Re: [Marxism] The AnftiFa Antimonies, Part 3 | Washington Babylon

2019-02-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Really?  You want a discussion of ideas.  Dandy.  That'd be a first for
antifa apologists.

Are you willing to answer some direct questions on the subject?
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Re: [Marxism] The AnftiFa Antimonies, Part 3 | Washington Babylon

2019-02-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 The muddle that is Antifa's "organization" seems to reflect the obvious
lack of coherence around a strategy.  So much so that Brother Masko can
only make assertions about who they are and how they feel . . . and not why
they do what they do or what they aspire to achieve.

Anyone else remember the schoolteacher in "All Quiet on the Western
Front"?  He urged others to put themselves at risk, while he himself was
not going to join them or even to explain why they should do so.
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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

2019-02-26 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Will do.

This was the result of my using email via the phone, with which I'm not
familiar (nor particularly happy).



On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:25 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> I just purged a number of messages from A. Stewart and J. Pasco from the
> moderator's queue because they had more than 3 recipients. In the
> future, please stay within 3 recipients if you want to avoid being held
> in a moderator's queue.
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Re: [Marxism] Flirting With Liberals

2019-02-16 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 As an fyi, the DSA Refoundation dissolved last November.
https://dsarefoundation.org/2018/11/11/dissolution/

Also, in a general sense, members declaring the DSA or any other
organization as being in the wrong class is not only an abstraction but
raises the question of why the hell anyone in the working class is in it.

Too, isnt a left-wing caucus just going through the motions unless we reach
out to the left-wingers in the DSA?  And doing so with a plan of action for
what we want the DSA to do in the here and now to move forward?  And what
we can do within the DSA to move the DSA that direction?
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Re: [Marxism] I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you

2019-02-13 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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He has risen!

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 2:10 PM Jim Farmelant via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
>
> Yesterday evening, the Wikipedia page on Lyndon LaRouche had him as dead
> for a while. That was later removed. Looking at the Talk page for that
> article, apparently Chip Berlet had made that edit. Other Wikipedia editors
> removed that edit on the grounds that news of LaRouche's had not appeared
> in any reliable news sources. Chip Berlet insists that word of his death
> has appeared on a number of Internet sources connected to the LaRouche
> network. I suspect that Berlet, who has been studying LaRouche and his
> followers for many years has gotten this right.
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> http://www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math
>
>
> -- Original Message --
> From: Louis Proyect via Marxism 
> To: Jim Farmelant 
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2019 18:15:43 -0500
>
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>
> On 2/12/19 4:53 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
> >
> > A message from Helga Zepp-LaRouche
> >
> > With infinite sadness I report to you that Lyn passed away this morning.
> > There are no words to describe the loss to humanity. He left us, but he
> > lives in the simultaneity of eternity. It is now up to us to realize his
> > life‘s work. Helga
> >
>
>
>
> May be bogus. Shit.
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> Sad News For Meghan Markle And Prince Harry
> track.volutrk.com
> http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5c646b2839cfa6b287603st01vuc
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Re: [Marxism] A Green New Deal Is the First Step Toward an Eco-Revolution

2019-02-10 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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It seems to me a very good first step in terms of getting climate change on
the agenda . . . as with health care, wealth inequality, etc.  Sure, I'd
rather the independent Left be doing it, but it seems to have not known how
to do so.  Thus, we struck with what has been able to get those issues on
the agenda--a bevy of new Democratic Congresswomen who have gotten down to
addressing serious questions in the middle of the silliest political
atmosphere in recent American political history.

I think it's useful to see this as an essential step.

I mean, we have always known that the first mass response when these issues
surfaced on the grand scale was that voters would look to the Democratic
party for relief.  This is something through which we are destined to
pass.  *No amount of repeated denunciations of this course is going to make
this phase shorter or less painful*.  Indeed, watching the Democratic
experience with those good "reasonable" candidates that don't scare the
"moderate" voters is playing out in Virginia . . . and will continue to do
so.  And, at some point, Shumer and Pelosi will present the new members of
Congress (and their many, many followers) with an ultimatum or a series of
ultimatums.

That will be the signal for us to have some useful advice and initiatives,
where possible.

Of course, we wanted to have positioned ourselves to have a more serious
influence on these things, the various kibbles and bits of the far left
could have started cooperative efforts to launch independent electoral
interventions . . . or done it through the Greens or some other such
vehicle.  Given that this did not happen--and doesn't look very likely to
happen now--we are left to buckle up and ride out this period.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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[Marxism] Roger Stone on Lyndon LaRouche

2019-02-14 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBsybNtzL58
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders started a revolution in 2016. In 2020, he can finish it | Bhaskar Sunkara | Opinion | The Guardian

2019-02-19 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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And, of course, I guess the non-officeholders and non-celebity mudsills
plugging away for decaddes did nothing.  That attitude really reveals
something fundamentally laughable about this approach to class.

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 10:50 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/19/bernie-sanders-2020-election-democrats
>
> "But Bernie did run in 2016 – and not just for a single campaign, but
> something far greater. Sanders reintroduced working-class politics in
> the US."
>
> What fucking idiocy. Working-class politics means the self-organization
> of workers, like the strike committees of the 1930s in places like
> Flint, Michigan. When a genuine revolution begins to take shape in the
> USA, you can bet that the Democrats will call out the cops and the
> military to suppress it.
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Re: [Marxism] Revolutionary strategy and the electoral road | John Riddell

2019-04-14 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Realizing that this is a regrettably short note, I am compelled to ask what
sort of strategic balance sheet have any of the groups engaged in electoral
politics ever written?

Or even a serious non-cheerleading analysis of their work after the end of
a particular campaign?

I suspect we know the answer.
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[Marxism] Interview on the Great Cowboy Strike (Thanks to Chad)

2019-06-04 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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https://www.lawcha.org/2019/06/01/the-great-cowboy-strike-an-interview-with-mark-lause/?fbclid=IwAR1ypG2kSSht3s6ZjSDdNKwiT7lgxgZ00jdW2bXV7zZ0iu8uFstoWh2RmEk
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Re: [Marxism] Socialist Alternative just sent me this

2019-05-19 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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The excuse that the Democrats can''t reciprocate by endorsing Sawant
because their bylaws forbid endorsing candidates of the rival "Socialist
Alternative Party" is so sleazy and dishonest that I wonder if some old
SWPers reincarnated as Democrats came up with it.
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[Marxism] Socialist Alternative just sent me this

2019-05-19 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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It looks pretty self-explanatory.  The folks who scorned the idea of
supporting the Greens because they weren't "socialists" now seem to be
sharing their contributors list with the Democrats.

https://southseattleemerald.com/2019/05/17/opinion-the-socialist-alternative-and-the-37th-district-democrats-at-endorsement-meeting-monday/?fbclid=IwAR0ESgfwr1CVJguTkxX8mGlSOT-wcmUuRWQboLtzVPcaaB5XT6El6Ve6nP8
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Re: [Marxism] Academics should write for the public for political, personal and practical reasons (opinion)

2019-05-17 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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A big part of the problem has always been a lack of outlets that have a
readership . . . .

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 4:53 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> I also write for the public because I see my work as part of a long
> tradition of black activist scholarship that was never fooled by the
> idea that intellectual, practical and political work should be kept
> separate. As an educator with expertise on racial inequality, I see my
> responsibility extending beyond the classroom, even if I don’t yet have
> tenure. W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the prototypical public sociologist,
> neatly encapsulated this view of the necessity of public engagement when
> he said, “One could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while
> Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.” The racial problems Du Bois
> identified are still with us, and we can help eradicate them by engaging
> in the type of committed public writing that Du Bois modeled.
>
>
> https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/05/17/academics-should-write-public-political-personal-and-practical-reasons-opinion
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Re: [Marxism] Andrew Johnson and the correct reasons to impeach

2019-05-10 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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It's worth noting that adherents of the First International and
sympathizers became actively engaged in the impeachment effort, Colonel
Richard J. Hinton playing a particularly prominent role in organizing
people to lobby fence-sitters.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] Trump and the reluctance to reckon with something fundamentally new

2019-05-08 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Perhaps my point about the Congress wasn't clear enough.   If it were
possible to have a single renegade officeholder, the situation of the
Congress makes explicitly clear that that's not the situation we face.  If
Trump represented some kind of renegade from the broad agenda of the
American ruling class agenda, the financial base of his drones would
shrivel like an old prune.  Not only hasn't this happen, but it remains as
likely as not that they're going to be able to carry the next election.
(This is particularly so given the DNC-Pelosi strategic hope to avoid
anything that would "alienate the Trump voters."

And if Trump is getting played by the capitalist oligarchs of Russia on a
range of issues, it doesn't necessarily place him beyond the broad
parameters of what the American ruling class sees as its mainstream.  And
when he has gone too far on some things--like not imposing the sanctions
the Congress voted on Russia--the rest of the government has pulled him
into line.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] A progress report on "Utopia in the Catskills"

2019-04-30 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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For those unfamiliar with Cole's "Course of Empire," see his series at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)
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Re: [Marxism] Happy anniversary

2019-05-01 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Hear!  Hear!

On Wed, May 1, 2019, 11:25 AM Patrick Bond via Marxism <
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>
> Yes, and more than merely keeping the list going, I don't know anyone
> whose suggestions for linked readings - and spicy commentaries - have
> been so valuable as Lou's.
>
> Keep 'em coming!
>
> Patrick
>
> On 2019/05/01 5:04 PM, Michael Yates via Marxism wrote:
> > Let's raise a glass to Louis on this May Day. Through thick and thin, he
> has kept this list going. Congratulations and Happy Birthday! And
> solidarity to all!
> >
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Re: [Marxism] Trump and the reluctance to reckon with something fundamentally new

2019-05-08 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Just a couple of admittedly superficial observations on this.

Capitalism has changed radically over the course of American history--and
since the days the first Marxist observers talked about divisions in the
ruling class.  Most clearly, it has become increasingly more integrated
internally.  However, divisions are relative.

We can't see much daylight between the White House and the Republican
officeholders in general.  That's a reflection of, among other things,
donor dollars and their expectation.  And we see this ratified by the
corporate media and the "mainstream" of Democratic officeholders who are
themselves timid to the point of complicity.

Are there institutional changes taking place?  Yes, but there always has
been.  On the generational watch of the Boomers, the presidency has
continued to accrue vast new powers.  This was done mostly, but not
exclusively, by Republicans--Nixon, Reagan, Bushdaddy, Dubya, and Trump.
And Democrats accepted it at every step, every seizure of new power.  And
the liberals accepted it and sanctioned it.  And most of the
self-identified Left found excuses for the liberals.  And those that didn't
were preoccupied with sectarian wranglings to no substantive purpose.

So, the process forms something of a continuum, in which there are
certainly leaps.   But we're a far cry from analogies to the disruptions
(and opportunities) of the Civil War and the Reconstruction.

But, as old Karl suggested, the point is not to solve the world but to
change it.  People have probably never had less faith in the institutions
of capitalist rule.  Yet, where are the ongoing mass mobilizations?  And
what are radicals doing to encourage them?

These seem to be more productive avenues to explore.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Trump's route to yet another victory | Richard Seymour on Patreon

2019-07-05 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I'll ask that resistance always defers to the Democrats. And the Democrats
generally defer to the most conservative among them.

If they foist Biden on the base and lose, they will wind up blaming Bernie,
Ralph Nader Jill Stein or anybody on the "Left."

On Fri, Jul 5, 2019, 9:40 AM Michael Meeropol via Marxism <
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>
> sad but true ---
>
> One caveat -- I think "the resistance" is broader and stronger than the
> writer allows  that's DESPITE the Democrats, not because of them ...
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Re: [Marxism] The Struggle Continues: From the ISO to Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists | Left Voice

2019-07-12 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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When I was urging socialists to support the Greens a few elections back, I
was told that they wouldn't back anyone but a socialist.  So, they backed
Bernie Sanders.

There just aren't enough feet on the ground to provide the grounding for
them to tell left from right.
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Re: [Marxism] Democratic Party debate

2019-07-01 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I thought there were several surprises in the debate.  My initial response
was that of the professional pundits, though for different reasons: the
women did superbly on many levels.  Despite polls showing virtually all of
the leading Democratic contenders defeating Trump, the DNC and the media
has presented Biden as the only candidate that can beat Trump.

The decision to isolate Warren from the other leading contenders by putting
her in the first group was a transparent attempt to insulate Biden.  In
terms of rhetoric, Warren is fundamentally indistinguishable from Sanders.
People do need to remember that she described herself as a Republican as
late as 1996, explaining this by citing the party's friendlier embrace of
"the markets."  So every time I hear her, I have to wonder how serious she
is after the years of Reagan-Gingrich "supply side" "trickle-down" voodoo.

Sanders' use of "socialism" weighs nothing--and probably a bit against
him.  Wanting to spend time debating the meaning of a word in the present
circumstances indicates a real failure to understand those circumstances.
Worse, I think his making an issue of the term is a purely electoral stroke
on his part to recover the kind of support it garnered him four years ago.
Still worse, his version of "socialism" is--as Howie Hawkins just reminded
us all--a rewarmed liberalism.

But back to the debate . . . despite that stacking of the deck in favor of
Biden hardly kept the other participants did a very decent job of mopping
the floor with him, albeit it in short sweeps.  Harris' exposure of his
Thurmond-esque appreciation of states' rights on busing was brilliantly
done, for which the media and commentators have made an issue of her lack
of clarify over health care.

I was particularly impressed with Bennet's quick cut to the core commentary
on Biden's BS about bipartisan "compromise" with McConnell--a compromise
that amounted to the kind of surrender we're used to seeing by the "New
Democrats."

In the end, it seems clear that the DNC, MSNBC, etc. are hell-bound to
foist Biden on the party's base . . . because they don't really have any
other viable alternative to the candidates who are trying to channel an
angry and thoughtful electorate.  At least, they don't really have one
yet.  And, as a candidate, Biden is as flawed in his way as Trump or was
Clinton.

This means that all the Sturm und Drang by the more "progressive"
candidates will boil down to supporting Biden (or, if necessary, a stand-in
for Biden) as a "lesser evil."

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Krugman on two parties

2019-04-23 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Both parties defend "American value," as defined by centuries of practice.
:-)



On Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 10:38 AM Richard Fidler via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote:

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> But it's all about the Republicans -- and thus an apparent argument in
> favour of the Democrats as the party that will still defend "American
> values."
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Marxism [mailto:marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu] On Behalf Of
> Anthony Boynton via Marxism
> Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 10:29 AM
> To: rfid...@ncf.ca
> Subject: [Marxism] Krugman on two parties
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> Despite the bullshit, Krugman’s analysis of the two parties is
> substantially correct.
>
>
>
> The Great Republican Abdication: A party that no longer believes in
> American values.
>
> New York Times by Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist April 22, 2019
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] President Bernie Sanders?

2019-04-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I don't equate acknowledging the history and experience of Democratic
politics with seeing it as "too late" for us to do anything in politics.

In many respects, Trump has represented a progression of--rather than a
serious break from--the recent trends in American politics, particularly in
Republican circles.  Aside from his personality problems (coupled with
signs of dementia), Trump won the Republican nomination not over the
resistance of its dominant currents but by extending them.  In particular,
I mean the "free-market," anti-regulatory dogmas of Reaganomics and the
militant corporate Christian Right.  Indeed, the most committed to one or
another of these fundamental tenets of Republicanism, the most they tend to
defend Trump.

If we want to learn from experience, we have to acknowledge that the
Democrats have not, in our lifetimes, ever nominated for president the most
progressive of their options.  Not once.

And, in the end, we all know that Sanders will--as he is already pledged to
do--endorse Biden or whichever of the Clinton lite alternatives the party
thinks it can run without alienating the 1%.  Trump is so awful that they
may well elect such a candidate in 2020, but we shouldn't delude ourselves
that any such option is going to make any serious change.  And that
candidacy will also give Trump his best chance of winning another term.

 And, if that happens, I have no doubt that the Democratic
establishment and its media voices will blame it on forces to their left.
Maybe the legions of Sanders supporters who didn't vote or voted for Trump,
or perhaps the black voters or white women or workers or others who failed
the Democratic party again by not showing up in enough numbers.  And
certainly the Greens.  Maybe even Ralph Nader's residual influence.

The Left will go nowhere if it can't deal with the material realities we
face.

On another note, some time back I asked for a single instance where the
American movement ever did a serious balance sheet on its experience in its
national electoral work.  I got one response from a comrade with a document
from outside the U.S.

This tells us something about our capacity to critically evaluate socialist
electoral projects, of which the episodic hallucinations about FDR are a
tragic aspect.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] President Bernie Sanders?

2019-04-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Through the entire history of the party, its leadership has actively
nobbled the efforts to make nominations they don't want and, failing that,
a willingness to step back and let a candidate they didn't want go down to
defeat.  Indeed, they've done this with candidates that they've wanted but
weren't especially enthusiastic about--like Gore, who won the 2000 election
and was as much a victim of legal malpractice by the Democratic campaign as
anything else.

I think they'll stop at nothing to destroy the Sanders campaign.  And the
news coverage theyve been giving him reinforces this sense

But we'll see.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] President Bernie Sanders?

2019-04-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Well, McGovern's oppositon to the war was highly touted, but Gene McCarthy
got there sooner and was also in the running in '72.  So was Ramsey Clark.
And I think Shirley Chisholm was a more progressive option than any of
them.
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Re: [Marxism] President Bernie Sanders?

2019-04-23 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I think it's more likely, the Democrats would nominate the corpse of Lyndon
LaRouche, because it would be less likely to say something objectionable.
Should Sanders start winning primaries, the DNC will simply start changing
the rules governing the selection of delegates--the old trick from 1968.
And, if hell should freeze over and Sanders were to win the nomination, the
DNC would surely hold a celebratory parade for him through Dallas . . .
right past the school book depository.

Of course, should the Democratic Party actually nominate even a nominal
socialist, it might well require a reassessment of our understanding of the
political order.

I don't see any reason to expect that will happen.
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Re: [Marxism] The Downside of Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide: “I was looking to the Epstein case with a lot of hope. Hope for a fair outcome, hope the victims would finally get justice.” | Washington Babyl

2019-08-12 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 I don't think there was ever any chance the authorities were going to
bargain with Epstein to get him to say anything.  His talking without other
evidence would mean nothing but hot air, and, if they have other evidence,
it would be much more credible than anything he would say.  Still, whether
he killed himself, whether the authorities set up a circumstances where he
could kill himself, whether he was killed by other inmates, etc.  may come
out in the wash.  Or not.

The death is of less interest than other matters. I'm amused at the mystery
around the source of his wealth.  The media seems to say it's probably not
as much as he claimed, while family members say it's probably more.  Given
what he had to work with, the most obvious source was that he had and was
willing to keep secrets.  From this perspective, the mystery of his money,
his bizarre legal breaks, etc. make a certain amount of sense.

All this may seem like merely salacious scandal-mongering, but if we
dismiss it as such, we are missing some serious issues.

This has to do with public faith in the institutions of justice and power.
And it should not be permitted to be swept under the rug.  Those of us old
enough to remember the education job market in the mid-1970s might wonder
at Epstein's 1974 employment as a 21-year old college dropout in the
prestigious Dalton School under headmaster Donald Barr, the father of the
present Attorney-General Bill Barr.  Barr had declined to recuse himself
from overseeing the Epstein case.  No conflict of interest here . . . ..
https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/william-barrs-personal-ties-jeffrey-epstein/
At some point, Barr's systemic arrogation of power is likely to create a
serious crisis within the government itself.  I think the real mystery is
not what happened in Epstein's cell but what must be going on right now
inside the Justice Department and other law enforcement bodies.

And this is just to note one problem from the very start of Epstein's
career.

So many questions, so many particulars.

Without leaping from those questions to answers, I would suggest that we
not take the advice to "move along, nothing to see here."  We should keep
our eyes open.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] The rise of the Republic of Texas

2019-08-13 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Stephen Pearl Andrews, later a member of the International, was living in
Texas at the time and involved in these negotiations with the Britsh in
hopes of flanking the slaveholding U.S.

He wound up being driven out in the middle of the night.

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 2:12 PM Dennis Brasky via Marxism <
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> The Texas republic was in financial distress, and the always meddlesome
> British were hovering over it with an aim of establishing an alliance of
> mutual convenience with the strug­gling republic. In exchange for financial
> help and military protec­tion, Britain would be positioned to undermine the
> United States's supremacy over the Gulf of Mexico and to menace its
> dominion over New Orleans, gateway to the strategically crucial Mississippi
> River. Besides, if Britain could dominate this southwestern territory, it
> would have the United States neatly hemmed in between that region and its
> Canadian possessions to the north. Britain's premier New World aim was to
> thwart the American dream of a burgeoning power stretching from sea to sea.
>
> https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3909
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Re: [Marxism] Millennial Socialism and Its Limits - Los Angeles Review of Books

2019-07-31 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Yes, the "liberal" MSNBC permitted no progressive voice in showcasing
misrepresentations and scare tactics about the mildest health care
proposals ... in between the insurance company ads.
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Re: [Marxism] At least 9 dead, 26 injured in mass shooting in downtown Dayton, Ohio - ABC News

2019-08-04 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 When the Miscreant-in-Chief was in Cincinnati last Thursday, a 29-year-old
suburban Kentucky thug assaulted a 61-year old demonstrator.  Everywhere he
goes, he encourages such things.

Government balks at identifying white nationalism, and the media provides
its own mealy-mouthed solutions--focused on the dangers of discussions on
social media.

While this is certainly not classical fascism, new technologies--not
electronic communications but military hardware--places what would have
been the power of an organized extralegal armed band in the hands of a
single person or several people.
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Re: [Marxism] Quentin Tarantino, Eileen Jones, and the perils of film school theorizing | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2019-08-22 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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If higher ed is going to be the yardstick for what is and isn't Marxism, is
it out of order to suggest seppuku.
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Re: [Marxism] 44 percent of workers in Brandenburg voted AfD yesterday

2019-09-02 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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This doesn't tell us anything about how they're defining the category?  Or
what was going on in other places?

I rethink things continually, but haven't had much reason to reconsider my
sense that these terms have little practical meaning the way most people
use them.


On Mon, Sep 2, 2019, 11:39 AM Angelus Novus via Marxism <
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>
>
> Interesting breakdown by social class:
> https://twitter.com/formelfriedrich/status/1168402855880994816
> In confronting the rise of authoritarian far-right populism, Marxists
> should really re-think the old Trotskyist shibboleths about fascism being a
> primarily petit-bourgeois or "Bonapartist" phenomenon.  It's pretty clear
> that the new far-right has a substantial proletarian base.
>
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Re: [Marxism] Eddie Glaude on racism in US

2019-08-07 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Eddie Glaube is one of the only reasons to check who's going to be on
MSNBC.

On Wed, Aug 7, 2019, 1:56 AM Ken Hiebert via Marxism <
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>
> Also scroll down to James Baldwin and Jane Elliott.
> ken h
>
> https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1158569576168402945 <
> https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1158569576168402945>
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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Louis Proyect Shreds Bhaskar Sunkara’s “Manifesto” | Washington Babylon

2019-08-07 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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My dear fellow,

How many elections have we had where this threat of fascism wasn't deployed
to encourage us to vote for an anti-labor, bought-and-sold corporate center
to center-right Democrat?  I can't think of a single one I didn't hear it.
:-)

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] What The Left Must Fight Against | Current Affairs

2019-08-05 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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This grissly misrepresents Populism, out of which the Socialist party
emerged.

On Mon, Aug 5, 2019, 9:41 AM Michael Meeropol via Marxism <
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>
> Thank you Louis -- I was totally convinced by the article -- I had no idea
> Carlson was such a DANGEROUS mix of accurate economic analysis and
> dangerous racism .
>
> In the 1890s, the Populist Party for a brief moment made an effort to
> create a black and white alliance -- but after the 1896 elections, decided
> that the top dogs in the South had been able to "corral" the black vote ---
> so the Populists opted for disenfranchisement in the hope that they (the
> Populists) would command the white majority based on self-interest --
>
> But in fact from that point on, the only way to get elected in the South
> was to sound the alarm about black folks (using different language of
> course).
>
>
> The last gasp of the black-white alliance (which  included Populists) was
> the terorist insurrection that drove out the elected government of
> Wilminston, North Carolina in 1899 --- The novel THE MARROW OF TRADITION by
> Chesnut (sp?) is a pretty good fictionalization of some of what was going
> on there ... but I bet there are some good historical treatments as well.
>
>
> 
> > 
> > 
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Re: [Marxism] What The Left Must Fight Against | Current Affairs

2019-08-05 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 There's a number of good essays over the last few years available online.
To frame the issue, see
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/14/trump-populism-history-216320

.The standard Marxist view of the Populists is Anna Rochester's little
book, available online at
https://archive.org/details/ThePopulistMovementInTheUnitedStates

The introduction to the short version of Lawrence Goodwyn's groundbreaking
_Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America_
https://ratical.org/corporations/PMSHAGAintro.html
Goodwyn's work spawned a series of solid reviews of the subject.

My two cents . . . in a nutshell . . . .

If you're talking about Populism after 1896, you're basically talking about
the Democratic party under the rubric of populism.   The People's party,
coaxed by the silver lobby, aligned itself behind the Democratic ticket
headed by William Jennings Bryan.  While dealing with a mass movement
always allows for cherry picking, but the erosion of the Populist potential
in terms of race--epitomized in the repeated call for the free and fair
ballot in the South--came to end with a distinctive Populism
generally--throttled by the Democratic Party.

Although a rump "middle-of-the-road" group around Tom Watson persisted into
the twentieth century, these mostly represented Southerners unwilling to
accept assimilation into the Democrats.  These took longer to break down
and assimilate into the Democratic Party and their drift towards an
acceptance of white supermacism reflected that drift into the arms of
Woodrow Wilson, etc.

The post WWII American intellectuals, being East Coast liberals, had
rationalized the secular jihad against Communism, and sanctified the
writing out of our past of socialism and radical labor also recast populism
as a movement of easily misled ignorant bumpkins from the middle of the
country and the South.  Too, these thoroughly Establishment authors of
McCarthyism also preferred to attribute McCarthyism to those same kind of
people. In another sense, of course, this anti-democratic, elitist
perspective also seemed to offer a microcosm of how they saw the Cold War
world.

It obviously also echoes in the dishonest and idiotic cant of the media and
punditry about the 2016 election, essentially a cross-town intramural New
York game between Trump and Clinton.  In the aftermath, the people who got
it all wrong as pundits and totally misjudged the state of the country
among the Democratic strategists decided that Trump won because of all the
out of touch parochial dummies in the center of the country.  This, despite
the statistics showing the average Trump voter to be marginally better off
than the Clinton voters, etc.  This despite the demographic studies
indicating that most of those alleged Trump voters sat on their hands.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

2019-07-21 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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The problem with any American examples is that Lewis and Clark or others of
the first whites recording their impressions of an area new to them were
actually looking at the result of several generations of collapsing human
populations.  This isn't to dismiss the anecdotal evidence, but to put it
into context.

On the other hand, even the earliest agriculture--and what came with
it--had a serious impact on the environment.  George Perkins Marsh compiled
a lot of information on the deforestation of the Levant for his _Man and
Nature_ (1864).  Recent work also indicates large populations and
agriculture in central Asia contributed to its desertification.

Not that we have any choice at this stage.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

2019-07-21 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I'm not referring to the violent onslaught against the native peoples but
"the Great Dying."  The arrival of European (and African) diseases cut
through native populations years ahead of the advancing line of white
settlement.

Entire sections of the Ohio valley that had supported an extensive
population before imploded to a fraction of what they had been.  Whites
generally encountered no resident native populations in much of West
Virginia and Kentucky, though there's plenty of archaeological evidence
that there had been earlier. This population collapse was even more
dramatic in the Deep South.  The expedition of Hernando de Soto (ca.
1540-41) recorded the presence of dozens of stable, well-populated towns.
Only a few were recorded when La Salle came through the region (around
1680) came through the same area.

My point was that the game and the fish populations bounced back and then
some.  Buffalo turned up in parts of the country east of the Mississippi
where it apparently hadn't been for many generations, if ever.  The first
whites in this part of the river talked about fish so thick in the river
that you couldn't paddle a canoe without hitting them.

For a concise overview of this, see Roger Kennedy's _Hidden Cities_,
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results=Kennedy=%22hidden+cities%22==

But new material on this has been coming out for years, the latest I
encountered being
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Tim Wohlforth

2019-09-28 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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The DSA is hardly any kind of social democracy.  It's a lot less than that
. . . and more.   Something like the SDS with a socialist label.

I was just trying to stir interest in a meeting for Howie Hawkins in
Cincinnati.  The DSA and the tiny self-defined cadre organizations also
involved in it seem uninterested in anything but Bernie Sanders.
Supporting a socialist running as a Green would, of course, be supporting a
bourgeois party!  Then, too, the Green party here consists of nothing but
self-appointed leaders who don't want any members--sort of like the Three
Stooges without the choreography..

So, we're left with what the radicals of our generation built . . . which,
thus far, has basically come down to a kind of déjà vu .


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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Clarence Thomas’s “Black nationalism”: a reply to Corey Robin | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2019-09-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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When Clarence Thomas moved into an office under Missouri's then-Attorney
General John Danforth, he decorated it with a Confederate flag.  That
should say everything essential there is to say about his black
nationalism.  :-)  Ken Blackwell here in Ohio offers another cut from this
mold.  However, you can probably turn on the idiot box and see a parade of
black figures working as reactionary pundits.

In the end, this is a matter of the market demand, isn't it?
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Early-America: CFP: Revolutions: Moments and Movements in Historical Perspective

2019-11-14 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Notifications 
Date: Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 4:31 PM
Subject: H-Early-America: CFP: Revolutions: Moments and Movements in
Historical Perspective
To: markala...@gmail.com 


Greetings Mark Lause,
A new item has been posted in H-Early-America.
CFP: Revolutions: Moments and Movements in Historical Perspective

by Sean Harvey

*Revolutions: *

*Moments and Movements in Historical Perspective*

What is a Revolution?  Historians have used the term broadly to
describe movements resulting in the toppling of regimes and establishment
of new social and political orders, yet much remains unclear.  Are
revolutions an intrinsically modern phenomenon, or can the concept be
productively applied to events in the ancient and medieval worlds?  Can
revolutions be clearly bounded in time? How do they begin and end? Is there
a common trajectory?  When and why do revolutions arise in interrelated
clusters?  However we choose to answer such questions, the 30th anniversary
of the fall of the Berlin Wall and recent events, from the Arab Spring to
the riots in Hong Kong, remind us that revolutions, whether a cause of hope
or trepidation, have lost none of their force and relevance.

The Department of History of Seton Hall University invites paper proposals
for the symposium “Revolutions: Moments and Movements in Historical
Perspective.” The symposium will consider revolutions broadly in their
social, cultural, and intellectual origins and ramifications, examining the
interactions of ideologies, structures, pivotal moments, and social and
political movements. The committee particularly encourages proposals that
address the following topics:



   - Revolutionary ideas and ideologies
   - Social and political conditions as preconditions for revolt
   - Participation in, and opposition to, revolution by diverse groups
   within and excluded from the polity
   - Cultural productions (including writing, art, material culture, and
   technology) that mobilized people or justified change
   - Foreign influence in promoting or suppressing revolution
   - Internal violence and external war in creating or changing
   revolutionary conditions
   - Establishing revolutionary regimes through legal and political
   institutions
   - Popular rituals enacting protest, intimidation, belonging, or
   allegiance
   - Connections among disparate revolutionary movements



The symposium will be held on Thursday and Friday, February 6-7. A keynote
address by Ervand Abrahamian, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Iranian
and Middle Eastern History and Politics at Baruch College, City University
of New York, will open the symposium on Thursday evening, February 6. The
symposium’s panels and a roundtable discussion will be held on Friday,
February 7. The symposium will be held at the South Orange, New Jersey,
campus of Seton Hall University, about half an hour outside New York City.



The committee welcomes proposals from historians in all fields, including
advanced graduate students. Please send proposals, in the form of a single
document containing (1) a title and an abstract of 250 words and (2) a
short CV, to setonhallhistorysympos...@gmail.com by Friday, November 15,
2019.



Seton Hall will provide two-nights of accommodations for all invited
participants coming from outside the New York City/Northern New Jersey
area, as well as meals for all invited panelists. Travel funding may also
be available on a case-by-case basis.



Please feel free to contact Sean Harvey at sean.har...@shu.edu with any
questions. For more information about History at Seton Hall, please visit
our website, https://www.shu.edu/history/.

   - Read more or reply
   

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[Marxism] Breaking news: U.S. officials have been lying about Afghanistan

2019-12-09 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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To quote Capt. Renault: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is
going on in here!"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/
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[Marxism] Historians . . . .

2019-12-17 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Historians' online petition on impeachment . . . . .

https://medium.com/@historiansonimpeachment/historians-statement-on-the-impeachment-of-president-trump-6e4ed2277b16
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Re: [Marxism] Why I Don't Have a Mobile Phone - CounterPunch.org

2019-12-06 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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As an aside, technology obviously isnt the same thing as technology.

My wife and I have mobile phones.  I frankly detest them.  However, in our
part of the city, Ma Bell effectively doesn't support having a land line.
After wasting hours several weeks in a row with repeated incidents of lines
just going dead, we had to give up and go for the alternate.

This is a general problem on our street, and I suspect this isnt the only
city letting the phone company do this in minority neighborhoods..

M
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Re: [Marxism] Why I Don't Have a Mobile Phone - CounterPunch.org

2019-12-06 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Correction, SCIENCE  isnt the same as technology.

(I'm doing this on a gd mobile phone.)

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, 10:01 AM Mark Lause  wrote:

> As an aside, technology obviously isnt the same thing as technology.
>
> My wife and I have mobile phones.  I frankly detest them.  However, in our
> part of the city, Ma Bell effectively doesn't support having a land line.
> After wasting hours several weeks in a row with repeated incidents of lines
> just going dead, we had to give up and go for the alternate.
>
> This is a general problem on our street, and I suspect this isnt the only
> city letting the phone company do this in minority neighborhoods..
>
> M
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Mark Esperanto? Trump Misnames His Defense Secretary in Tweet

2019-10-20 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I saw this but just assumed that he had picked someone as his new Secretary
of Defense who could circumvent the language barriers.
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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Re: Brief Reflection on Trump?s Impeachment By Roberto Savio

2019-10-18 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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"Mainstream" American politics is always about what defines that
"mainstream."  The pundits and professional politicians tend to treat this
as a contest over the same set of voters.  It isn't.

To take a particularly dramatic example of this, the difference between the
Democratic landslide of 1964  and what the media dishonestly called an
"electoral landslide" for the Republicans in 1980 came down to who voted.
Studies that broke down the statistics indicated that the demographics
broke the same way in both elections, but that those groups favorable to
the Democrats didn't vote in 1980 in the numbers they had in 1964, while
groups inclined to the Republicans turned out in much larger proportions.
Some of the sharper (and more progressive Democrats) understand that the
road to victory leads through mobilizing those voters who are
understandably disengaged from this inbred quasi-masonic 18th century game.

For us, of course, the question is to have to bring the necessary social
and political weight to bear where it counts . . .. in the streets and in
the workplaces . . . and in the numbers to make it matter.

Just imagine what could have been happening over the last year if we had
the political savvy, independent sense, and organization to have brought
several hundred thousand demonstrators to Washington during the great tax
"reform"--or during those Kavenaugh hearings.  Or if we could have brought
to the capital a fraction of the legions of citizens disgusted with the
administration and the Democratic sluggishness in calling it to account.
The major features of Trump's agenda could have been checked--or, if they
had been, would have been generating mass, political disaffection and
radicalization.

And we'd have would have contributed sorely needed examples of how
sustained independent mass action can turn politics on its head--the most
important practical lessons that could have been passed on to young
radicals.

Isn't it a pity it didn't happen?

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] DSA rank-and-file strategy

2019-10-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I think what the DSA is up to isn't that different than what other groups
who've done this were up to . . . .

If you have a group with working people as members, you don't have to turn
them into anything . . . . :-)  And there's no reason, at this point, to
invent strategic rationalizations for directing them into specific
colonization efforts.   There's no basis for positing a coherent strategy
and invoking the need for an optimized coordination.  It wasn't possible
for earlier groups to have these things, and people today looking back at
that experience is going to clarify how things are just not possible.

The central challenge has always been to build an organization habitable
over the long run for working people with demanding jobs, families, etc.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Democratic Party debate

2019-10-16 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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These "debates" have become less substantive and more of a spectacle every
time they do them.  Their corporate sponsorship and the requirement of a
certain level of campaign moo-lah in order to buy your part of the platform
makes the fundamental nature of electoral politics absolutely
transparent--as much as the motives of the Democratic National Committee
and the various organs of the media in sponsoring and structuring them. All
the commentary building up to them aims at encouraging confrontational
rhetoric and minimizing conflict over substantive questions.  The whole
thing is modeled on a game show and it's no secret that that's what framed
the election of the present Con-artist-in-Chief.

And they've gotten worse every four years.  Next time, I'm expecting mud
wrestling.  Eight years, maybe the swimsuit competition with Trump lurking
in the dressing rooms.

I don't know how anyone with an ounce of respect for themselves and what
they say they're running to promote can go anywhere near them.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] Democratic Party debate

2019-10-17 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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It's also just blatantly transparent that CNN and MSNBC (for which much of
the advertising comes from insurance companies, etc.) is doing their
damnedest to disparage Warren as well as Sanders.  They want Biden and are
continually trying to force feed him to the electorate, though they're
toying with the blatantly pro-corporate alternatives.  Neither the
so-called "liberal media" nor the Democratic hierarchy have learned much
from the Trump disaster they helped to co-author.

If there was any sort of serious Opposition party in the U.S., this
trumpster fire would have been extinguished as soon as it started.  But,
too, it would never have been ignited.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Robert E. Lee was a traitor, not a hero!

2019-11-19 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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For many years, I have explicitly used your parents as a point of
comparison with the treason of Jefferson Davis, etc.  I recommend it highly.

The conduct of the current president--Roy Cohn's parting gift to American
life--is certainly another.

But this is all capitalism creating the sort of people it always worked to
create.  Oligarchs are oligarchs, wherever they were born and whatever
government they us to rule.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself

2019-11-27 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Are those who saw the real Obama a dozen years ago and called him out still
closet Republicans and reactionary vermin?

Just wonderin'.  :-)
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Re: [Marxism] Trump defends abandoning Kurds by saying they didn't help US in WWII - Business Insider

2019-10-10 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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In hindsight, we should have started a catalogue of these idiocies when
Trump took office.

We should add to this the comment of Rep. Matt Gaetz that the Democrats
were running their inquiries like a "kangaroo court" presided over by a
"malicious Captain Kangaroo."  Next up, Rep. Jim Jordan will demonstrate
string theory by tying his shoes.

The ruling class has always had a barely disguised contempt for the
people.  Since the 1980s, the Republicans have turned that into a
successful political formula with a coalition that validates the
self-confident arrogance of the dumbest and the least informed, harnessed
to the most short-sighted and self-interested, including more-or-less
openly criminal enterprises.

And it's in the nature of the two-party partnership that the Democrats have
been enabler of this at every step.
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Re: [Marxism] A sad commentary on the Left

2020-02-13 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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For years now--and longer--there was nothing stopping radicals from
organizing independent mass actions.  Had we been exercising this function,
we'd not be left as essentially consumers and cheerleaders to electoral
politics.  It can surprise nobody that the Democrats did nothing to build
on the unprecedented mass marches that greeted Trump's inauguration, but
radicals have done very little but watch events from the sidelines.  When
Trump was foisting Kavenaugh onto us, for example, public sentiment was
such as would have supported demonstrations that could have flooded the
capital with supporters and choked the process . . . which would have cut
one of the main motives for the Republicans to sustain their criminal
president.  Over 50% of the public wanted Trump removed from the
presidency, and the Left did nothing more than the Democrats wanted done,
so we're still paying the price for that.

The pathetic history of radicals in the current election campaign simply
extends that role.
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders's "turnout" strategy not working

2020-02-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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David's right.  The media's sucking those stories about what Sanders
supporters did out of their thumbs.

The gut-level hatred of the Democratic establishment for Sanders is
downright rabid.  The batcrap crazy rant of Chris Matthews comparing
Sanders' victory in Nevada to Hitler's invasion of France was unusually
only in that Matthews is so clueless that he was saying out loud what the
Democratic allies in the media have been hinting at for months.  For a
while, they sought to coax reform-minded voters towards Warren, but when
she started showing strength, they began battering her as well.  Their only
objection to GOP Mayor Bloomberg is whether they can get him to pass his TV
audition.  The current holy war is about Sanders saying basically the same
thing that Obama said about Cuba.  We should remember that the Democratic
bosses would rather lose an election to the Republicans than to allow
themselves and their faction to be pushed from power.  They're already
making noise about Sanders being unsupportable, and I doubt they'll let it
get that far.

That said, we shouldn't be distracted by the bullshit coverage and the
reality TV.  What needs to concern us about voting and national election
campaigns is how we can use them to build something of substance that can
carry some political clout beyond the election.  What we need are not these
consumer satisfaction surveys but feet on the street, hands at work
building for the future.  Going Democratic essentially sets that
consideration aside, which is the essence of why it's unacceptable.

Remember the big movements Obama supporters said we were going build in the
wake of his election?  Never happened.  Then, there were the big marches
against Trump on his inauguration, and the Democrats got control of the
local organizing groups, got everybody off the streets, and insisted that
the party would handle the problems.

Can something be done through the Greens?  Perhaps, if Howie is nominated.
But don't expect the structure of the party to do it. Don't just cast your
consumer preference.  It will take hundreds of committed radicals to get
involved and build some sort of an organization or network of thousands.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Can Bernie Sanders Make the Democratic Party a Democratic Party? | The Indypendent

2020-02-26 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Positing a remaking of the Democratic Party is not the same as suggesting a
vote for this or that candidate, which might be worth discussing.

The former suggests something for which nobody . . . NOBODY . . . has ever
been able to identify a means and a strategy.  There exists no mechanism
for citizens to remake the party.  Those who talk about an "inside-outside
strategy" don't really have either, but they can't even pretend to be
"inside" of it.  The Democratic party has no members among the citizenry,
just voters . . . or, most accurately, consumers.  It has no membership
meetings, but merely mass consumer satisfaction surveys.

Turn on the TV and take a serious gander at the selection process in these
parodies of "debate."  (Bloomberg wasn't wrong when he referred to himself
and other Democratic contenders as "contestants.")  It is a mechanism for
frustrating anyone expecting a clear discussion of conflicting policies,
much less underlying ideas and values.  It is exactly what it looks like: a
process for corporate capitalism to select a spokesman deemed to be the
most likeable and credible.

The local TV station is auditioning for who we'd like to see on the air as
the next weatherman, but is that even a tiny step towards the kind of
democracy we need to build is one that gets us control over the factors
effecting the stability of the climate?  Can we move towards a more
environmentally friendly mode of transportation by choosing between which
fossil-fuel based machine you want to buy?

If I am mistaken in this thinking, I would ask anyone who wants to remake
the Democratic Party to identify the mechanism for doing this?  You have to
do that before we can begin to discuss a strategy.

Cheers,
Mark L.

PS: None of this is not to say that the Left has done well pursuing an
independent course, but that's a different set of questions.
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Re: [Marxism] Can Bernie Sanders Make the Democratic Party a Democratic Party? | The Indypendent

2020-02-26 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Abstractions, rhetoric, campaign promises, sales pitches, etc.--however
seriously intended or reasonable--are not strategies.  Strategies are how
we can concretely get from where we are to where we want to be.

Those who can't clearly identify a mechanism for change, can't offer a real
strategy for how to use that mechanism.
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Re: [Marxism] Vivek Chibber for Sanders

2020-02-29 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 "[The] American Parties have very little control over who can and cannot
run on their tickets. Anyone is free to enter a primary, and if they can
attract enough votes, it is very hard to stop them. And the Party
leadership’s helplessness is becoming palpable."

Anyone who would write such a thing is either ignoring the experience of
history entirely or deliberately choosing to falsify it.  Ultimately, the
party, though its leadership bodies, exercises the legal authority to
decide how it will structure representation in its convention and their
equivalents at the state level can structure representation in such a way
as to not directly reflect the weight of voter opinion.
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Re: [Marxism] Could Sanders win? | Red Flag

2020-03-04 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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It doesn't matter any more.  Sanders isn't going to get the chance to do
anything.  We might as well be discussing Jesse Jackson or what-ifs about
RFK . . .  or William Jennings Bryan.
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[Marxism] Sanders is no longer an issue

2020-03-04 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 The Democratic outcome is clear after last night.

The DNC won't have to pull much sleight-of-hand with superdelegates, etc.
The media beat the drum constantly for Biden after Sanders won Nevada.
With Bloomberg as a backstop, they threw everything into stopping Sanders
by reviving a viable Biden campaign.  Last night, Biden was reechoing the
promises of Sanders and Warren, despite the record of the Obama-Biden
administration on health care--and the free community college talk.  Using
older Southern black voters as a cudgel, they remade Biden's record
advocating mass incarceration, etc. into that of an old civil rights
advocate.

Enough of the electorate fell for it--or figured that most of their peers
would go for it anyway and that it was time to unite the party base . . .
Or the effort successfully demoralized enough of the voters to whom the
Sanders campaign appealed--the young and those who had topped voting or
never voted because of a very realistic skepticism of the corporate shell
game.  (Yes, in the end, disenfranchisement has always been a bipartisan
strategy, differing only in terms of who they sought to disenfranchise.)

The outcome can be no great surprise, given the nature of the two-party
system.  The way it functions predisposes the outside party not to oppose
the party with power so much as to try to mirror what it thinks made that
party successful.  So you get months of worthless self-congratulatory
kabuki about diversity to produce an old white salesman who'll be near 90
if he gets two terms in the White House.

Biden was and is the closest the Democratic party could come to mirroring
Trump.  He's even got the same predisposition to making strange public
gaffes that followers actually embrace as a kind of endearing grandfatherly
confusion, (a trait that is all the more entertaining of those followers
because it maddens those who are not his followers). Too, as with Trump,
the great groundswell is a media creation.

The issue is no longer what the Sanders campaign might do, could do, would
have done, hoped to do, etc.   All that's very abstract right now, because
the relations of power are such at this point that he will not be overtake
the orchestrated Biden momentum.

The question is actually not whether we should vote for Sanders but for
Biden..

Solidarity,
Mark L..
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders is no longer an issue

2020-03-04 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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We know it with all the certainty we can know anything that hasn't happened
yet.  (They're just this minute announcing Bloomberg's out of it, which
means that all of the anti-Sanders eggs are in the Biden basket.)

The media had wall-to-wall Biden promotion to stop Sanders since Nevada.
It worked and there's no reason to expect that it will not use it again if
the campaign threatens a Biden coronation.  Conversely, the more the
Sanders campaigns tries to fight back, the more it is going to be
represented as being divisive and ultimately helpful to Trump's reelection.

Indeed, if, as it seems, Trump will get a second term, I'm certain the
Democratic pundits--and the various Republican pundits standing in for them
on cable "news"--will blame Sanders for damaging the campaign, just as they
blamed him for the defeat in 2016.  (You want to be a Democratic stand-in
for Nader, you will get the heat for it.)

There remains, of course, a chance for Biden to self-destruct with some
thoughtlessly tossed off rambling bit of offensiveness, but remember that
we've already seen this with statements that should have outraged black
voters . . . and some dismissiveness towards women.  But remember how this
worked with Trump?  We seem to be in an age where old white guys doing
self-destructive things in the national spotlight aren't going to
self-destruct if they're not presented or perceived as such.

I don't know where old tigers go to best fight this, my friend.  :-)
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Re: [Marxism] The Speech Bernie Sanders Should Give But Won’t - CounterPunch.org

2020-03-04 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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A good plan.  It was superb six years ago and is worth recirculating an
update.
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Re: [Marxism] Could Sanders win? | Red Flag

2020-03-03 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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So, what "structural change" could Sanders enact in the WH without a
majority from a sympathetic party in the Congress (and enough political
moxie to handle the Supreme Court).  Right now, he can't even get fair
coverage from the gasbags on the idiot box.

The bottom line is you'd better be retooling all those old rationalizations
because a bit down the line, you're going to be arguing that we'll get
serious political change by voting for Biden or Bloomberg.
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[Marxism] The stock market

2020-02-27 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I'm just a poor country boy that doesn't understand these big city things
and just wants to nationalize the corn belt.  But I am watching the TV and
I just have to ask whether anyone's threatening to jump out the office
windows over on the stock exchange.
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Re: [Marxism] Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders

2020-02-28 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 The dominant cliques in the Democratic Party have periodically
demonstrated their willingness to let the party lose an election to the
Republicans rather than to lose their control of the party.  This is why
the Sanders strategy is ultimately suicidal.

That is, were Sanders to to win the nomination, they will happily step back
and McGovern him.

And, if he won the presidential election, they'd demonstrate their
prediction that he couldn't get anything through the Senate by joining the
Republicans to squelch anything they view as damaging to the "the party,"
ie. the big donors.

There are no short cuts.  Heaven knows, if there was one, I'd be the first
to buy a ticket.
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Re: [Marxism] Democrats wrap up their case in impeachment trial

2020-01-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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If we had been building up to this point over recent years, there could be
mass independent mobilizations that could have thwarted some of the most
objectionable initiatives of the administration and could be pushing
towards removal.
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Re: [Marxism] » An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy

2020-01-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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The essence of this is the usual liberal BS of blaming left.

If I believed what these people seem to believe--and I sure don't--I'd
focus my efforts on trying to persuade Democratic voters to go for Sanders
or some other "progressive" rather than  crapping on radicals.  I regularly
defend Sanders and Warren against media misrepresentations and the lies of
the DNC types who prevail there, but I don't put time, energy or money into
what I see as a hopeless bid to get the Democratic hierarchy to permit the
nomination of such candidates.  I see this as being as hopeless as trying
to get the Republicans to nominate a socialist in 2020.

I don't base this on abstract theories or "dogma" but on half a century of
watching Democratic politics and a study of how politics worked before I
was here and alert enough to follow it.

These people who are so free with their "advice" to--actually accusations
against--we pathetic mortals  with the audacity to try to learn from
experience and observation is equally of waste of time and effort.  If they
want to win this argument, they should focus their Jedi wisdom on proving us

Get the Democratic nomination for a socialist and then we'll talk.

Of course, I'm still waiting for them to levitate the Pentagon.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy

2020-01-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Just a couple points.

The assumption that inept, incompetent, dishonest, and pointless electoral
activism must necessarily be something other than working class is
mistaken.  Maybe we should even expect that working class electoral
politics has to be so if there's no mechanism for collectively evaluating
experience.  We have to work with what we've got.

More importantly, the discussion always seems to veer from the most
fundamental concern we have: to foster self-organized, independent
political action. Talk about parties, candidates, labels, and abstract
"positions matter only insofar as they advance (or retard) the development
of the only force that can address these issues.  That's keeping our eyes
on the prize not dogmatism, blueprints, etc.

That might mean something different for those who have a vehicle that can
seriously make a real bid for power and something else when we don't have a
vehicle in electoral politics to get anywhere near power.  But the idea
that we can address we address the weakness of that power by voting against
it doesn't make sense.

My objection isn't to voting for Sanders in a primary, though I wouldn't
put much time, energy or effort into what's surely a doomed attempt.  My
objection is that, in the end, most of the people making that argument
always wind up supporting Biden, Clinton, etc.

But here's an idea.  Everyone in any and all socialist groups agree to shut
down the treehouse in terms of electoral politics.  Get together and agree
on a few points as the basis of a class platform.  Pick candidates.
Doesn't matter what club they're in, so long as they agree to campaign on
those points.  Vote, pull the names out of a hat, do it in alphabetical
order, but put together a united labor ticket and stick to it until
November.

Cheers,
Mark L..
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Re: [Marxism] It’s Time for the Left to Build a Force Outside the Democratic Party | Left Voice

2020-02-05 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 We seem to be so far down the rabbit hole of money-centered
corporate-consumerist politics.   Raising money to open offices and hire
canvassers is no alternative to a system based on that circular process.
The alternative to running as Democrats is not running LIKE Democrats.

A challenge to the structure of electoral politics has to be reflected in
our practice, not just in abstract and aspirational terms.  What we need
are politics based on people.  We need something with membership that will
maintain some coherence between elections and generate recognizably good
advocates that can run for office and--most importantly--plenty of
volunteers to take the case to the wider society.  Some years back, when
the Green party won over 104,000 votes in this state, I put together a plan
to organize and field teams that could cover the state, establishing viable
little groups where the vote was in double digits and cultivating a
statewide network that would circulate speakers and engage in regular
public forums and events.

The old Socialists and other insurgents established membership bodies that
amounted to roughly a tenth of their voting strength.  Out of over 104,000
voters, we could have put together an organization of several thousand and,
with the right work, been able to get a significantly higher vote total in
the next election.   But the self-elected "leaders" feared something of
which they would not be guaranteed control.  And the bulk of them have
since slithered off to the Democrats.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, there is no reason why various groups
couldn't cobble together a united electoral front at the local, state,
regional or national that could do something like this.  Make it
people-focused and have confidence that good politics will always prevail
in a fair fight out in the open.
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Re: [Marxism] It’s Time for the Left to Build a Force Outside the Democratic Party | Left Voice

2020-02-06 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Yeah, what I proposed, repeatedly, as a course of action for the Greens in
Ohio might well be common sense, but it's certainly NOT what advocates of
independent political action do.   If it had been, we'd be in a much
different place than we are today.

The Greens in all but a few states have repeatedly chosen not to do it.
And the leadership in those few states that have tried to build something
(New York and California, for examples) have been fine with a national
party dominated by paper parties.  That's been the case for a quarter of a
century.

And those who don't like the Greens because they don't label themselves as
a class party have accomplished even less.  Every time you hear someone
say, "why should we put anything into the Greens when we could invest in
building a labor party," you know they're not going to actually do
anything.  Most of them I've heard this from for years are currently
cheering spectators in the Democratic stadium.

And the socialists?  Well, they could have kept their own organizations and
acted together electorally.  They could have done this in 2016  or 2004 or
1992.  But not a one of them has taken any initiative on this over the last
fifty years, what chance is there that they're going to respond any
differently over the next decade or so.

There will be no party without new politics based on actually mobilizing
people--an electoral strategy that reflects the kind of movements we want
to build.  It's not being done.  And the corporate "social justice warrior"
model applied to electoral action will accomplish no more permanent gains
in electoral action than in the wider society.

Solidarity!
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] The Party’s Over: Bernie’s Last Dance With the Dems - CounterPunch.org

2020-02-02 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Show of hands here . . . does anybody remember an election where we haven't
heard about the imminent threat of fascism?  :-)

Still, the alarm would be serious enough to have my attention if it wasn't
all aimed to get me to vote for Hindenburg . . . .
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Re: [Marxism] An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy

2020-01-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Yeah, it's absurd to describe something as not a working class formation
because it doesn't label itself as such.  Equally to think that something's
not a working class formation because that it's run by sellouts and/or
idiots.  I've long severed ties with the coalition of flakes and Democrats
in the local party.  The last person they supported as  a "Green" was also
running as a Democrat and I just got an email endorsing him from one of our
big name local machine politicians.

This doesn't mean that the Greens elsewhere might be genuinely independent,
though I think it's politically suicidal for them to retain ties with state
and local parties that don't really exist except on paper and function
primarily as a stopgap measure to bloc any viable independent alternative
from taking form.  But, since it's gone on since the last century, I don't
have high hopes for any corrective.

I won't bore anyone with historical examples.  Electoral politics grows
from an overall principle of fostering independent class self-organization
and self-reliance with its fulcrum resting not on campaign promises and
rhetoric but issues of power.  It's not related to electoral promises or to
pragmatic considerations about the rivalries between Democratic
slaveholders and Whig slaveholders.  (Oops, historical examples are
slipping in, apparently.)  And, btw, the emphasis on Trump as some sort of
meteor strike that came out of nowhere is just silly.

Look at the impeachment with open eyes and you see a crisis inseparable
from Democratic decisions to rely on executive rule by Obama rather than to
fight in the court of public opinion . . . to give Dubya a free pass over
WMDs and Bushdaddy repeated free passes for high crimes and misdemeanors of
all sorts.  And Regan.  And even Nixon, into whose work the Democrats
essentially dropped the investigations after his resignation.  The path to
Trump was paved by Democrats and much as Republicans.  That's the nature of
the system both serve.

Bernie Sanders will be irrelevant in a matter of months.  Despite all sorts
of developments, the party and the media is beating the drum for nominating
Joe "Lock 'em up" Biden or the nearest stand-in they might have to install
to replace him.  And when that happens, the people who offered the Greens
such brilliant "advise" will beat the drum for whoever the Democratic
hierarchy wants, denouncing those of us who aren't buying the kool-aid as
closet fascists.  Heard it all before.

Just to make a practical observation.  We don't have a lot of
alternatives.  Everybody in a socialist group that hasn't done anything to
create such an alternative--and going through the motions hasn't
sufficed--bears some responsibility for this.  You don't like the Greens,
but haven't done diddly to forge something better.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] The Party's Over: Bernie?s Last Dance With the Dems

2020-02-02 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Michael, I said we had been warned about fascism every four years, and you
responded only that you didn't warm us about fascism.  I take you on your
word and congratulate you for your relative level-headedness.

But I still heard it.

Still, in your relative level-headedness, three of the elections during
which you acknowledge to have raised this cry ended in a triumph for what
you called the fascists.  Reagan won in 1984, Bush in 2004, and Trump in
2016.  Right?

All deplorable and to be fought as hard and effectively as we can.  But not
fascism.  We saw more political repression at other points in our lives and
the racial demagoguery is especially discouraging, but let's not delude
ourselves about Trump's predecessors.

Which gets us back to the question of our effectiveness.  You assert that
this requires supporting whoever the Democrats use to keep Sanders or
Warren from the nomination, but you can't really seperate Reagan's
successes from Democratic subservience to his nonsensical trickle down
creed, or even as he utterly ignored the law in Iran -Contra.

And Dubya's dangerous war-mongering was so dangerous first and foremost
because he faced virtually no opposition from the other party.  Democrats
happily circulated through the news shows, pimping his WMD lies, spreading
the paranoia about germ warfare, funding his invasions, and building whole
new dimensions of the surveillance state in his service.

And before he ran for president as a Republican, Trump spent more time as a
Democrat than as a Republican.

Yes, Trump is different and the most detestable president in our lifetime.
But we got him, in large part, by not building a real opposition.  Easier
to pass the buck to the Democrats, even though we know what they have done
... and have no basis for thinking they will do otherwise.

It is precisely because the stakes are so high that we have to start trying
something different. Finding something that will work.
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Re: [Marxism] Marx, Lincoln and Project 1619 | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2020-02-14 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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There's plenty worth discussing here.

American radicals naturally had a better handle on most of these things
than Marx and Engels.  Those interested in their thinking could consult
_Long Road to Harpers Ferry_, written without the sanction and support of a
Genius Grant from the MacArthur Fellowship or any other corporate
sponsors--or getting regular public service blurbs on cable TV, in between
the insurance ads and the 24/7 arguments to persuade us that
African-Americans are pragmatically shifting their support from Joe Biden
to Mike Bloomberg.

Someone was asking earlier for a radical response to _Winners Take All: The
Elite Charade of Changing the World_ by Anand Giridharadas.  Although there
are obvious problems with the book, I would urge that it be read.  It makes
some very important points that serious radicals need to consider,
particularly the way corporate venues have rather successfully undercut
independent movement-oriented radicalism over the last twenty or thirty
years..

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Marx, Lincoln and Project 1619 | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2020-02-15 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 Douglass actually acknowledged the nomination, thanked them for it, and
declared his support for the Republican ticket.

The backstory on this had to do with the efforts of the Woodhull wing of
the women's movement to keep "universal suffrage" on the agenda" after the
adoption of the `5th Amendment in 1870.  In a very real sense, the
persistent advocacy of woman suffrage represented the left wing of what had
been a rather broad civil rights movements in the wake of the war.  This
was not an unreasonable place for the IWA to want to position itself.
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Re: [Marxism] What Do You Do When Neo-Nazis Crash Your Anti-War Rally?

2020-01-09 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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This is a depressing measure of how much a movement is going to have to
re-invent the wheel.

Relying on small self-selected groups to deal with this is an invitation to
all sorts of trouble.  As a general rule, organizers need to marshal their
demonstrations.  When there's a disruption to distract from the focus of
the march, the disrupters are invited to remove themselves and, failing
that, they are removed by any means that will best minimize the distraction
they intend to cause.  We had this problem locally back when Occupy
exploded on the scene and nobody knew how to deal it when small clusters of
tea party types came in and began chanting batshit crazy slogans.

Of course, the essentially Democratic engineers of the enterprise (and the
architects of its destruction) did just the opposite of what they needed to
do.

Cheers!
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Times publishes op-ed from white nationalist Center for Immigration Studies.

2020-01-18 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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A useful caveat for those inclined to see the New York Times as the arbiter
of social enlightenment and proletarian clarity.
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Re: [Marxism] Capitalism needs racism: A response to the NYT 1619 Project | Joel Wendland-Liu | People's World

2020-01-19 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I will not post on this subject again until someone makes an intelligent
response to what I posted before. The post the conflict over the American
Revolution in these terms is simply dishonest.

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:33 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> On 1/19/20 1:13 PM, Patrick Bond via Marxism wrote:
> >
> > On 1/10/2020 6:51 PM, Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism wrote:
> >>
> https://peoplesworld.org/article/capitalism-needs-racism-a-response-to-the-nyt-1619-project/
> >>
> >
> > Actually, there's such a big theoretical problem here, as to whether
> > capitalism 'needs' racism, or can jettison even its most profound
> > manifestations  - such as apartheid - when more effective systems of
> > surplus extraction emerge. The South African case is exemplary, and the
> > main writers on this have tried over several decades to specify when
> > racism is functional, and when it creates contradictions that become
> > debilitating. If you're interested in identifying the contingent versus
> > the necessary, have a look at Ben Magubane's historical work, e.g.
> >
> http://unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/63265CAFF973018D80256B6D005785D1/%24file/dmaguban.pdf
>
> This takes us a bit far afield. The big question prompted by Project
> 1619 is not so much about how surplus value is extracted but over the
> dynamics of American history. WSWS and its historian allies both
> exaggerate the democratic character of the 1776 revolt and minimize the
> importance of slavery in the rise of American capitalism. As I pointed
> out in a piece on this, one of the articles that irked Wood and
> McPherson, two of WSWS's allies, was based on the work of Sven Beckert,
> Edward Baptist et al who come out of the Eric Williams tradition. If
> there was an afterlife, I'd like to think of Jim Blaut up on a cloud
> somewhere grinning at the pendulum swinging in his direction at last.
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[Marxism] Impeachment

2020-01-21 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I spent the day working, but had the impeachment trial going on in the
background and stopped regularly to follow it.  Our old expectation of the
American political system was that it was going to shed credibility its
functions became increasingly obvious.

What's striking to me about the present stage is that almost no sentient
observer can seriously muster much confidence in the entire process.

The virtual absence of an independent Left has been a tragic feature of our
politics for decades, but it has never been more painfully acute than it
now is.

Solidarity,
Mark L.
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[Marxism] New York Times' fascination with U.S. History continues . . . .

2020-01-17 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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. . . . despite ongoing oversimplifications and gross shortcomings in doing
their homework.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/1856-election-2020.html
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Re: [Marxism] Waterloo for the anti-anti-Trump left (and all other normalizers): You knew he was a snake | Salon.com

2020-01-08 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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It's noteworthy that we rarely hear denunciation of what "the Left" in
America ithat actually tries to define it in any realistic way.   As a
unitary, coherent entity worthy of being its own proper noun, it exists
only as an abstraction--not a spectre haunting the nightmares of the master
class but mostly as a scapegoat.
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Re: [Marxism] ARE WE ON THE BRINK OF A RENEWED WAVE OF RADICALISATION WITHIN BRITAIN UNDER THE SURFACE OF INCREASING REACTION?

2019-12-31 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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The popularity of Sanders created great opportunities for the Left in the
U.S., which it flubbed up and still flubs up.  The chance that the
Democrats would permit him (or likely Warren) to get the nomination is less
than the prospect of Yellowstone erupting.

Should he (or any "progressive") get the nomination, we have absolutely no
reason to imagine that the Democratic hierarchy will do anything other than
McGovern them . . . that is, it would extend no more than the most minimal
support, and then use the defeat as an excuse for moving ever more
Biden-ward next time.

And if, by some stretch of the imagination, we were to find ourselves with
a President Sanders in 2021, he will face a Congress divided between a
Trumpified GOP and an essentially Nixonized-Reaganized Democratic caucus.
And we have no reason to think that Sanders would embrace a strategy of
mass mobilizations.

Electoral politics will open only after we get and sustain those mass
mobilizations.   I'm hopeful, because there's plenty of sentiment for
radical change.  However, there's no strategic understanding of independent
movements and virtually zero understanding of how to go about the work of
building them.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’s’ racist lyrics reflect its slave owner author, Francis Scott Key

2019-12-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 I was confused by the title of the article, because--while Francis Scott
Key was a white supremacist--I couldn't recall any mention of race in "the
Defense of Fort McHenry."  The verse in question is:

"No refuge could save the hireling & slave/
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:/
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/
O’er the land of the free & the home of the brave."
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Re: [Marxism] Behind the attack on New York Times Project 1619 | Louis Proyect

2019-12-27 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I've just heard that jaw-dropping clip from the president offering his
expert warnings about the environmental dangers of windmills.  I’m sure
that, between them, the various media outlets have given a far bigger and
louder platform to his idiocy than they've ever given the advocates of wind
power.  Such is life for us, as unwilling denizens of the Opposite World
structured by the American ruling class.



Like the president, corporate media regularly disparages work by anyone
whose perspective they’d prefer to dismisses, perhaps especially so for
those who've spent years, decades, lifetimes actually studying a
subject.  Their
priority is, first and foremost, showcasing whatever will goose its
readership/viewership and the advertising revenues linked to them.


In this context, we should welcome the 1619 Project for popularizing what
scholars of American History generally have been studying and discussing
for half a century:  Race cannot be separated from any major event in our
history, and the nature of power means that these have been shaped by the
imperatives of white supremacy.  These insights should actually surprise
nobody on a Marxism list, though, if they do, we have all the more reason
to praise the project.



However, I would not uncritically embrace the New York Times without a few
caveats.



To state the obvious, causality requires sifting and processed of those
diverse motives.  In a large and complex population, a broad spectrum of
concerns motivates individuals. The nonslaveholders in the Confederate Army
or small town kids of all backgrounds enlisting to fight for the U.S. in
Vietnam might tell us all sorts of things about their motives.  Rather than
take these on face value as explanatory of the general cause of the
war.  Rather
we weigh them critically.



Then, too, we can't take the outcome of the process as an indication of
what motivated those who participated in it.  In particular, people my age
hopefully have recollections of their parents talking about what hopes they
had coming out of the sacrifices of World War II.  Most did not struggle
because they wanted the permanent warfare state and the Mutually Assured
Destruction insanity that emerged.  I suppose you could say that this was
“one of the principal causes” of WWII—it certainly had to motivate some in
power or we wouldn’t have gotten them—but it would be misleading to read
this backwards into the past.  In the wake of the American Revolution or
the Civil War, there were always many people who protested the outcomes as
less than they had expected.



Certainly, some of the slaveholding gentlemen in slaveholding states
opposed secession and became Unionists because they rightly saw secession
and war as likely to result in the destruction of the institution of
slavery.  Did that mean that one of the principal causes of the Union in
the Civil War was the preservation of slavery?  Some with racialist
hypernational politics opposed the Axis in WWII, but that did not mean the
Allies favored fascism.  At least such erroneous assumptions in these cases
would have something from which to leap to a conclusion.



To me, though, the fundamental objection to the assertion that the American
Revolution was about saving slavery from its abolition by the British are
obvious.  This refurbished old Tory whitewash of the British Empire is
applied over an undercoat of American parochialism.  First, the American
colonies did not square off against a British Empire eager to abolish
slavery.


In fact, it did not do so for several generations after the American
Declaration . . .   Maybe somebody had a TARDIS.


Then, too, the empire's move against slavery never emancipated the imperial
economy from slavery.  Indeed, not only did it make a series of exemptions
at the behest of the East Indian Company, but the entire Industrial
Revolution rested as firmly on the textile industry, the cotton trade from
the American South, and its reliance on African slavery.  This British
reliance on slavery provided the Confederacy with a strong base of support
within the government and provided the Confederacy’s main hope for the
salvation of its own independence from the U.S. and the salvation of its
“peculiar institution.”



Most directly, the American Revolution became an American Revolution—a
unitary experience—only after the fact, in the establishment of unified
national government with a unified policy.  In practice, colonists
organized their rebellion through their colonial governments, which forged
a common military force and a foreign policy but balked at almost any other
move the direction of a national policy.  Slavery did not have the 

Re: [Marxism] Sanders never planned to win; structural elements were always in place to prevent that victory

2020-03-12 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Two things that signaled his lack of seriousness.

The first was the injection of the "'s' word" early on, where it was
absolutely unnecessary (and incorrectly used).  He was actually running as
a New Deal Democrats urging the party to return to its earlier
manifestation.  What was the point of introducing "socialism" into the
discussion?

The other was raising the issue of Cuba at exactly the point in the
campaign where he was easing into the lead.  what was the point of it?
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Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders Ending Presidential Run

2020-04-08 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Or how about just using those funds to set up an organizing committee in DC
capable of bringing several hundred thousand people to the city every time
that Orange Reagan Zombie tries to put someone on the Supreme Court or get
another bailout for "working people"?
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Re: [Marxism] The SWP and Social Distancing: a Study in Abnormal Political Psychology | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2020-04-10 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Maybe the cabin fever's finally pushed them over the edge.  It finally
brought out their predisposition to making the self-emancipation of the
working class about how serious they are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8
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Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders Ending Presidential Run

2020-04-08 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 I don't think Sanders ever had a snowball's chance of getting near the
nomination . . . and arguing that the DNC couldn't have prevented it misses
the newest player in all this.  Historically, the DNC had been essential in
tipping the nomination where it wanted to go, especially when tied to a
seated president.  However, I'd argue that no such intervention was needed
in 2020 thanks to the very blatant way in which the "liberal media" covered
this campaign.

They sought to head off Sanders initially by boosting Warren, and, as soon
as her campaign looked as though she could more to fore, they froze her out
(and then wallowed in its faux outrage at how sexism kept her back and not
their own pathetic lying about how a national health care system was simply
unaffordable).,  CNN and MSNBC reported the view she and Sanders
expressed--that health care should be a human right--as an attempt to take
health care away from people. o(It was truly a Democratic version or the
Republican BS about "death panels.")

In the end, they pulled out all the stops to assert (contrary to the
evidence) that Biden was the Democratic contender most likely to defeat
Trump.  And that's what's settled the matter indirectly without any need
for direct action by the Democratic hierarchy.
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Re: [Marxism] Minnesota: Doctors Receiving Instructions “to Report Covid19 as a Cause of Death, even if Patient was never Tested”

2020-04-11 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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To state the obvious, if you have a health care system that can't get more
than that small part of the population tested, most Covid-19 cases and
deaths are going to take place among the untested.  As was the case in
1918, the epidemic causes a lot of deaths by heart failure and pneumonia.
This is why we only have estimates from 1918--so many of the deaths were
ascribed to those immediate causes of death.

Although I didn't get the details, I did hear the tail end of an interview
the other day reporting that deaths from heart failure are 400% higher than
they ordinarily would be.  I didn't catch the context--where it was,
etc.--but the takeaway on this is that people are already doing these sorts
of studies, and we'll hear much of this in the future, even if it's not
going to be grabbing the headlines.

That approach is going to give us the best real measure of the impact of
the coronavirus . . .

Or we can just embrace the BS cynically spread by officialdom and its
self-serving right-wing apologists.
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Re: [Marxism] bellingcat - How (not) to Report on Russian Disinformation - bellingcat

2020-04-16 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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An excellent piece.
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Re: [Marxism] Kevin Coogan

2020-03-15 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I like first piece though it had no real relation to try the corporate NY
Times project.

The Democratic Review is interesting enough and available online, but it
had absolutely nothing to do with the history of political radicalism.
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Re: [Marxism] Rethinking Voting for Democrats

2020-03-16 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Not so much of a rethinking as a repositioning to the thinking of most
Democratic voters: voting lesser-evil.

And this is actually worse, because most of the latter insist that they are
picking the best option within the race for a particular position.  This
discusses things in terms of the party.

Just out of curiosity, how many people are in this group anyway?  I'm
asking because, as a rule of thumb, the larger the organization the more
pressures in faces to engage in this "rethinking."
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Re: [Marxism] Corbynism Lost, Sandersism is Losing: Why Working Within Capitalist Parties Fails | Left Voice

2020-04-05 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I can think of lots of things more worthy of our time and efforts than
waging a losing fight over the future of the superfluous politics of the
Democratic party.

How about vital fights over environmental issues?  What about the latest
moves to revive the old U.S. practice of Indian Removal?  How about making
something like Black Lives Matter actually matter?   Or perhaps solidarity
work with organizing drives among the new layers of the working class,
which impertinently haven't waited for the official bodies of the labor
movement or the next convention discussion of the socialist grouplets?

But, if I had to think of something less worthy of our time and efforts, it
would probably be the struggle to establish the respectability of the term
"socialist" by redefining it as the struggle to save capitalism 80 years
ago.
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Re: [Marxism] Corbynism Lost, Sandersism is Losing: Why Working Within Capitalist Parties Fails | Left Voice

2020-04-05 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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 Chris wrote, "If you can build a big socialist party while having nothing
to do with the Democrats, that will be great."

Experience poses us a different  question.  People have been trying to
build a socialist movement by springboarding off the Democratic party . . .
well, the Owenites started almost as soon as there was a Democratic party.
The real question is when did any of those efforts actually work?  When did
we ever build a big socialist party while working through the Democrats?
Or even a teensy socialist party?

We have already seen the kind of "movement" we can build through the
Democrats, and we don't have to go back to the Locofocos . . . or any
further back than very recent years.  We watched the Democratic party and
its adherents dead end the very promising Occupy movement.  They
sidetracked Black Lives Matter from small but spirited demonstrations into
a kind of philanthropic NGO useful for making moral appeals in cable news
interviews.  And it sent home those massive wonderfully angry women's
marches that greeted the Trump presidency.

The mechanism of demobilizing people is the most well-practiced

In or out of electoral politics, the movement we need has to understand the
only reliable source of its own power and to function accordingly.

I would add that experience also tells us that the discussion around the
predictably doomed Sanders campaign has no practical point other than pave
the way for the equally predictable arguments why everybody has to vote for
Joe Biden.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] ‘Unworthy Republic’ Takes an Unflinching Look at Indian Removal in the 1830s

2020-03-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Not exactly "the war the slaveholders won," though they certainly
inaugurated and implemented it.  However, it was pursued actively by
Northern Democrats, Whigs, and all but the most radical of the Republicans.

Just think "railroads" and you get the point.  America's first Big Business
and the means for accumulating much of the capital for what was to follow
got its first great too-big-to-fail leg up from Indian Removal.
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Re: [Marxism] How to Beat Coronavirus Capitalism Tickets | Eventbrite

2020-03-26 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Need a bit more notice on these things.

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 4:47 PM MM via Marxism 
wrote:

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>
>
> An online teach-in with Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta
> Taylor.
>
> About this Event
>
> Please join an online teach-in with Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and
> Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, with a musical performance by Lia Rose
>
> Thursday, March 26, 2020, 5 PM Eastern
>
> Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Leap, Debt Collective, and Democratic
> Socialists of America
>
> The event will begin at 5:00 PM EDT (2:00 PM PDT) and will be streamed
> live on Youtube through this link:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lxwLHRKaB0
>
> The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities
> of our economic and social system.
>
> We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this
> crisis. We will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal
> winner-takes-all system — or this will be a wake-up call.
>
> Ideas that were dismissed as too radical just a week ago are starting to
> seem like the only reasonable path to get out of this crisis and prevent
> future ones.
>
> We need to use every tool that we have that allows us to hear each other’s
> voices, to read each other’s words, to see each other’s faces, even if it’s
> just on screens, to stay organized and stay connected. We have to create
> spaces where we’re able to deliberate and strategize about what it means to
> protect our neighbors, our rights, and our planet.
>
> We have to have the confidence to say this is the moment when we change
> everything.
>
>
>
> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-beat-coronavirus-capitalism-tickets-100840167656
>
>
>
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[Marxism] Pastor warns of virus hoax, but . . . .

2020-03-30 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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This from the _Christian Post_:

Pastor Ronnie Hampton of New Vision Community Church, a Free Methodist
Church Planting Project scoffed at all that concern about the pandemic.

He warned::“They’re gonna come up with a vaccine and in that vaccine
everybody is gonna have to take it … and inside of that vaccine there’s
going to be some type of electronic computer device that’s gonna put some
type of chip in you and maybe even have some mood, mind-altering
circumstances … and they’re saying that the chip would be the mark of the
beast."

He died of Covid-19 last Wednesday.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/3-pastors-killed-by-coronavirus-one-thought-god-allowed-infection-so-he-could-get-a-little-rest.html
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Re: [Marxism] "Trump comments prompt doctors, and Lysol, to warn against injecting disinfectants"

2020-04-25 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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The bourgeoisie are still something of a diverse lot, though not enough to
matter in terms of what they have to offer.  On the one hand, Bill Gates
has been making the rounds on TV, sharing his medical insights and his
faith that, after all of this is over, we're going to keep all the yummy
online ways of doing business, etc.  On the other, there are still plenty
of entirely detached Trumpnuts among them.

I'm not even going to bother pushing back on this characterization of FDR
as having been good for us, because it's entirely irrelevant.

Right now, the pro-Democratic wing of the ruling class hasn't been able to
do offer anything better than Mr. Biden, more a John W. Davis than anything.

Cheers,
Mark L.

PS:  People need to think less about stuffing a capitalist ballot box and
more about voting with our feet.
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[Marxism] "Trump comments prompt doctors, and Lysol, to warn against injecting disinfectants"

2020-04-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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Did any of us ever expect to see a headline like that?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/24/disinfectant-injection-coronavirus-trump/
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Re: [Marxism] "Trump comments prompt doctors, and Lysol, to warn against injecting disinfectants"

2020-04-24 Thread Mark Lause via Marxism
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I have a slightly more ghoulish curiosity about how many of them are
actually ignoring social distancing, gathering in large crows with others
who believe it's all a hoax, and basically taking up his most
self-destructrive and lethal kind of advice, including this latest.  I
mean, it's a very big country and a media that gives him a massive
audience, and his followers include a lot of the most gullible bipeds on
the planet.
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