saw himself and
his soldiers as fundamentally different from the civilians they
encountered, the argument that this is ev

[Marxism] Political Gingervitis: Episode 23-Anne Garland Mahler on From the Tricontinental to the Global South

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Today we talk with Prof. Anne Garland about her new book From the
Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational
Solidarity published by Duke University Press.

https://rimediacoop.org/podcast/political-gingervitis-ep-23-anne-garland-mahler-tricontinental/

-- 
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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Taxi Searchers – Ch. 1: Antecedents pt. IIRhode Island Media Cooperative | Rhode Island Media Cooperative

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https://rimediacoop.org/2018/05/10/taxi-searchers-ch1ii/


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] [UCE] Letter to Stalin: “can a homosexual be in the Communist Party?”

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https://www.marxist.com/letter-to-stalin-can-a-homosexual-be-in-the-communist-party.htm


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] End the “Green” Delusions: Industrial-scale Renewable Energy is Fossil Fuel+

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https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3797-end-the-green-delusions-industrial-scale-renewable-energy-is-fossil-fuel


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[Marxism] We Must Speak Up Against Israel's Slaughter in Gaza

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Palestinians are often lectured from abroad on the merits of Gandhi. The
current effort in Gaza will inevitably be viewed as a test case of the
efficacy of a nonviolent approach; its success or failure will help
determine the character of future efforts to bring the occupation to an
end. But as a Guardian headline succinctly put it, “Palestinian
non-violence requires global non-silence”. The people of Gaza are depending
on us to make a nonviolent strategy viable in this, their hour of need. If
the demonstrations in Gaza are met with mass displays of solidarity abroad,
Israel might be induced to change its approach toward Gaza and a brighter
future for the region may yet be within reach. Precisely how much pressure
is required in order to force Israel to budge is difficult to predict. One
thing, however, is certain: as Gazans attempt to break free of their prison
camp, their only protection, their only armour, their only defence against
the wall of Israeli snipers, is us.

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/7xm9p4/we-must-speak-up-against-israels-slaughter-in-gaza

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[Marxism] From the Young Greens of RI re: RI House Bill 7891

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Hi Friends

I am sharing with you tonight a link to our Facebook page and a campaign
being held by our friends at Rhode Island Jobs with Justice.

This law would allow our families and neighbors who right now face
unprecedented insecurity and hostility at the national level to have the
security of knowing that when they travel on our roads that they can do so
legally.

By providing a limited drivers license to our undocumented Rhode Islanders
you would be protecting a community that is currently under siege and in
desperate need of security and stability.

If you can spare some time to check out this link and show support for its
important cause, it would be appreciated.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=442584512833963&id=423838404708574

-- 
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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Taxi Searchers – Ch. 1: Antecedents pt. IVRhode Island Media Cooperative | Rhode Island Media Cooperative

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https://rimediacoop.org/2018/05/15/taxi-searchers-ch1iv/


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Taxi Searchers – Ch. 3: Go Searchin’ Way Out There pt. I

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Here's the start of the book that begins a bit of critical analysis about
John Ford's THE SEARCHERS and brings in analysis based around opposition to
race and racism. Use this book to talk some sense into Trump voters you may
be related to.

Louis Proyect kindly said the following in his review of the book:

I can strongly recommend Andrew Stewart’s book to everybody as a successful
multidisciplinary work that is so hard to find in scholarly treatments of
film. With so many film scholars focusing narrowly on auteur theory,
mise-en-scène, tracking shots and camera angles, it is a relief to read a
young film scholar who makes the connection between film and politics.


https://rimediacoop.org/2018/05/22/taxi-searchers-ch3i/

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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Liu on Zouw and Zürcher, 'Three Months in Mao's China: Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution'

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: May 23, 2018 at 11:24:44 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]:  Liu on Zouw and  Zürcher, 'Three 
> Months in Mao's China: Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural 
> Revolution'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Kim van der Zouw, Erik-Jan Zürcher, eds.  Three Months in Mao's
> China: Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
> Acumen Research Editions Series. Amsterdam  Amsterdam University
> Press, 2017.  144 pp.  $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-946298181-2.
> 
> Reviewed by Zixian Liu (University of Toronto)
> Published on H-Socialisms (May, 2018)
> Commissioned by Gary Roth
> 
> Life in Mao's China
> 
> In recent years, scholarship about the Cold War has stepped beyond
> its traditional parameters in terms of high politics and has expanded
> its scope to include social and everyday life histories. The new
> trend has enabled historians to incorporate a fuller range of primary
> sources into their scope. _Three Months in China: Between the Great
> Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution_, the publication of Erik
> Zürcher's diaries and letters, written in 1964, __comes at the right
> time to help us think about the Cold War's influence on daily life in
> China and the historical context that framed the worldview of a
> generation of leftist China observers.
> 
> Zürcher (Chinese name 许理和) was a famous Dutch sinologist whose
> expertise focused on the history of Chinese religion. On the eve of
> the Cultural Revolution, accompanied by Gan Tjiang-Tek (颜昌德), a
> curator at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Zürcher
> traveled to Mao's China to set up an academic exchange project. His
> role as a sinologist and a critical sympathizer of the Chinese
> revolution distinguished him from ordinary travelers. His supportive
> attitude toward the Chinese revolution and the future of China cannot
> be separated from his critiques of the Chinese Communist Party's
> questionable political practices.
> 
> Zürcher's writing reflected common anxieties among left-wing
> intellectuals about the future of socialism during the Cold War. In
> his diaries and letters, he expressed his disillusion with Soviet
> socialism when he traveled through that country and witnessed its
> rural poverty. After arriving in Beijing in September 1964, Zürcher
> reflected on the extent to which the Maoist regime had changed the
> country. His conclusion was positive: "it is truly phenomenal what
> this government has done for the masses China has enormous
> potential and will develop into [a] first-class world power in the
> coming twenty years" (p. 109). Wherever he visited, he paid close
> attention to the well-being of the common people by focusing on such
> problems as food shortages and workers' exploitation. His assessment
> was positive regarding the progress the socialist state had made,
> especially the improvement of working conditions and the amelioration
> of food shortages. Given the fact that all factories and villages he
> visited were "exemplary models" with better food and consumer goods
> supplies, Zürcher's perceptions were certainly mistaken. As the
> editors of the volume remind us, Zürcher disapproved of China's
> authoritarian style of governance, but he nonetheless made excuses
> for it: "We [Westerners] would not be able to live in such a system
> ... but for them [the Chinese, it] is the only way" (pp. 15-16). This
> quote gets to the heart of Zürcher's naïveté. Historians, however,
> need to delve into the problematic of how the state exhibited itself
> and how a leftist intellectual was influenced by state-approved
> "showings."
> 
> As a book written by an informed outsider with a keen interest in
> ordinary people, this book sheds new light on the history of everyday
> life. Zürcher portrays in detail people's leisure activities,
> clothing styles, living conditions, and attitudes toward foreigners.
> In Zürcher's opinion, the Chinese were much more open-minded than
> what Cold War biases had led him to assume. They were not afraid of
> talking with foreigners. He also experienced the country's regional
> diversity by traveling to Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Xi'an, and
> other cities. His observations undermine the totalitarian
> understanding of Mao's China as a state of dull uniformity. For
> example, he observed that people in Shanghai had adopted more
> Western-style fashions compared to other regions. In industrial
> construction projects and urban cleaning campaigns, he witnessed the
> party's mobilization campaigns that were intended t

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: de Mestral on Vandevelde, 'The First Bilateral Investment Treaties: U.S. Postwar Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation Treaties'

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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Tue, May 29, 2018 at 10:55 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: de Mestral on Vandevelde, 'The First
Bilateral Investment Treaties: U.S. Postwar Friendship, Commerce, and
Navigation Treaties'
To: 


Kenneth J. Vandevelde.  The First Bilateral Investment Treaties: U.S.
Postwar Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation Treaties.  Oxford
Oxford University Press, 2017.  xii + 575 pp.  $105.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-19-067957-6.

Reviewed by Armand de Mestral (McGill University)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Professor Kenneth Vandvelde's work on international investment law is
widely known and respected. Author of three important books on the
subject, _United States Investment Treaties: Policy and Practice
_(1992), _U.S. International Investment Agreements _(2009), and
_Bilateral Investment Treaties: History Policy and Interpretation
_(2010), Vandevelde has now given us a remarkable review of the
historical foundation of this law in the United States and by
implication throughout the world. His review of American treaties of
friendship, commerce, and navigation (FCN) provides a much-needed
analysis of the origins of international investment law in the United
States, which in turn enhances our understanding of the whole field
of modern international investment protection law. Given his
experience in government service and as a leading exponent of this
area, few people are more qualified to undertake the careful legal
and historical analysis required, and this book does not disappoint.

The book focuses on American practice and policy with respect to FCN
treaties and their significance for the origins of modern
international investment law. This book illustrates the United
States' constant and significant use of FCN treaties, beginning with
its very first international treaty, the FCN Treaty of 1776 signed
with France, until the signing of its last FCN treaty with the
Republic of Korea in 1968. The book reviews the early history of
American practice but concentrates on the development of the modern
US model during the Second World War and the different phases of
negotiation and development of this model under successive presidents
from the end of the war until 1968. Vandvelde's purpose is to show
how the US FCN treaty program laid the groundwork for the modern
bilateral investment treaty (BIT) and subsequently the modern
comprehensive regional trade agreements (RTAs), not only in US
practice but by implication for the practice of many other states.

This is a work both of legal and historical analysis. Vandevelde
provides a detailed analysis of the content of many key FCN treaties.
He is also careful to review the thinking behind the design of modern
US FCN treaties, starting with the objectives of the Franklin
Roosevelt administration's New Deal understood as part of the postwar
international economic arrangements. He also examines President Harry
Truman's inaugural address, which made the link between US investment
policy and international development. Finally, he concludes with an
analysis of the gradual adaptations of the US model FCN in the course
of the twenty negotiations of the immediate postwar years, which
involved some seventy countries in all between 1945 and 1968.

Far too few analysts of modern investment law look beyond the recent
history of BITs and BIT arbitrations, which have exploded into
international law and practice in the last twenty years. Vandevelde
shows us a much more complex history and one well worth knowing,
which enriches our understanding of contemporary BITs and investment
chapters in RTAs. Vandevelde carefully analyzes both a number of
important FCN treaties and their negotiation. His analysis reveals
the origins of many important concepts now found in contemporary
international investment treaties.

Although Vandevelde's thesis is to demonstrate how the FCN treaty
became the basis of modern American BITs, he makes it clear that the
US FCN treaty always addressed a much broader set of concerns.
Particularly in the early years, but even in the twentieth century,
the concept of friendship in the US FCN treaty was designed to ensure
friendly diplomatic and political relations between the parties and
to offer protection to citizens and their commercial interests. The
concept of commerce covered the right of establishment and right of
traders of both parties to do business in the other's territory, as
well as the right of fair and equitable treatment of traders,
including the right to remain and own property and enjoy personal
security, exercise a profession, and enjoy and freedom 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Florida]: Ferdinando on ArbesuÌ , 'Pedro MenÃ(c)ndez de AvilÃ(c)s and the Conquest of Florida: A New Manuscript'

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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Tue, May 29, 2018 at 10:56 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Florida]: Ferdinando on ArbesuÌ , 'Pedro Menéndez
de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida: A New Manuscript'
To: 


David Arbesú.  Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of
Florida: A New Manuscript.  Gainesville  University Press of Florida,
2017.  xii + 431 pp.  $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-6124-5.

Reviewed by Peter Ferdinando (University of North Carolina at
Charlotte)
Published on H-Florida (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Jeanine A. Clark Bremer

David Arbesú's discovery and translation of a different and more
complete manuscript of the Gonzalo Solís de Merás account of the
Florida conquest of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés is of significant
importance for historians of both Florida and the wider United
States. The centrality of Menéndez to the histories of this state
and country cannot be understated. In 1565, Menéndez founded St.
Augustine, the first continuously occupied European settlement in
what is today the continental United States. Four decades before
English Jamestown, St. Augustine and the Spanish colony of La Florida
changed the shape of the American Southeast. Thus, possessing a more
complete accounting of Menéndez's defeat of the French at Fort
Caroline, his establishment of St. Augustine, and his frequent
dealings with a variety of Native American peoples is a boon for
scholars in a number of subfields.

The account by Solís de Merás is of particular importance to
understanding Menéndez's conquest of Florida. He was Menéndez's
brother-in-law and he was present during the crucial early years of
the Florida conquest from 1565 to 1567. Of the other major accounts
of Menéndez's conquest, the one by also-present Father López de
Mendoza Grajales is much shorter and the lengthier one by Bartolomé
de Barrientos largely draws on Solís de Merás. In fact, Barrientos
was not in Florida for the conquest. The Solís de Merás account
transcribed and translated by Arbesú thus offers both an eyewitness
and a lengthy account of Menéndez's first frenetic years in Florida.

Arbesú's text has three major parts, including an English
translation and a Spanish transcription of this newly uncovered
version of the Solís de Merás account, and an informative and
self-reflexive introduction, along with extensive endnotes on each of
these sections. This introduction serves to introduce Menéndez,
position the new manuscript vis-à-vis the existing manuscript copy
and other contemporary primary sources about Menéndez's Florida
conquest, and reflect on Arbesú's editorial and translatorial
approach. Arbesú found this manuscript version of the Solís de
Merás account among the papers of the Marqués de Ferrera. The
Ferrera manuscript is more complete and written in an easier hand
than the earlier used manuscript of the Solís de Merás account from
the Count of Revillagigedo's archive. The Revillagigedo manuscript
was the source for the existing published Spanish transcription that
formed part of Eugenio Ruidíaz y Caravia's _La Florida: Su conquista
y colonizacaión por Pedro Menéndez de Avilés_ (1893). All
previously published Spanish transcriptions and English translations
trace to Ruidíaz's volume. What is now clear from the Ferrera
manuscript and Arbesú's work spot-checking Ferrera with Ruidíaz and
a microfilm copy of Revillagigedo held by the St. Augustine
Foundation is that both Ruidíaz's transcription and the
Revillagigedo manuscript are deficient. Arbesú notes several issues
with Revillagigedo and Ruidíaz, including an incorrect page order
and at least twelve missing folios in the Revillagigedo manuscript,
along with numerous issues with transcription, such as misread
numbers and a number of silent corrections and additions by Ruidíaz.
The discovery of the Ferrera manuscript permitted Arbesú to
recognize and fix these problems with this new transcription and
translation of the Solís de Merás account.

The second and third parts of Arbesú's text include the English
translation and Spanish transcription of the Ferrera manuscript,
respectively. The English translation is readable and flows well.
This readability suggests possibilities of using some or all of this
text in an undergraduate classroom, along with it, of course, taking
residence on the shelves of academic offices. The inclusion of the
Spanish transcription of the Ferrera manuscript also is important,
because of the acknowledged deficiencies of the existing Ruidíaz
transcription of the Revillagigedo manuscript. Whether reading the
English or Spanish version, the fact that Solís de Merás was a
booster for his brother-in-law reminds sc

[Marxism] Taxi Searchers – Ch. 4: You Lookin' At Me? pt. IIRhode Island Media Cooperative | Rhode Island Media Cooperative

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Here is the newest entry for the serialized form of my book. Here is where I am 
using the writing of Frantz Fanon to analyze Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER 
https://rimediacoop.org/2018/06/07/taxi-searchers-ch4ii/


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Trump’s Second Term Probably Guaranteed This Past Weekend In Providence | Washington Babylon

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http://washingtonbabylon.com/trumps-second-term-probably-guaranteed-this-past-weekend-in-providence/


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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Citizenship]: Erwin on Marez, 'Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance'

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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 7:13 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Citizenship]: Erwin on Marez, 'Farm Worker
Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance'
To: 


Curtis Marez.  Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of
Resistance.  Minneapolis  University of Minnesota Press, 2016.  232
pp.  $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-9745-8.

Reviewed by Anna Erwin (Virginia Tech, School of Public and
International Affairs)
Published on H-Citizenship (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Emily Mitchell-Eaton

In _Farmworker Futurisms_, Curtis Marez examines how agribusiness
utilizes multimedia technologies to "project competing futures,"
which he calls futurisms or futurity (p. 3). He differentiates
"futurism," the tendency for agribusiness and other powers to dictate
futures for farmworker populations, from "futurity," which captures
"the expectation of the future as possibility, not guaranteed but
also not foreclosed" (p. 10). Marez's expansive analysis succeeds at
demonstrating these competing futures in agrarian politics, and also
provides support for those outside of the humanities who are
continually interested in analyzing the power of agribusiness in
policy, governance, and in society as a whole.

To demonstrate how agribusiness uses multimedia technologies to
reproduce futurity and futurisms, Marez argues that "visual fields
are partially constituted by forms of socially and historically
produced perceptual mapping that in turn shape the construction of
historical social realities" (p. 7). _Farmworker Futurisms_ uses this
theoretical foundation to analyze media such as popular films,
science fiction literature, art, and photographs. For instance, Marez
details how agribusiness utilized cameras and other media
technologies to further exploit and create hegemonic narratives
during the 1960s. Conversely, he demonstrates how the United Farm
Workers (UFW) utilized the same technology to both create an
alternative farmworker futurity where workers had agency, while
reproducing dominant cultural and political norms of nationalism,
patriarchy, and militarism. This analysis demonstrates how visual
fields can recreate and/or fracture the way people view farmworker
livelihoods and agribusiness.

In chapter 3, Marez also applies this frame to contrast the _Star
Wars_ series, which he argues reproduces the dominant neoliberal
narrative of agribusiness and farmworker exploitation, with art by
Ester Hernandez, who he claims reveals the exploitation of
agribusiness and works to create alternative futurity for Latinos and
farmworkers in California. These examples identify how some artists
can encourage agribusiness's creation of futurisms in popular media,
while others utilize art to create alternative, more open narratives
and futurities. Where George Lucas appeals to visions of agrarian
white populism, Hernandez's works, "taken together, undermine
agribusiness efforts to appeal to wholesome whiteness by revealing
the face of death behind the industry's self-promotional mask" (p.
145).

As a scholar whose works contribute to critical food studies, I found
Marez's book specifically helpful in illuminating new ways in which
the agrarian imaginary--that is, the image of the white, male,
heteronormative farmer--is employed to render laborers invisible.[1]
While the text supports accounts of the dominant agrarian imaginary,
Marez also succeeds in the difficult task of identifying spaces where
farmworkers have or have had agency in shaping their own futures. In
so doing, he reveals how farmworkers and other populations should
_continue_ to employ technologies to create images of an alternative
future or imaginary, one that does not focus on the power and
prosperity of agribusiness. Most works focus primarily on identifying
either agribusiness power or farmworker agency, but Marez builds his
argument to show how each informs the other, and in doing so, he
ensures that neither reality is ignored. However profound this
approach, Marez does not critique the idea of the "future," which is
arguably a neoliberal concept that supports Western expansion and
colonial ideas. An additional critique of the "future" in light of
futurisms and futurity would strengthen and clarify the refreshing
analytical approach in _Farmworker Futurisms_.

Overall, _Farmworker Futurisms_ provides additional, much-needed
fodder for what critical food scholars claim as the agrarian
imaginary and its capacity to thwart policy aimed at increasing
social and ecological justice. I highly suggest this book to those
whose scholarly work focuses on farmworker issues, and advise
political sociologists

[Marxism] Fwd: The Fake Left at the Left Forum: The Attack against Ajamu Baraka

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Ajamu Baraka" 
> Date: June 13, 2018 at 1:33:22 PM EDT
> To: "'Ajamu Baraka'" 
> Subject: The Fake Left at the Left Forum: The Attack against Ajamu Baraka
> 
>  
> As some of you may have heard I have been the object of mobilizations from 
> some sector of the white left over the last few weeks that culminated in an 
> organized action against me during the closing plenary of the left forum.  We 
> recognize that this is not an attack on me as a person but on those of us 
> from black liberation movement and the authentic left that have taken a 
> consistent anti-imperialist stance during the current period of right-wing 
> ideological retrenchment that intensified under the Obama administration. We 
> thank comrade Haiphong for his defense and analysis. We will continue to 
> build and to uphold the tradition of Black/African internationalism. 
>  
>  
> The Fake Left at the Left Forum
>  
> By Danny Haiphong
>  
> https://blackagendareport.com/fake-left-left-forum
>  
> The Fake Left at the Left Forum
> “Black Agenda Report and the Black Alliance for Peace have been called 
> ‘Assadists’ for defending the Syrian people’s rightful decision to determine 
> who governs them and under what type of state.”
> 
> I was at the Left Forum held on the first weekend of June in New York City. I 
> did what I’ve done every year that I’ve attended. I spoke at Black Agenda 
> Report’s panel, chatted with a few comrades I rarely see due to distance, and 
> attended a few of their panels. More than a few colleagues mentioned to me 
> that a contingent of so-called “Trotskyists” publicly protested Black 
> Alliance for Peace founder Ajamu Baraka for his support of the Syrian 
> government. These so-called “Trotskyist” forces passed out leaflets 
> condemning Baraka and protested his remarks at the closing plenary in 
> opposition to “the brutal Assad regime.” A UNAC statement on the matter can 
> be found here.
> 
> While some were engaged in unprincipled, pro-empire, and chauvinist actions 
> such as these, others such as myself were using the Left Forum to figure out 
> who the left is and what it should stand for and do. This is an important 
> task because the real left in the United States is small. As Glen Ford stated 
> in Black Agenda Report’s panel,the small size of the real left means that it 
> shoulders a heavy burden. Not only must the real left in the United States 
> find a way to develop an organized anti-imperialist, and class-based 
> opposition to the ruling class, but it must also combat the fake left in its 
> many forms. Those who participated in slandering Baraka are what the fake 
> left looks like and sounds like in the flesh.
> 
> “The real left must combat the fake left in its many forms.”
> 
> The fake left at the Left Forum should be distinguished from the fake left of 
> the non-profit industrial complex. The non-profit industrial complex indeed 
> hires fake activistsbeholden to government and corporate funders responsible 
> for the very problems that non-profit activists oppose in the first place. 
> Fake left activists reside in non-profit organizations such as MoveOn.org and 
> Indivisible. The fake left I refer to in this piece are perhaps even more 
> insidious than those paid by foundations and non-profits. This band of 
> leftists verbally states opposition to imperialism and an embrace of 
> socialism in theory yet behaves more like amateur soft agents of the US 
> intelligence services in practice.
> 
> These fake leftists reside in an alphabet soup of so-called Trotskyist 
> organizations like the International Socialist Organization (ISO). So-called 
> “Trotskyist” organizations have a long history of supporting US imperialism. 
> I don’t pretend to know which organization the fake leftists who protested 
> Baraka belonged to. An attendee told me that the organizers of the protest of 
> Baraka stemmed from the League for the Revolutionary Party. Thetrend is more 
> important than the organization. Just days prior to the Left Forum, activists 
> in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wrote an opinion piece claiming 
> that “The 2,000 US troops in Syria are not there to conduct ‘regime change.’ 
> They are there to defend the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in North 
> East Syria and to oppose ISIS. Trump has made that clear.” One of the authors 
> of the piece has been active on social media denouncing Baraka and the Black 
> Alliance for Peace for being so-called apologists for Assad. This falls in 
> line with the ISO, which has long been known to support US-led operations in 
> Libya 

[Marxism] Andrew Stewart: All the people working for ICE in RI and MARhode Island Media Cooperative | Rhode Island Media Cooperative

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https://rimediacoop.org/2018/06/19/andrew-stewart-ice-ri-ma/


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Andrew Stewart: Forget Corporatized White Pride, Up With LGBTQQIA+ Liberation and Providence's Justice Gaines! | Rhode Island Media Cooperative

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This is a profile of a socialist candidate running for Providence City Council 

https://rimediacoop.org/2018/06/25/andrew-stewart-justice-gaines/


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[Marxism] LAKE OF FIRE movie review to organize for preservation of Roe v Wade

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Far be it for me to self-promote ad nauseum but we're in some political
territory that I didn't think we could get into last weekend.

I think that, if we're decent organizers, we can use Tony Kaye's movie LAKE
OF FIRE to fight back against the repeal of Roe v Wade. I realize that, as
usual, we're at a low point in organizational and ideological house
keeping. But it may be a matter of simply organizing house parties and
public free screenings in our communities at this point


https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/19/73084/

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[Marxism] DSA's Ocasio-Cortez and what comes next

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I've watched the chatter on both social media and the Marxism list over the
last few days, not to mention blogs.

Simultaneously, partly for unrelated reasons and partly because of this
issue, I've been re-examining some of the founding materials and documents
of DSA.

Let's be objective on a few counts:

a) There's a generational split within DSA between old guard Harrington
loyalists and the Bernie Sanders generation. While I am no Maoist and shy
away from being too sectarian, I would propose that real progress would
come from heightening the contradictions, so to speak, and educating people
about the founders of DSA, who had distasteful aspects to their
personalities. Let's be absolutely clear, Irving Howe, Michael Harrington,
and probably Bayard Rustin are rolling in their graves over Ocasio-Cortez's
positions on Israel/Palestine, ICE, and racism. They were on the absolutely
rotten side of history in the 1968 teachers strike and that needs to be
pointed out constantly, particularly given the upsurge in teacher unionism
in the past 6 months. Paul Buhle wrote a wonderful polemic on this when
Shaker died :

Joining the inner circle of George Meany’s AFL-CIO cronies who regarded
Martin Luther King, Jr., as an ingrate for pressing too hard on integration
and for coming out against the Vietnam war, and shunning even the cautious
reformer Walter Reuther for the hawk faction gathering politically around
Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Shanker made himself a national labor
figure. A major element in his emerging labor statesmanship was his
handling of race issues in the approved AFL-CIO fashion… [I]n the Ocean
Hill-Brownsville crisis Shanker was encouraged by a group of
self-proclaimed “democratic socialists” including, among others, Michael
Harrington, Tom Kahn and Bayard Rustin, with Max Shachtman in the
background as the powerful grey eminence. They considered parents’
“interference” to be intolerable for teacher-unionists, but they had a
purpose far beyond the districts of Greater New York. By 1968, they
envisioned themselves the heirs to the Meany labor empire. To demonstrate
their capacity to deliver the labor support and labor votes for a greater
coalition, however, they had to keep order—at any cost. Even then the
disaster might have been avoided through careful negotiation. But Shanker
called “his” teachers out on strike. Yesterday’s socialists who have become
today’s Manhattan Institute operators correctly describe that moment as a
turning point in New York City’s history… And so Shankerism, hammered out
against a background of both middle class yearnings and ghetto rage, became
the oddest possible American-style parody of “democratic socialism.”

b) Ocasio-Cortez has been forced to re-affirm her anti-imperialism after
people like Margaret Kimberley and David Swanson pointed it out on social
media and joined with others in pressuring her. That is a good sign. She's
basically a shoe-in because of the dynamics in her district and for her to
be that responsive says something.

c) As I look at the written materials by Howe and Harrington, I remember
what Alexander Cockburn wrote in his obit for Howe, which merits a long
quote:

Howe’s prime function, politically speaking, in the last thirty years of
his life was that of policing the Left on behalf of the powers that be… “He
vigorously scolded the student Left for its intellectual laziness,
authoritarian arrogance, and occasional barbarism” (Clarence Page, Chicago
Tribune). Get the picture? In other words, How was an assiduous foot
soldier in the ideological Cointelpro campaign to discredit vibrant
political currents electrifying America and supporting liberation movements
in the Third World, the only significant general mobilization of a Left in
the United States in the second half of the twentieth century… In 1984 Howe
successfully organized the denial of endorsement of Jesse Jackson’s
candidacy in the primaries by the Democratic Socialists of America. In 1988
he tried again but failed.
_

I don't want to suggest that anyone reading this is in any way close to
Howe's MO. But there's a certain objective diagnosis about the landscape
that is necessary. The Greens are putting up candidates on a state-by-state
basis and, in NY, that means a pretty impressive ticket. But the national
organization is still a mess because of the liberals who use
"de-centralization" as a smokescreen for not solidifying their org into a
genuine national party. The RI Greens are a complete joke and I have tried
organizing with them seriously for 2 years. Their bylaws are a lot of
nonsense and they designed th

[Marxism] DSA's Ocasio-Cortez and what comes next

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Let's start a conversation about strategy and practical action. Is it time
for the Green Party to be pushed take on an active role in this situation
and take a stance that avoids the typical sectarian bullshitting while
keeping people honest at all levels? Is it time to be creating agit-prop
(in cyberspace AS WELL AS print, and most certainly bilingually) that
builds in this direction? The dynamic seems very clear to me:

If DSA builds bridges with the Greens (and pray God the hippies are kept
out of the meetings), you could see them magnetize towards each other and
build something positive.

But if the only force for DSA to gravitate towards is the Democratic Party
and its Progressive caucus, it's not a good forecast, in 2006 there was
supposed to be something super-magnificent fostered by the midterms and
Pelosi pissed that away.

The North Star has gotten coverage by Angela Nagle in her book KILL ALL
NORMIES. Maybe that is the place to do this?

-as


as someone who watched the 1968 Ocean-Hill-Brownsville fight in real time
in NYC, I have to agree with Andrew  The behavior of Shanker was outrageous
--- and Harrington's effort to "gently support" SHanker fooled no one ---
It's the SAME ATTITUDE that led the so called "socialists" of LID to
attempt to "control" SDS in the early 1960s ---

Right now -- it is absolutely essential that the insurgents whether within
or outside of the Democratic Party force the "old guard" to at least make
room for the energy of the people who are at the front lines of resistance
against Trump's fascism --- (at best to make WAY for the young folks
many of them women of color such as the Congresswoman from Seattle as
well as Ocasio-Cortez ---

On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 4:31 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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[Marxism] Rudy Cheeks on Moira Walsh and RI Politics

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Speaking of changing the Democratic Party...



<
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/the-rhode-island-democratic-party-may-have-endorsed-a-trump-supporter.html
>

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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Juggalo makeup prevents facial recognition

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/worried-facial-recognition-technology-juggalo-makeup-prevents-involuntary-surveillance-232354372.html


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Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Freedom Rider: Ocasio-Cortez and the Left | Black Agenda Report

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https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-ocasio-cortez-and-left


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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Poland]: Jasiński on Polak-Springer, 'Recovered Territory: A German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-1989'

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: July 5, 2018 at 2:18:23 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Poland]:  Jasiński on Polak-Springer, 'Recovered 
> Territory: A German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-1989'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Peter Polak-Springer.  Recovered Territory: A German-Polish Conflict
> over Land and Culture, 1919-1989.  New York  Berghahn Books, 2015.
> xxi + 280 pp.  $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78238-887-6.
> 
> Reviewed by Łukasz Jasiński (Muzeum Miasta Gdyni, Museum of the
> City of Gdynia)
> Published on H-Poland (July, 2018)
> Commissioned by Anna Muller
> 
> An In-depth View on Language, Propaganda, and Architecture in
> Polish-German Relations during Borderland Conflict
> 
> A tangled web of Polish-German relations in the twentieth century has
> been one of the main areas of scholarly interest in both countries.
> Despite a significant number of publications and scientific projects
> dealing with relations between these two states, there are still
> areas that require in-depth studies in terms of both microhistory and
> wider examinations dealing with crucial political events and social
> phenomena. Peter Polak-Springer's _Recovered Territory: A
> German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-1989 _is an
> attempt to combine regional history with broader political and social
> analysis. Polak-Springer focuses on reconstructing the history of
> Polish-German rivalry over the Upper Silesia region, which, after the
> end of World War I, became a new borderland, torn by rivalry between
> the reborn Polish state and both the Weimar Republic and, after 1933,
> the Third Reich. The author conducts a reconstruction of nationalist
> movements in two parts of Upper Silesia supported and even championed
> by central and local authorities, which aimed to prove that only one
> of the protagonists had a right to Silesia.
> 
> Polak-Springer presents a transnational history of irredentism as
> popular culture and its promotion at the grassroots. Through a wide
> variety of examples, he covers Polish-German disputes and conflicts
> not only over the territory itself but also in the sphere of symbols,
> language, and culture. He also presents this rivalry as based on a
> wide scope of propaganda mechanisms and tools, which often were
> rooted in nationalist approaches that aimed to prove either that
> Upper Silesia could only be treated as a fully German land or that it
> was a perennial part of Polish territory. This book, however, is not
> simply limited to mere description of propaganda campaigns conducted
> in Upper Silesia by Poles and Germans starting from the end of World
> War I and ending with the collapse of Communism in Poland. Instead,
> Polak-Springer shows how two nationalist-rooted camps did not only
> compete against each other but also interacted, showing a great deal
> of similarities in such areas as culture, architecture, language, and
> political rallies.
> 
> The chronological frame of this book is 1919 to 1989. These seven
> decades were marked by many events to which the author refers: for
> example, three anti-German uprisings in Upper Silesia, which broke
> out between 1919 and 1921; the division of Upper Silesia between
> Poland and Germany, followed by political and social rivalry over
> this region; World War II and the German occupation of Poland; the
> end of the war and expulsion of the German population from Poland in
> 1945; and the politics of Communist authorities toward Upper Silesia
> and its inhabitants. Every event is here a subject of analysis from
> the prism of conflict over land, culture, and actions conducted by
> the two protagonists, which aimed to prove their "exclusive rights"
> to this region.
> 
> Polak-Springer divides his book logically into five major chapters
> and a short epilogue. The chapters are arranged in chronological
> order focusing on the origins and course of the conflict over Upper
> Silesia between 1871 and 1939, border rallies as a method of
> mobilization of supporters between 1922 and 1934, Polish attempts to
> acculturize Upper Silesia as a typical Polish province between 1926
> and 1939, German attempts to "re-germanize" this land between 1939
> and 1945, and expulsions of Germans and the politics of
> "re-polonization" of Upper Silesia conducted by Polish Communists
> between 1945 and 1956. The epilogue focuses on brief reconstructions
> of the German minority in Silesia and consecutive waves of migration
> to West Germany, as well as propaganda campaigns conducted by
> authorities in Warsaw until 1989.
> 
> The

Re: [Marxism] The Complex Relationship Between Socialists and Immigration

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Wasn't Sol in the orbit of Socialist Union at some point?

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2018 08:35:47 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: [Marxism] The Complex Relationship Between Socialists and
Immigration
Message-ID: <748e79b4-cb32-3fa0-bde7-d75602c07...@panix.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

This reminds me of how the late Sol Dollinger used to promote
anti-immigration policies in the name of protecting U.S. workers on
Marxmail.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/05/the-complex-relationship-between-socialists-and-immigration/

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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Russiagate: Muzzling the Black Left and the March to War - Left Forum

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https://www.blackagendareport.com/black-agenda-reports-panel-discussion-2018-left-forum

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[Marxism] A left candidate for City Council in Providence

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Sorry to repeat, was asked to take this down previously by the folks
affiliated with the campaign to accommodate their campaign schedule.

https://rimediacoop.org/2018/07/09/andrew-stewart-justice-gaines/

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Re: [Marxism] Marx and Engels on Civil War: New Collection - HARD CRACKERS (Louis Proyect)

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Very interesting and nice to see CPUSA adapting the Du Bois line of
thinking about the Civil War from BLACK RECONSTRUCTION. Guess Herbert
Aptheker's legacy is bearing some some good bounty.

-- 
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Andrew Stewart


Message: 14
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 08:45:51 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: [Marxism] Marx and Engels on Civil War: New Collection - HARD
CRACKERS
Message-ID: <89f44e50-70b8-2c87-1ddd-1c6fef6a0...@panix.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

http://www.hardcrackers.com/marx-engels-civil-war-new-collection/
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[Marxism] FREE Verso ebook for 24 hrs

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https://www.versobooks.com/lists/3902-no-walls-no-borders-verso-reading
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Re: [Marxism] Question

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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I have previously asked whether the Saudis could have done this without
approval or knowledge of the Americans, which is extremely tenable given
what we know about the links between Riyadh and other forces in the region
besides the US. The Wikileaks cache from Podesta showed this clearly.

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2017 17:30:02 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Question
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

On 4/15/17 5:08 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:
>
>
> Theodor Postol argues that the rebels are responsible for the release
> of sarin at Khan Sheikhoun.  His key argument is that the damaged
> missile found at the site could not have been bent in the particular
> way it was if it was dropped from the air.  Instead he says it was
> damaged by an explosion on the ground.
>

I am plowing through Postol's shit for an article tomorrow--for the time
being focused on his 2013 defense of Assad.

I just took a quick look at his statement on Khan Sheikhoun and don't
quite see anything about a missile being bent. This is what I did see:

The explosive acted on the pipe as a blunt crushing mallet. It drove the
pipe into the ground while at the same time creating the crater. Since
the pipe was filled with sarin, which is an incompressible fluid, as the
pipe was flattened the sarin acted on the walls and ends of the pipe
causing a crack along the length of the pipe and also the failure of the
cap on the back end. This mechanism of dispersal is essentially the same
as hitting a toothpaste tube with a large mallet, which then results in
the tube failing and the toothpaste being blown in many directions
depending on the exact way the toothpaste skin ruptures.

If this is in fact the mechanism used to disperse the sarin, this
indicates that the sarin tube was placed on the ground by individuals on
the ground and not dropped from an airplane.

---

Think about the implications of "the sarin tube was placed on the ground
by individuals on the ground". Is Postol in his right mind? How would
this not get noticed? Also, what is he trying to say? This is a "false
flag" narrative that does not even conform to the Russian alibi.

The main point I will be making is that Postol never once deals with the
technical and infrastructural questions of making and weaponizing sarin
gas. For an MIT professor to evade such questions, especially when he is
peddling a "false flag" story, is unbelievable. But then again, since he
has relied on Maram Susli for advice on chemistry, anything goes.


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Re: [Marxism] Question

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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You can't imagine the Saudis flying a plane to drop a sarin bomb without the 
approval or knowledge of the US? They did something like that a few blocks from 
your house about 16 years ago now.

Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2017 14:57:35 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Question
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

On 4/16/17 2:46 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote:
> 
> I have previously asked whether the Saudis could have done this without
> approval or knowledge of the Americans, which is extremely tenable given
> what we know about the links between Riyadh and other forces in the region
> besides the US. The Wikileaks cache from Podesta showed this clearly.

Done what? Sent secret agents into Khan Sheikhoun to kill a bunch of 
people to create a false flag?

I think it is more likely that the smoking man from X-Files was behind it.
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Re: [Marxism] Question

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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The unredacted 9-11 report has the hijackers getting aid and financing from
both the Saudi diplomatic corps and their network of American theological
groupings centered around Wahhabi-brand mosques and other organizations.
This is pretty well documented in multiple sources.

https://28pages.org/2016/04/18/911-commission-investigators-proposed-examining-possible-political-economic-and-other-influences-on-inquiries-into-saudi-ties-to-attacks/

https://28pages.org/saudi-government-connections-to-911-shouldnt-stay-secret/

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2017 14:17:31 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Question
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

On 4/17/17 2:11 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote:
> You can't imagine the Saudis flying a plane to drop a sarin bomb
> without the approval or knowledge of the US? They did something like
> that a few blocks from your house about 16 years ago now.


Don't confuse the Saudi state with the 9/11 attackers. To start with, it
was Yemenites who dominated the attack, even if they were Saudi citizens
at the time.

For more background on this:

https://louisproyect.org/2016/05/17/was-saudi-arabia-behind-911/

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Andrew Stewart
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Re: [Marxism] Question

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Are you really that unclear about the situation that is in the 9-11 report or 
are you being sarcastic? The Saudi royal family is a fractious, schismatic kind 
of mirror image of the American left. The interplay between al Queda and 
members of the royal family as opposed to the government is well documented. 
How much pull each family member has in an individual consulate or mosque in 
America is borne out by the historical record. Furthermore the fact that bin 
Laden was opposed to the royal family may not have been a huge factor in the 
behavior of the hijackers in America. How do you not get this?

Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

> On Apr 18, 2017, at 5:37 PM, Louis Proyect  wrote:
> 
>> On 4/18/17 2:10 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote:
>> 
>> The unredacted 9-11 report has the hijackers getting aid and financing from
>> both the Saudi diplomatic corps and their network of American theological
>> groupings centered around Wahhabi-brand mosques and other organizations.
>> This is pretty well documented in multiple sources.
>> 
>> https://28pages.org/2016/04/18/911-commission-investigators-proposed-examining-possible-political-economic-and-other-influences-on-inquiries-into-saudi-ties-to-attacks/
>> 
>> https://28pages.org/saudi-government-connections-to-911-shouldnt-stay-secret/
> 
> 
> So, you are saying that Saudi Arabia was behind 9/11 even though al-Qaeda had 
> declared war on the ruling family?
> 

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Re: [Marxism] Question

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Louis 

I studied under Richard Lobban. He was doing scholarship on Islamism as a style 
of government back when Peter Camejo was running for president on the SWP 
ticket. Because he was working in Sudan, he was there when bin Laden showed up 
in Khartoum. You can find his stuff pretty easily. I tend to follow his 
analysis on this issue pretty regularly.

Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

> On 4/18/17 5:57 PM, Andrew Stewart wrote:
> The interplay between al Queda and members of the royal family as opposed to 
> the government is well documented.

My advice to Andrew and anybody else interested in these questions is to read 
"The Thistle and the Drone" by Akbar Ahmed, which is now online:

https://archive.org/stream/The_Thistle_and_the_Drone_How_Americas_War_on_Terror_Became_a_Global_War_on_Trib/The_Thistle_and_the_Drone_How_Americas_War_on_Terror_Became_a_Global_War_on_Tribal_Islam_by_Akbar_Ahmed_djvu.txt

If you don't have time to read the whole thing, this chapter is essential:


page 43
Bin Laden’s Dilemma:

Balancing Tribal and Islamic Identity
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[Marxism] Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton on Chris Hedges Show re: Syria

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://youtu.be/e6C249jh7wQ

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-South]: Illingworth on Rothman, 'Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: April 26, 2017 at 10:31:24 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-South]:  Illingworth on Rothman, 'Beyond Freedom's 
> Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Adam Rothman.  Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight
> of Slavery.  Cambridge  Harvard University Press, 2015.  288 pp.
> $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-36812-5.
> 
> Reviewed by James Illingworth (Department of History, University of
> Maryland, College Park)
> Published on H-South (April, 2017)
> Commissioned by Caitlin Verboon
> 
> An extraordinary drama played out in the courtrooms of New Orleans in
> early 1865. Rose Herera, a Louisiana freedwoman, brought suit against
> her former mistress, Mary De Hart, for kidnapping. Two years earlier,
> De Hart had taken Herera's three oldest children on a steamer from
> Union-occupied New Orleans to Havana, Cuba. There, they rejoined
> their master, one of many Confederate sympathizers who had fled the
> Crescent City for a port more hospitable to slavery. By the time Mary
> De Hart returned to New Orleans in January of 1865, however, a new
> state constitution had abolished slavery in Louisiana, and Rose
> Herera was a free woman with powerful new allies. First, Herera
> pursued her claims in the civilian courts, and, when that failed, in
> the provost courts of the occupying army. Finally, after three years
> apart, and thanks to the intervention of figures at the highest level
> of the federal government, Rose Herera was reunited with her
> children.
> 
> Rose Herera's struggle to rescue her children is the subject of Adam
> Rothman's _Beyond __Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of
> Slavery_. This compact, lively book manages to be both an intimate
> microhistory of one black family and a sweeping transnational account
> of war, emancipation, and Reconstruction in the Deep South's largest
> city and beyond. In it, Rothman uses Rose Herera's life and times to
> illuminate crucial changes in the southern legal system during
> Reconstruction, and, more importantly, to illustrate the challenges
> and triumphs of African American family life in the age of
> emancipation.
> 
> Born a slave in rural Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, in 1835, Rose
> Herera grew up in the distinctive plantation regime of the lower
> Mississippi Valley. By the 1830s, planters in Pointe Coupée had made
> the transition from tobacco and indigo to cotton and sugar, and the
> booming parish had a significant black majority. In the early 1850s,
> Herera's owner sold his plantation and brought her and several other
> slaves to New Orleans, a bustling metropolis of well over a hundred
> thousand people. In the Crescent City, Herera was bought and sold
> several times, eventually ending up in the possession of one James De
> Hart, a dentist. In New Orleans she met and married George Herera, a
> free man of color, and the couple had four children before the
> outbreak of the Civil War.
> 
> When the Civil War came and Union forces occupied New Orleans, James
> De Hart fled to Cuba. The dentist's family tried to take Rose to join
> him there, but she resisted, and ended up confined to the city jail.
> Sick and imprisoned with her youngest child, an infant, Rose was
> powerless to prevent the De Harts from sailing to Havana with her
> three oldest children. She did not remain helpless for long, however.
> The abolition of slavery, the presence of Union troops, and the
> beginning of the political reconstruction of Louisiana created a
> terrain on which Herera was able to press her claims as a free woman
> and a mother. Although she was ultimately unsuccessful in both
> civilian and provost courts, Herera's persistence caught the
> attention of the military authorities who, in turn, alerted the
> federal government. Through the intervention of Secretary of State
> William Seward, the De Harts were eventually forced to send the
> children home.
> 
> In _Beyond Freedom's Reach_, Rothman faces the challenge of using
> Rose Herera's life to illuminate major historical processes without
> letting the drama of war and emancipation drown out the human
> elements of her story. This challenge is particularly acute given
> that Herera left very few written records for long stretches of her
> life. It would have been all too easy for her story to become
> submerged in the social history of Civil War-era Louisiana. In
> general, however, Rothman succeeds admirably in striking the right
> balance between narrating Herera's life and describing her times, and
> there 

[Marxism] Providence May Day media

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Happy May Day comrades. Workers of the World unite!

https://rimediacoop.org/2017/04/30/providence-may-day-media/

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Empire]: Wang on Coates, 'Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: May 2, 2017 at 10:45:15 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Empire]:  Wang on Coates, 'Legalist Empire: 
> International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth 
> Century'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Benjamin Allen Coates.  Legalist Empire: International Law and
> American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century.  New York
> Oxford University Press, 2016.  296 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-19-049595-4.
> 
> Reviewed by Jingbin Wang (Elizabeth City State University)
> Published on H-Empire (May, 2017)
> Commissioned by Charles V. Reed
> 
> Legalism and the American Empire
> 
> The United States has long had an uneasy relationship with
> international legal institutions such as the World Court and the
> International Criminal Court. It has often been in a minority
> refusing to ratify international treaties. The recent Bush
> administration stood out. It is easy to dismiss international law as
> insignificant in American foreign policy. In his _Legalist Empire:
> International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early
> Twentieth Century_, however, Benjamin Allen Coates disputes this
> seemingly inevitable conclusion, although he agrees that the United
> States has for the past few decades lacked a proud record of
> respecting international legal institutions and international law.
> Drawing on the literature on international law and international
> relations, Coates identifies two popular conceptions of international
> law: judicialist legalism and realism. International law means either
> self-enforcing universal principles or "a transparent tool for
> justifying atrocities" (p. 5). In either case, it is assumed that
> "international law and state power are antagonists" (p. 1). Coates
> does not altogether deny this antagonistic relationship between law
> and power under certain circumstances, but calls attention to a
> situation in which they can be mutually reinforcing.  That is, law
> not only "constrains states by forcing them to do something that they
> would not otherwise do," but also "has often permitted the use of
> force" to advance national interest (p. 5). Coates therefore paints a
> complex picture of when US leaders followed and even moved to promote
> international law and when they chose to disregard it.
> 
> Coates places the United States in the larger context of the New
> Imperialism (1875-1914). Focusing on the years from 1898 to 1919,
> Coates maintains that the American empire was "in important ways a
> legalist one" (p. 2). Specifically, international law was "an
> essential component of" the rise of the United States to great power
> status, and international lawyers were "at the center of the effort
> to create and administer the American empire" (p. 2). Invoking the
> discourse of civilization, American legalists helped defend the new
> imperial power by identifying it with its European peers, which had
> embraced empire as a new international norm to civilize remote and
> backward nations. Sharing the White Men's burden, the American empire
> was both sanctioned by international law and expected to help
> establish the rule of law in "uncivilized" nations.
> 
> Coates convincingly demonstrates that international law derives its
> meaning in a specific political and ideological context. Early on,
> the transatlantic discourse of civilization informed international
> law, which in turn justified the American empire. In this sense,
> international law shaped empire. In other words, power projection was
> not the prerogative of the military but also the job of international
> lawyers. Conversely, as Coates indicates, empire shaped international
> law. Empire could not become a new international norm without
> recourse to the discourse of civilization, which was ultimately
> backed by power. Indeed, international law was never divorced from
> power realities, which was reflected even in the establishment of
> American Society of International Law (ASIL) in 1906: "The secretary
> of state, Elihu Root, served as ASIL president, and the organization
> counted among its vice presidents three Supreme Court justices, three
> former secretaries of state, and a future US president" (p. 67). On
> the other hand, many international lawyers worked for the federal
> government, especially the State Department. Others worked with US
> overseas corporations. Still others continued to speak for the
> American empire through annual meetings and publications.
> 
> Coates is explicit that the early twentieth century was the high
> poin

Re: [Marxism] Orwell-bad history?

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Yeah but Orwell didn't give a damn about the colonial question. His
activities after the events in Spain were boot-licking exercises in the
service of the British Empire. When he named names for the intelligence
services he explicitly said that Paul Robeson and Henry Wallace were
"anti-white", a pretty obvious premonition of the notion of "reverse
racism". Whether the Popular Front period had more losses than gains for
the Communist parties worldwide is a debate that has to be totally removed
from Orwell's explicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, and imperialist
criticism of it that portrays itself as a left critique. It's not an
accident that the Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling wrote an introduction to
the book in 1952.

=
Message: 5
Date: Sun, 7 May 2017 16:58:17 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan 
To: Gregory Adler , Activists and scholars in
Marxist tradition 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Orwell-bad history?
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Agreed Gregory.  I read a piece by Chomsky long ago which made the point
that the suppression of the revolutionary impulse was the problem.  The
Republican government for example failed to declare an end to colonialism
and thus gifted Franco with Moorish troops.

comradely

Gary

On Sun, May 7, 2017 at 4:31 PM, Gregory Adler via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> This is a succinct view of the anti-Orwell position on the Civil War and
> the suppression of the revolutionary forces. Although I am far less
> attracted overall to Orwell than some on this list in this matter I think
> he was on the side of the angels.
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/06/george-
> orwell-homage-to-catalonia-account-spanish-civil-war-wrong
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[Marxism] Interview With Max Blumenthal: Syria and the Failure of the Left

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Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola interview 
https://shadowproof.com/2017/05/07/interview-max-blumenthal-unauthorized-disclosure/


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[Marxism] Have you completed your registration with the Green Party of RI Nation Builder website? - Green Party of Rhode Island

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Any folks who are in the Providence area are welcome to join and help us build 
up the party.
https://greensofri.nationbuilder.com/registration-gpri


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[Marxism] Labor Notes on Buy American

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http://labornotes.org/2017/05/interview-pitfalls-buy-american

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[Marxism] Fwd: Beginning of the end for net neutrality

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: *Sherrod Brown* 
Date: Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Subject: Beginning of the end for net neutrality
To: Andrew Stewart 


*"FCC taking first vote on net neutrality rollback"*
-- *The Hill*, 5/15/2017

Andrew,

The Trump FCC is about to take the first step toward destroying net
neutrality.

*"On Thursday, the Trump FCC will vote to adopt a final 'Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking' (NPRM) that will officially begin the effort to repeal the 2015
network neutrality rules and the legal authority upon which they are
based..."*
-- *Mashable*, 5/15/2017

If net neutrality disappears, the Internet as we know it will change. Large
companies would be able to pay for their content to move faster, tilting
the playing field away from small-scale content providers and online
innovators.

The free, open nature of the Internet will likely fundamentally change --
the result being a huge handout to corporate special interests.

*We have a petition urging members of the FCC to protect net neutrality.
Right now we have 12,000 signatures. Before Thursday's vote, I want to get
that number up to 25,000.*


*Add your signature >>*


Thank you.

Sherrod
Paid for by Friends of Sherrod Brown

Contributions or gifts to Friends of Sherrod Brown are not tax deductible.

This email was sent to hasc.warrior.s...@gmail.com

Click here

to unsubscribe
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[Marxism] Gentrification

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Does anyone have any insights on developments since Neil Smith published
The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City?

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[Marxism] Amazing China Mieville panel on his book October worth your time

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://youtu.be/sLBXeRLIDVg

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[Marxism] Housing Activist Asata Tigrai on Gentrification in Providence

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https://rimediacoop.org/2017/05/30/stewart-tigrai-gentrification-providence/

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[Marxism] Movie review Alien Covenant

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/02/ridley-scotts-horrific-depiction-of-fascism-in-alien-covenant/

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[Marxism] Keynes question

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At some point recently I read somewhere that many politicians do not read
the full General Theory by Keynes and instead read a certain shorter
article or essay by him. Anyone know the title?

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[Marxism] Yanis Varoufakis on Putin

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https://youtu.be/GW2JYtusKts

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and terror: separating fact from fiction | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist (Louis Proyect)

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Yet again you refuse to acknowledge the literature generated by the
American intelligence community that demonstrates the connection between
911 hijackers and Saudi government. It's been in classified and
unclassified documents both formally published and leaked. Do you realize
how that gap is making your work so faulty?

Message: 1

Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 16:58:18 -0400

From: Louis Proyect >

To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

>, PEN-L <
pe...@mail.csuchico.edu >

Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and terror: separating

fact from fiction | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Message-ID: <68b75100-d5d7-646c-d0b2-4dedf6fa9...@panix.com >

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed




https://louisproyect.org/2017/06/19/saudi-arabia-wahhabism-and-terror-separating-fact-from-fiction/



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and terror: separating fact from fiction | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist (Louis Proyect)

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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"The Thistle and the Drone", a book by the Brookings Institute? Come on
Louis, you aren't even trying anymore.

Who am I going to believe, the CIA cables that were top secret and never
intended for publication as well as multiple people from the Dubya
government who have said this or the Brookings Institute? Vijay Prashad has
done plenty of work on this also, as have my anthro profs that I correspond
with daily. Brookings Institute or them?

On 6/20/17 2:17 PM, Andrew Stewart wrote:

> Yet again you refuse to acknowledge the literature generated by the
> American intelligence community that demonstrates the connection between
> 911 hijackers and Saudi government. It's been in classified and
> unclassified documents both formally published and leaked. Do you realize
> how that gap is making your work so faulty?
>

Did you read what I wrote?

The hijackers were mortal enemies of the Saudi government. Most came from a
region in the southwest of Saudi Arabia that had been grabbed from Yemen in
1934 in a war of conquest having a lot in common with the "Texas war of
Independence". I don't bother with Wikileaks bullshit or "literature" the
CIA  produces. I read scholarly literature like "The Thistle and the Drone"
and so should you--frankly.

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-HOAC daily digest: 1 new items have been posted

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Notifications 
Date: Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 12:47 AM
Subject: H-HOAC daily digest: 1 new items have been posted
To: "hasc.warrior.s...@gmail.com" 


Greetings Andrew Stewart,

New items have been posted in H-HOAC.
Table of Contents

   1. Review: Frazier's The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black
   Radical Imagination <#m_4866506961890496606_184348>

--
Review: Frazier's The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical
Imagination 
by John Earl Haynes

*Robeson Taj Frazier.* *The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black
Radical Imagination.* Durham: Duke University Press
, 2014. 328 pp. $25.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8223-5786-5; $94.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-5768-1.

*Reviewed by* Joseph Parrott (Yale University/The Ohio State University)
*Published on* H-Afro-Am (June, 2017)
*Commissioned by* Jewell Debnam


Since W. E. B. DuBois defined the global color line as “the relation of the
darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the
islands of the sea,” scholars have posited various
theories on the development of international solidarity.[1]. Pan-Africanism
has long dominated the literature, but in recent years scholarship on the
links between African and Asian diasporas has increased. Given differences
in language, culture, and geography, activists developed diverse networks
and  projects to achieve unity of purpose. In the mid-twentieth century,
radical African American activists looked to China for support and
inspiration to strengthen their struggles for equality during the Cold War.

In *The East is Black*, Robeson Taj Frazier seeks to recover the evolution
of Maoist China in the black radical imagination. He contends that African
Americans used their experiences traveling in the anti-imperial nation to
challenge the formulations of race and world affairs that motivated Cold
War politics. At the heart of Frazier’s study is the transnational exchange
of ideas, goals, and peoples that brought black Americans into direct
collaboration with China’s government. Mao Zedong sought to legitimize his
rule--domestically and internationally--by “constructing Chinese communism
as global capitalism’s antithesis” (p. 11). Given the close association of
capitalism with American preponderance, a prominent element of this
strategy included the exploitation and manipulation of the United States’
deeply contested race politics and its popular conceptions of China.
African American radicals who visited China as reporters, educators, and
exiles became central actors in this project. They found in Mao’s flexible
anti-imperial reading of Marxism an attractive alternative to the United
States’ systemic economic and social inequalities. These globe-trotting
foreigners adapted and disseminated Chinese communist ideals for
international consumption, even as they witnessed some of the limitations
of Mao’s domestic revolution.

Frazier focuses on six individuals, providing a detailed textual analysis
of their cultural production about China. During the 1950s, W. E. B.
DuBois, Shirley Graham DuBois, and reporter William Worthy all toured the
country, while Mabel Williams, Robert Williams, and educator Vicki Garvin
lived for extended periods in China in the 1960s. Frazier contends that
they came to understand the hardships faced by blacks in the United States
as inextricably linked to those of China by their shared participation in a
global “system of racial capitalism” based on white supremacy, unequal
wealth accumulation, privatization, and male dominance (p. 6). Travel and
travel narrative provided a conduit through which internationally minded
radicals could trade, negotiate, and disseminate political ideas. The
result was a direct challenge to the dominant Euro-American liberal order
that had long constrained the freedoms of nonwhites and defined identity
within strict national parameters. These new ways of viewing the world
expanded the political consciousness and imagination of African Americans
and, to a lesser extent, their East Asian hosts. For Frazier’s activists,
China became a template that offered “instructive principles and praxis for
making a U.S. revolutionary movement” (p. 34).

Frazier uses DuBois’s concept of “unity and variety” to explain this
radical transnationalism, which forms its identity less around sameness
than a pluralistic resistance to racial capitalism undertaken by the
long-marginalized colored peoples (p. 69). In particular, Dubois and the
Williamses articulated a decentralized s

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]: Lichtner on Ben-Ghiat, 'Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 12:13 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]: Lichtner on Ben-Ghiat, 'Italian
Fascism's Empire Cinema'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Ruth Ben-Ghiat.  Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema.  Bloomington
Indiana University Press, 2015.  420 pp.  $35.00 (paper), ISBN
978-0-253-01559-4.

Reviewed by Giacomo Lichtner (University of Wellington)
Published on H-Nationalism (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel

Films in Search of a Formula: Italian Empire Cinema as "Imperial
Debris"

If readers of this book want to understand both the essence of
propaganda in Fascist Italy and the organic interdisciplinarity of
Ruth Ben-Ghiat's remarkable research, they should turn to page 20.
They will find a 1936 photograph of a Milan street corner plastered
with the epiphenomena of a symbiotic relationship between marketing,
popular culture, and politics: an advertisement for the autarchic
"Victory Butter"; the marmoreal "M" of confectionary company Motta
referencing the Duce's initial; a film poster of tenor Beniamino
Gigli in the drama _Non ti scordar di me_; and, above Gigli,
Mussolini's own infamous three-quarter profile, also compelling
Italians to "Remember!" the sanctions imposed by the League of
Nations a year earlier. Fascist propaganda, including imperial and
racial propaganda, suffused Italian culture and society, relying on
and fostering an obedient blend of persuasion, conformism, censorship
and coercion. Its "tropes and iconographies migrated throughout the
public sphere ... into the fabric of everyday life" (p. 26). Having
taken in the intricate textures of that image, readers should go back
to the start and read every word of the book.

Ben-Ghiat's _Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema_ analyzes nine famous
and less well-known films made between 1927 and 1942 that deal
directly with Italy's colonies. These are impeccably contextualized
within the transnational concept of empire cinema on the one hand,
building on Ann Laura Stoler's notion of "imperial debris," and
within the broader humus of Fascist propaganda about the empire,
race, and gender, on the other hand.[1] The tantalizing result sits
alongside Stephen Gundle's _Mussolini's Dream Factory _(2013) and two
recent histories of Fascist consensus--Paul Corner's _The Fascist
Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy _and the late
Christopher Duggan's _Fascist Voices_ (both 2012)--as another crucial
piece in the puzzle of Italian popular culture during, and under, the
Fascist regime. This is an investigation long overdue, which will
undoubtedly help a scholarly and general readership address Italy's
imperial past, on the one hand, and acknowledge the complex layers of
identity that competed or colluded to define Italians under
Mussolini's dictatorship, and beyond.

This elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated study,
beautifully supported by numerous illustrations, is structured in
eight chapters that move along concurrent thematic and chronological
paths. Chapter 1 stakes out the field of study, drawing the many
different strands of the investigation into a coherent methodology.
This is a particular strength of the book--and one readers of
Ben-Ghiat's oeuvre will be familiar with--that manages to engage the
discourses of both cinema and history, and of both Italy and its
European context, with exceptional clarity and efficiency. Ben-Ghiat
maps out how spectatorship, gender, conceptions of modernity and
technology, and of course race, collide with Italy's imperial
ventures, its own historical and political references, and its
representation and construction through film. Film thus emerges as a
popular interface that mediates and reinterprets past and present, as
well as identitarian and ideological tropes.

Chapters 2 to 8 apply this methodology to Italian empire cinema,
focusing on specific themes and periods. Chapters 2 and 3 highlight
Italy's imperial connections, with both the colonies and the European
colonial models it sought to emulate and respond to, while discussing
Mario Camerini's _Kif Tebbi_ (1927), and empire cinema up to the
invasion of Ethiopia. Chapters 4 and 8 home in on the Fascist version
of the cult of aviation, wrapped into dreams of conquest both
symbolic and territorial. Sandwiched between these initial chapters
and the two sections on World War Two (chapters 7 and 8), are two
chapters dedicated to the imperial body, which discuss in depth _Lo
squadron bianco_ (Augusto Genina, 1936), _Sentinelle di bronzo_
(Romolo Marcellini, 1937), _L'Esclave blanc_ (Carl Theodor Dreyer,
completed by Jean-Paul Paulin, 1936), and _Sotto la Croc

[Marxism] Revitalization movements

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This piece of anthropological literature can help explain the left wing
cult phenomenon.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1956.58.2.02a00040/abstract

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Animal]: Taylor on Grigson, 'Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 9:31 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Animal]: Taylor on Grigson, 'Menagerie: The
History of Exotic Animals in England'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Caroline Grigson.  Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in
England.  New York  Oxford University Press, 2016.  349 pp.  $45.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-871470-5.

Reviewed by Anna Taylor (University of Massachusetts)
Published on H-Animal (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Zoei Sutton

Animal History from an Imperial Perspective

In this lively and entertaining book, zoologist Caroline Grigson
traces the history of collections of imported animals in England. She
progresses chronologically, organizing chapters by rulers and
subdividing them into sections about various animal collectors,
traders, and showmen. She begins with medieval and Renaissance
collections, starting with the first menagerie in the Tower of London
in 1204. Her focus, though, is the age of exploration, in which
growing wealth and the discovery of new animals, together with
scientific curiosity, fueled the mass importation of wildlife from
around the globe. She examines the aristocratic collections,
traveling shows, and profitable menageries that housed these animals,
until the emergence of zoological gardens in the early nineteenth
century.

Grigson uses her expertise to distinguish among the species whose
identities are often masked by fluid naming conventions, and provides
a helpful glossary. We learn not only of the standard charismatic
megafauna, such as elephants, lions, tigers, and rhinoceroses, but
also of many others, including wombats, chameleons, capybaras,
rattlesnakes, polar bears, nylghais, and a camel painted with spots
to impersonate the cameleopard (i.e., giraffe). The dazzling array of
birds includes cassowaries, black swans, "spectacularly ugly" king
vultures, golden eagles, and emerald doves. (A useful index of
animals is included.) Grigson's human cast--such as the actor John
Philip Kemble, who drunkenly insisted on riding a rhinoceros, and
John Bobey, who was born into slavery in Jamaica and ended up running
his own English menagerie--is as riveting as the animals. Royalty,
aristocrats, traders, rival showmen (and sometimes women),
zoologists, and imperiled animal keepers people the book.

 Although _Menagerie_ has no overarching argument (and no
introduction in which to make one), a number of themes recur: exotic
animals as status objects and gifts; the postmortem value of these
animals' bodies; the role of menageries in scientific exploration;
the shifting boundary between human and (nonhuman) animal; the
animals' suffering; and the significance of their keepers. Exotic
animals were frequently imported as gifts for kings, queens, and
other important people. After death, the animal bodies could again be
gifted for dissection and preservation, as were the elephants that
King George III and Queen Charlotte presented to Dr. William Hunter
(p. 168). In death these animals contributed to scientific
understanding. Their dissection aided comparative anatomy and
provided evidence for the development of the theory of evolution.
Directors of menageries and the earliest zoological gardens asserted
that their collections had moral and scientific value. Individuals
attempted experiments on naturalization and interbreeding, claiming
that they would produce useful domestic animals. The resulting
zedonks, ligers, and wolf-Pomeranians, however, did not live up to
this claim.

Dissection showed the commonality of animal and human, as did living
fauna, particularly monkeys and apes. A chimpanzee was dressed up in
women's clothes and trained to take tea. Happy Jerry the mandrill was
induced to smoke a pipe, which he would do, at four in the afternoon,
reclining in an armchair. While these wild animals were being cast in
human roles, humans were being treated like animals. Some menagerie
owners staged shows of "exotic" humans, and the animal trade was part
of a broader colonial exploitation that included the slave trade.

Immense suffering is always just below the narrative's surface.
Numerous animals died of cold. Others ingested foreign objects or
attacked one another: a polar bear ate a raccoon, a tiger ate a
hyena, and a hyena killed a secretary bird. They were confined to
small, foul-smelling cages, fed incorrect diets (including bread and
sometimes alcohol), and dragged around the countryside over atrocious
roads. Grigson occasionally comments on particularly inhumane acts,
such as George Wombwell's tiger- and lion-baiting spectacles, the
injuries inflicted on the elephant Chunee, and John Hunte

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Sci-Med-Tech]: Brown on Mangham, 'Dickens's Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence'

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From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 1:25 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Sci-Med-Tech]: Brown on Mangham, 'Dickens's
Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Andrew Mangham.  Dickens's Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence.
 Columbus  Ohio State University Press, 2017.  xvi + 253 pp.  $84.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-8142-1324-7.

Reviewed by Andy C. Brown (University of Exeter)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Darren N. Wagner

_Dickens's Forensic Realism_ begins with the commonplace observation
that bodies--particularly unstable ones, as well as dead--abound in
the novelist's works. Arguing that Dickens's interest in these bodies
stemmed from a forensic fascination with their aesthetic, political,
and philosophical potential, Mangham shows how Dickens was informed
by--and spoke back to--Victorian values of medico-legal truth. The
instability of interpretation, perception, and narration is shown to
be an inherent feature of both medical-jurisprudence _and_ Dickens's
technique, informed by his strong working knowledge of the period's
developments in forensic medicine. The whole book is meticulously
researched, fluently and entertainingly written, and sheds light on
perennial epistemological questions of what we know and how we know
it in the face of alleged truths and unstable evidences. In relation
to how we perceive and narrate our answers to such questions, Mangham
reflects that both medico-legal discussions and Dickens's novels
demonstrate that "while one can never hope to capture absolute truth,
limited, self-aware, and self-distrusting truth is a powerful
compromise" (p. 118).

The opening chapter presents a number of high-profile historical
court cases alongside a thorough survey of the development of
forensic medicine and its relation to the law. Received notions of
"natural law" and "gut feelings" dominated common law practice at the
start of the nineteenth century, leading to a mistrust of experts and
prevailing "common sense" notions that "the truth will out." Mangham
traces this history in detail to demonstrate how Dickens's
novels--notably _Bleak House _(1852-53), with its savage
representation of Chancery, and Tulkinghorn's outmoded legal
methods--provide a damning critique of this status quo. Dickens's
formative childhood reading of sensationalist journals such as _The
Terrific Register_ helped shape the mature author's dismantling of
the relationship between narrative and "natural justice." Mangham
also shows how Dickens's critique of the conflicts between forensic
medicine and law, in their conflicting claims to authority, are shown
to originate in his understanding of how forensics and law competed
"for intellectual authority over the process of interpretation" (p
.64)--what Mangham characterizes as "the law's need for certainty and
medicine's need for doubt" (p. 85).

A second chapter explores how Dickens employed the methods of
forensic medicine in _Oliver Twist_ (1837) and _Our Mutual Friend
_(1864)_ _to develop a narrative style that troubles objective claims
to "the whole truth." Through a detailed discussion of the former,
Mangham shows how Dickens drew on medical ideas "as a means of
creating and making good use of a central light in the novel" (p.
88). Oliver's dominant perception, characterized by goodness and
light--"the heliocentric characterisation of Oliver" (p.
100)--mirrors the interlinking of truth and justice in the medical
jurisprudence of the period. In one passage, Fagin is shown to become
unnerved when he realizes Oliver is watching him pore over his
treasures and yet, in a later dream passage, the gaze is reversed as
Oliver is watched by Fagin and Monks at the window. This, Mangham
argues, is the crux point at which Oliver's observations as guiding
light in the novel can no longer be trusted, deconstructing the
objective center of the text in a way that parallels the discussions
being held in the medico-legal field of the time.

In contrast to _Oliver Twist_ with its central lead character, _Our
Mutual Friend_ has no central protagonist, a narrative decision,
Mangham argues, that enables Dickens to employ a narrative strategy
of multiple, interlocking perspectives that echo contemporary
medico-legal discussions. Mangham argues, for example, that Mr.
Venus's "articulation" of bones mirrors concerns in forensics:
"reading bodies textually in this way, and articulating the meaning
of their clues" (p. 106). Mangham argues that Mr. Venus "allows the
novel to personify one of the major epistemological questions asked
at the border between law and medicine and t

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-FedHist]: Farmer on Kanter, 'Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush'

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From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 11:42 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-FedHist]: Farmer on Kanter, 'Presidential
Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover
to George W. Bush'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Jodi Kanter.  Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating
American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush.  Carbondale
 Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.  198 pp.  $35.00 (paper),
ISBN 978-0-8093-3520-6.

Reviewed by Mindy Farmer (Kent State University and May 4 Museum)
Published on H-FedHist (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Caryn E. Neumann

Presidential libraries are odd institutions. They house the
presidential archives, where federal employees work to preserve,
protect, and serve to researchers both the most sensitive and most
mundane documents. An important part of the executive branch, they
prove that in the United States, the government is transparent and,
with a few exceptions, the papers of the president belong to the
people. At the same time, the same federal workers oversee the
presidential museum, with exhibits shaped and often financed by a
private presidential foundation. These foundations are often
populated by White House employees, the president's family, and loyal
supporters whose unstated, but understandable, goal is to create a
compelling, largely positive portrait of their former boss, loved
one, or friend. Sometimes these missions align, but often they do
not--a fact I know all too well. For five years, I served as the
Nixon Presidential Library's first education specialist. There I
worked with Timothy Naftali on the Watergate gallery, the subject of
first chapter of Jodi Kanter's newest work, _Presidential Library as
Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to
George W. Bush_.

Kanter's work adds to an extremely small but telling scholarship on
these curious private-public partnerships. While presidential
libraries have been the subject of some excellent articles and book
chapters, there are only two other full manuscripts: Benjamin
Hufbauer's classic _Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries
Shape Public Memory_ (2006) and Anthony Clark's more recent _The Last
Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and
Enshrine Their Legacies _(2015)_._ As their titles imply, both of
these assessments of the presidential library system are rather
critical. Kanter comes to similar conclusion, but through a very
different lens. Where Hufbauer and Clark analyze the libraries from a
historical perspective, as an associate professor in theater, Kanter
combines museum and theatrical theory to evaluate the "presidential
museum performance." In keeping with this theme, the author examines
three different types of scripts found within the museums:
historical, representational, and cultural. Similarly, the book is
divided into three parts. In part 1, Kanter examines the "funding of
the museums and their spatial organizations" and insightfully
concludes that presidential libraries need to clearly communicate
which portions of the museum are funded by the foundation and which
are funded by the government (p. 10). The second, and strongest,
section explores the different aspects of "American character"
embodied in the life story, postpresidential accomplishments, legacy,
and design of each individual library and thereby each individual
president. In the third and final part, Kanter offers insight on how
to improve and diversify the museum experience.

At times, _Presidential Library as Performance_ reads like a
travelogue. This is both a strength and a weakness. In describing the
exhibits, some of which have since been removed, Kanter necessarily
acts as both guide and reviewer. This is engaging, but personal.
Guests experiences can vary greatly, especially when history and
memory collide. However, as Kanter correctly notes, the National
Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which administers the
presidential library system, has conducted very few visitor surveys
to serve as evidence for more thorough conclusions.

Though admittedly biased, I also believe Kanter overestimates the
ability of library directors to implement their own agenda. They
often face enormous pushback from NARA leadership. The struggle
between Naftali and his supervisors at the Nixon Library is far more
interesting than the fight between Naftali and the Nixon Foundation.
The Foundation's positions were mostly predictable. They respected
the former president and wanted to present him in the best possible
light. The reaction of NARA's leadership, which often positioned
itself as

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Niebuhr on Gerolymatos, 'An International Civil War: Greece, 1943-1949'

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From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 8:15 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Niebuhr on Gerolymatos, 'An International
Civil War: Greece, 1943-1949'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


André Gerolymatos.  An International Civil War: Greece, 1943-1949.
New Haven  Yale University Press, 2016.  432 pp.  $25.00 (paper),
ISBN 978-0-300-18060-2.

Reviewed by Robert Niebuhr (Barrett, The Honors College, Arizona
State University)
Published on H-War (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

André Gerolymatos has written a comprehensive study on perhaps the
most important period in modern Greek history. His volume provides a
nice balance between showing the reader the larger historical
significance while still venturing into detail that brings the story
some life.  Specialists in Balkan/Greek studies should find this
study inclusive and accessible while nonspecialists should appreciate
the adequate context throughout the narrative that neither strays too
far afield nor ends up trapping the reader in tangential specifics.
This book accomplishes for Greek history in the period of World War
II and the earliest years of the Cold War what Stevan Pavlowitch has
done for Yugoslavia in the same period (_Hitler's New Disorder: The
Second World War in Yugoslavia_, 2008). In that way, Gerolymatos
chronicles just how chaotic the Nazi occupation was for Greeks,
especially those in Athens, and sets up how this chaos spurred the
challenge over creating a post-Nazi government.

Divided into nine substantive chapters, the book provides a complex
and nuanced topic with a logical platform. Gerolymatos starts with an
overview of the creation of the modern Greek state and gives some
contextual notes regarding the political situation in Greece on the
eve of World War II. This sort of background clearly helps
nonspecialists but I think this is actually one of the weaker
sections of the book in part because it misses an opportunity.
Specifically, these introductory remarks set up how divided Greece
was, especially given the refugees from Asia Minor by the 1920s, but
it does not go into enough detail regarding the history of Marxist
groups during this critical period. Since the civil war in Greece
took on a form that roughly corresponded to a generic Left versus
Right, it would have been instructive to learn more about the few
Greek Communists who operated prior to World War II. Were these
thinkers or writers in exile between the wars, did they spend time in
the Soviet Union, were they educated in Vienna? There may have been
only a few Communists, but this is a critical point when considering
aspects of the civil war once the Nazis retreated. For instance, how
could the Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas,
or_ _KKE) construct a legitimate government, win support from or be
powerful enough to bully the people, or simply act as a puppet of
foreign Communist powers? All of those dilemmas posed serious
challenges to the KKE's potential success, but in a broader sense the
lack of a powerful domestic movement would likely have doomed the KKE
regime to resemble the Nazi puppet state during the war.

There are a host of names, acronyms, and groups in this
story--something that undergraduates would surely bemoan--but
Gerolymatos does a nice job of keeping the reader on track. Chapters
unfold in a largely chronological fashion, which makes the book easy
to follow.  This reviewer had the most interest in the later
chapters, especially when one considers the larger Cold War struggle
that had already emerged by 1947. Intersected with the Cold War
contests for power, issues of identity become apparent in this
history, as Greeks continued to struggle over not only what type of
political system they would follow (i.e., which system had legitimacy
by the end of the war) but also who they were as Greeks. A nice
background to this aspect, including the so-called Macedonian
Question from the nineteenth century, helps us understand how
important identity politics had become in the 1940s. These two
realms--the political and the personal--were intertwined; for
instance, Gerolymatos recounts how the BBC's Kenneth Matthews
reported on how various sides used identity as a test: "Is
Thessalonica a Greek or a Bulgarian City?" (p. 225).

Thessalonica, of course, was not limited to a contest between
Bulgaria and Greece but also included the motivated Yugoslav regime
in the north. Josip Broz Tito had a hand in nearly all of the major
events in the region, from activity in Austrian Carinthia and Trieste
in the north to the domination of Enver Hoxha's Albanian state and
support for the KKE in it

[Marxism] I'm currently doing a sit-in for single payer!

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Dear Comrades


I am writing you today from the offices of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. I have
come to the conclusion that it is necessary to engage in nonviolent civil
disobedience to provoke the Democratic Party Senators to introduce a
parallel bill to Rep. John Conyers’ single payer healthcare bill, called
the gold standard of such legislation by activists and analysts on this
issue.


The onslaught of the TrumpCare fiasco is only able to happen because Barack
Obama and the Democratic Party in the past 8 years readied the path for
such a catastrophe. The demand is concrete, tangible, and not able to be
compromised. We need the Conyers bill to be entered into the Senate by
Sheldon Whitehouse and/or Jack Reed. No public option, no fixes for
ObamaCare, the Conyers bill made law and only the Conyers bill.


If you are reading this, I have successfully entered the offices of Sen.
Whitehouse and locked my body to a chair. I have with me my own personal
medications that I take daily as an exhibit of why I need Medicare for All.
However, and if there is one overall point to be made above all else, even
the matter of nonviolence, it is that centering this action on Black single
mothers as those who are most certainly owed and deserving of such a law
for me is essential.


While I personally parted ways with the Catholic Church years ago for a
variety of reasons of an extremely human nature, I hope you’ll forgive me
invoking some of that language to explain why. Put simply, it is through
the struggle of Black single mothers and solidarity with their struggles
that liberation and salvation will come for everyone. Robin D.G. Kelley
spells this out clearly in his introduction to Discourse on Colonialism by
Aime Cesaire: “…Anti-colonial struggle supersedes the proletarian
revolution as the fundamental historical movement… The implications are
enormous: the coming revolution was not posed in terms of capitalism versus
socialism…but in terms of the complete and total overthrow of a racist,
colonialist system that would open the way to imagine a whole new world.”
For our contexts, we need to understand that Rhode Island is a
settler-colonialist state. Europeans came here and eradicated the most
American Indians they could while bringing to these shores Africans as
slaves.


Unlike a country like Great Britain, whose colonies were external to the
mother country, we live as the colonizers in the mother country and the
colony at the same time. Black single mothers are the class of people
placed on the lowest rung of our social ladder. Only by emphasizing and
elevating their struggle to the most important in our community will we be
able to create the sort of democratic socialist system that so many were
inspired to by the campaign of Bernie Sanders. And furthermore failing to
do so will be at the peril and ultimately extinction of our species. The
trauma of climate change and its impacts must be seen as a struggle that
exists in the same spectrum with the struggle against slavery and Jim Crow
or it will be for naught.


I am attaching here a public statement in TXT, PDF, and JPEG format. Please
help it get distributed via social media and to news outlets in a fashion
you find most appropriate given the circumstances. As a suggestion here are
some addresses for reporters to contact:


WPRI news room: 401-438-3310

daniel.mcgo...@wpri.com

@TedNesi

@TimWhiteRI

WJAR News Tipline: 401.455.9105

counterpu...@counterpunch.org

si...@comcast.net

joshuafran...@gmail.com

atomicst...@gmail.com

@OccupyWallStNYC

breakingn...@providencejournal.com/401-277- 8100

kbram...@providencejournal.com

Kate Nagle 

Josh Fenton 

n...@golocalprov.com


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Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Political Gingervitis: Episode 11-A United Front? Part 1

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https://rimediacoop.org/podcast/political-gingervitis-episode-11-a-united-front-part-1/

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [Jhistory]: Pillen on Dunaway, 'Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images'

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-- Forwarded message --
From: *H-Net Staff* 
Date: Sunday, July 2, 2017
Subject: H-Net Review [Jhistory]: Pillen on Dunaway, 'Seeing Green: The Use
and Abuse of American Environmental Images'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Finis Dunaway.  Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American
Environmental Images.  Chicago  University of Chicago Press, 2015.
344 pp.  $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-16990-3.

Reviewed by Cory J. Pillen (Fort Lewis College Department of Art and
Design)
Published on Jhistory (July, 2017)
Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe

Many of us are familiar with the recycling logo that adorns packaging
and waste containers in the United States. Fewer, however, know the
history of that logo or have considered the broader implications of
its design, which suggests that our individual commitment to
recycling will provide a much-needed solution to environmental
crisis. Finis Dunaway's _Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American
Environmental Images_ investigates the role this recycling logo and
other iconic environmental images played in the "making of popular
environmentalism" in the United States (p. 1). Organized both
thematically and chronologically, the book's fifteen chapters address
a wide range of visual material produced since the 1960s, from Pogo
comic strips and Hollywood movies like the _China Syndrome_ (1979) to
news coverage of Three Mile Island and Earth Day.

_Seeing Green_ offers important insights into various ways these
images worked to prioritize specific environmental narratives and
forms of activism. As Dunaway explains, these works successfully
expanded the public's awareness of particular issues and generated
concern by appealing to viewers' emotions and visualizing scientific
knowledge. At the same time, they failed to address important causes
of our environmental troubles or present a full range of potential
solutions. For Dunaway, these omissions point to the limitations of
the appeals, as well as mainstream approaches to environmental reform
more broadly.

Many of the images Dunaway addresses, for example, place the
responsibility for environmental reform and stewardship on the
individual, ignoring broader, systemic causes of our environmental
problems. They urge individuals to recycle or conserve energy, for
instance, but rarely address company packaging practices or critique
the government for inadequate regulation of industry. Likewise, by
focusing on individual responsibility, these images disregard some of
the more far-reaching solutions offered by activists and others. They
present, in essence, a limited vision of environmental responsibility
and citizenship, one shaped by unequal power relationships and
structural inequities.

In the last section of his book, Dunaway considers the increasing
prevalence of neoliberal, consumerist approaches to environmental
problems that perpetuate this belief in individual responsibility. As
he explains, these campaigns suggest individuals can address
environmental issues through green consumerism, by buying organic
foods for example, or boycotting products like canned tuna that have
been associated with fishing practices that kill dolphins. These
appeals, however, disregard the fact that some "green" consumer
choices are too expensive for all but the wealthy or upper middle
class. They also prioritize immediate reform efforts over long-term
solutions, particularly those that challenge the basic structures of
capitalism or dominant national narratives.

Throughout _Seeing Green_, Dunaway pays attention to the various ways
these environmental images intersect with social justice issues like
race and class. As Dunaway notes, a number of the images under
discussion use white, middle-class children and adults to suggest
"universal vulnerability"- that all humans will suffer the
consequences of environmental degradation. In doing so, they
disregard the disproportionate effect environmental problems have on
poor communities, minority groups, and specific laborers. Dunaway
offers a number of examples, including gas mask imagery, posters
warning of pesticides in breast milk, and media campaigns focused on
the danger of Alar on apples. As he explains, these appeals ignore
the inequities of environmental risk, like the greater exposure to
pesticides some farmworkers experience, in stressing the fact that
all viewers are susceptible to environmental harm.

Contextualizing his analysis of these images, Dunaway addresses
broader debates concerning environmentalism and some of the responses
these appeals engendered. Discussing toxic waste, for instance, he
explains that some media sources suggested the state had a
responsi

[Marxism] Political Gingervitis: Episode 12-A United Front? Part 2

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https://rimediacoop.org/podcast/political-gingervitis-episode-12-a-united-front-part-2/

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Andrew Stewart
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