Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century:, Global Inequality, Piketty, and the Transnational, Capitalist Class,

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Eugene Coyle  wrote

I agree with Robinson’s dismissal of Piketty but the rest of the chapter 
is a very poor jumble of the economic history of the 20th Century. 
Almost just a story made up out of thin air. And not only bad history, 
poor analysis as well.


Reference*
*

*[pen-l] Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century:,Global Inequality, 
Piketty, and the Transnational,Capitalist Class, 
*/

/

/From:/ Louis Proyect 



"a poor jumble of the economic history of the 20th Century", "a story 
made up out of thin air", "Bad history". "poor analysis." If you're 
going to take a responsible opposing line to someone's point of view, 
especially that of  a respected Marxist scholar like William Robinson, 
don't you think it's counterproductive to do so with airy dismissal, 
without specifying in some detail what it is you don't like about it, so 
as to give a respondent something to tie to? This used to be called 
"badmouthing." I don't like to think that these lists are to be used for 
ventilation.



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[Marxism] Free Copy of Fire & Fury

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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 * "A.R. G via Marxism" 
 * Subject: [Marxism] Full / Free Copy of Fire & Fury
 * Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2018 13:29:45 -0500 (EST)

Please send me a copy of the PDF. Thank you much.

Ralph Johansen



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Re: [Marxism] Another May Day

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Mark Lause wrote

I haven’t decided yet whether to accept the invitation by text message 
to participate in the local May Day activities. I have been to so many 
depressingly small affairs . . . “small but spirited,” as they used to 
say in the Socialist Workers Party whenever that organization sponsored 
something that flopped colossally. They usually end with a closed circle 
of believers in which whatever militancy present is safely channeled 
into “witnessing” to each other as to their faith.



Workers in the US, the belly of the beast, aren't going to produce much 
in the way of sustained, game-changing protest for the time being. 
Anyone doubting what the prospects are in the rest of the world would do 
well to read John Smith's book Imperialism in the 21st Century.


I received this message today from John:

MayDay greetings to y'all
MayDay lives! - and nowhere more than in revolutionary Cuba! Today, 6 
million Cubans (/c. //half of the entire population!!!/) joined MayDay 
demonstrations across the island, according to the CTC (Cuba's trade 
union federation). 
http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2018-05-01/minute-by-minute-2018-may-day-celebrations 



¡revolución o muerte!

John

I join in his message. And having been raised in the pieties, I recall a 
line from the Book of Common Prayer, which can be translated to fit the 
sorry scene in the US at the present time: "Whenever two or three are 
gathered together in thy name [read revolution] thou wilt grant their 
request." Even of you're the only one there. Because, unlike the guy in 
the comic strip with the white beard and white gown holding the sign : 
"The end is coming!" we happen to be exactly right. And we have comrades 
all over the globe who know that better than we ever will. Damn straight 
another MayDay. "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!



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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Is Capital or Labor Winning at Your Favorite Company? Introducing the Marx Ratio - The New York Times

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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On 5/22/2018 7:24 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/21/upshot/marx-ratio-median-pay.html 



Just off the top, this article seems simple-minded, an exercise in 
fudge-figure apology, invoking old mole in vain ("the Marx Ratio") How 
is net income of corporations calculated in this study? Does it include 
global operations, the manner in which net income can be hidden in 
offshore sequestration of profits, value chain obfuscation, retained 
earnings overseas generally? What does "median employee compensation" - 
"the return to capital, on a per-employee basis" - mean for the range 
and the extremes, and doesn't it include compensation for upper echelon 
and management, in which case it's hopelessly skewed from the get-go?


"It is a question that speaks to some of the oldest debates in economics."

For crissake we know the answer to that. It's only a debate among 
capital's apologists and epigones, buttressing an obsolete ideology to 
soothe the suits and mystify the masses. To repeat, this is a system of 
production of needs that is inherently conflicted, against labor, since 
it vitally depends on profit, an imperative on which the life and 
well-being of every corporate enterprise rests, in a system which is 
predicated on constant vicious internecine warfare, capital against 
capital, capital against labor, and worker against worker. And the 
dominant result of that imperative is that labor costs, the most 
malleable and important of the costs that are a barrier to profit, have 
to be kept to the minimum, by any means necessary, at whatever cost to 
society and individual. That has been enhanced by the very successful 
attack on labor since the 1970s, including anti-labor legislation, 
crushing labor organizing, just-in-time, part-time and casual jobs, 
excluding those no longer looking for work, as official statistics would 
have it, calculating official unemployment statistics by regarding as 
employed anyone who has worked so much as one hour in the past two 
weeks, and shipping jobs off to cheap labor venues wherever they are to 
be found most profitably.


The NYTimes generally lays down received wisdom, unless rebutted, this 
could use an answering op-ed, and Shaikh and Tonak, Michael Roberts, 
Fred Mosely, Andrew Kliman and other careful analysts who see the system 
for what it is would have much more trenchant and accurate responses 
than I can come up with. If they didn't have more important research to 
occupy them, and if they thought that this bilge is worth the effort.



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Re: [Marxism] Israel’s Premature Celebration: Gazans Have Crossed the Fear Barrier

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Dennis Brasky wrote

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/israels-premature-celebration-gazans-have-crossed-the-fear-barrier/ 




As I read this, two images crossed my mind. One was the profane image of 
the knight errant in Monty Python's skit where he challenges a gigantic 
warrior in an impregnable suit of armor. As the knight attacks, the 
giant methodically clops off his arms one by one, then finally his legs, 
and the bloodied knight, who has all the time been contemptuously 
taunting the giant, is shouting something like, "Is that the best you 
can do? I'll best you with this shattered sword in my teeth."


But the other is "The Battle of Algiers." For those who don't know or 
remember, what I recall is the leadership of the battle for 
independence, through the French practices of utterly savage torture and 
spies, are systematically tracked down and eliminated. Then there is an 
ominous interval. There appears several years later the rising of 
virtually the entire populace of Algiers, with the women ululating and 
everyone singing liberation songs and shouting slogans. Shortly after, 
the French retreat and the Algerians have their native land back They 
had crossed the fear barrier.


Either way, maybe, "a likely story."


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Re: [Marxism] Needed Now: A Real and Radical Left - Truthdig

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

By Paul Street.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/needed-now-a-real-and-radical-left/



 This is good stuff and quite comprehensive. I'd add to his appraisal
 of Obama not only how the liberals got all misty-eyed over his initial
 accession, and the members of the African-American community were
 largely ecstatically expectant, Obama sat in the most powerful seat of
 power on the globe for eight years, and for his fellow Black
 constituents he did squat - calling to mind for all of us the simple
 fact that class trumps ethnicity, and the powers behind the office
 define the incumbent. It's helpful that Paul Street reminds us that
 the same holds for Sanders, or for that matter any would-be leader who
 stands to the right of the kind of complete turnabout that Street
 describes. I like to think (well, hope) that our experience in the
 past thirty years, after the right wing nostrums have run their
 course, and the air clears enough to realize the draconian,
 destructive nature of this system, especially with the inexorable
 coming collapse of hopelessly indebted capitalism into doctrinal and
 functional incoherence, that more and more of us are led to the same
 conclusion.






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Re: [Marxism] query

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Michael Meeropol wrote

Mike Zweig of STONY BROOK has sponsored conferences on the reality of 
the AMERICAN WORKING CLASS for years -- he would be a perfect place to 
start.


Louis Proyect wrote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Olin_Wright

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 2:50 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism 
 wrote:


Anybody have some recommendations on theoretical or practical work 
defining class in our contemporary U.S. setting


Cheers,

ML

I participate in a study group which for a brief time last year went 
into the concept of class. I didn't find much out there that's current, 
other than critiques of other, past analyses. That's in spite of the 
current naked nature of the class war being waged by capital.


There's Eric Wright and Michael Zweig, as you point out both at it for 
years, and I have problems with Wright.


Eric Olin Wright conflates Weberian categories, ideal types, with Marx' 
core identification of class which is centered around the relationship 
of any collection of workers, or employers, or undefined categories, to  
relations of production. Anything that strays from Marx's concept to me 
cannot be relied on to provide a basis on which to construct further a 
unified field theory of productive activity and actual class 
composition, nor can it point out the class fractions and divisions 
which can be relied on to go all the way with you in thoroughgoing class 
warfare.


Zweig is good on the necessity for groups such as civil rights, 
anti-war, and women’s struggles to obtain or maintain close connections 
with labor (defined through its trade union organizations or how?), on 
how considerations of class dynamics have "been driven from economics as 
an academic discipline, how the decline of union power has contributed 
to the decline in living standards that workers experience, "and how 
public policy in the United States has been shaped by class power to the 
detriment of working people, how obvious, growing inequality reveals the 
presence of class differences [although what's so different from the 
late 19th century?], "the incongruous alliance between the corporate 
elite and, especially, although not exclusively, white working-class 
people—an odd mating which defines the conservative populism of the 
Republican Party," the nebulous recognition of women's relations and 
race differences to the concept of class, that "trade unionism [more 
ineffectual in the global context all the time, especially given its 
ongoing post-WW2-originated policy of production-related wage 
increase/decrease - "concession bargaining," the General Motors 
reorganization, for example] - must supplant or supplement what we have 
up to now taken for granted. ... the nature of both the 21st century 
domestic economy and the international one to which it is now 
intricately tethered [which] marginalize the normal workplace-based 
forms of collective bargaining," nationalism, chauvinism and the 
execrable role played by US unions in foreign policy - Venezuela for 
example, and "the troubled relationship between the new immigrants and 
the African American community."


Then there's the many surveys on class, which rely on answers to 
questions about income, lifestyle, location of habitation, educational 
level, how people see themselves (important in a subjective sense and in 
realization of where we are historically, but not in the sense of an 
objective analysis of actual class relations), "their sense of space in 
the world,” according to sociologist Jane Van Galen, etc. --  then 
there's discussions of culture, religion, and other aspects of life – 
social capital -- all of whichconceal much more than they purport to 
reveal about class.


As E.P. Thompson in his introduction to /The Making of the English 
Working Class 
/ 
pointed out,

//

[Class is] an historical phenomenon. . . something which in fact happens 
(and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.  And class 
happens when some [people], as a result of common experiences (inherited 
or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as 
between themselves, and as against other [people] whose interests are 
different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is 
largely determined by the productive relations into which [people] are 
born — or enter involuntarily.


In other words, that class relations are neces

[Marxism] My response to Robert Scheer's 'A Victory for Sanity in World Politics'

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-victory-for-sanity-in-world-politics/

I won't cite the many articles currently appearing, you have as much 
access to them as I do and I don't regard them as nitpicking, which 
ascribe or associate this seeming rapprochement with a deal to bring 
North Korea into the ambit of transnational corporate power - just as 
with China in 1975 as you say, when I saw on TV first Kissinger and then 
Ted Kennedy traveling to China, emissaries for a similar deal with that 
country.


So the further implication is that North Korea, instead of struggling 
with top-down socialism in one isolated country, is to become more 
openly capitalist (capitalism defined as usual as accumulation and 
expansion by labor exploitation, application of the labor theory of 
value) in form if not in name. The US gets to share onerous terms of 
trade in North Korea with South Korea, China and Japan, and the Kim 
family dynasty only has to contend with its own exploited people, and no 
longer so much with the sanctions and threats of transnational capital. 
If that's our idea of "risking peace instead of war," rather than 
kicking the can down the road and using threats of cataclysmic 
destruction to power a deal with another heretofore non-compliant 
country, getting them to knuckle under to US corporate dominance and all 
that entails for further exploitation of cheap foreign labor, access to 
resources, exacerbation of the toxic contradictions of capital leading 
inexorably to planet destruction and nuclear holocaust, then so be it, I 
suppose.


In 1957, I co-wrote a pamphlet called "Question and Answers on Nuclear 
Testing" which with some small success conveyed the conclusion that, 
until we are collectively on track toward substantive equality, rather 
than specious, inoperable formal equality of opportunity under 
capitalism, no deal on nuclear proliferation and its likely 
planet-destroying consequences is possible. That message still holds.



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Re: [Marxism] South Korean socialist and peace activist: US-North Korea summit ‘a first step to ending final Cold War conflict’

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Stuart Munckton wrote

The summit essentially reaffirmed the spirit of transitioning to peacefu 
coexistence contained in the Panmunjom Declaration signed at the 
North-South Korean summit in April.


   
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/south-north-korea-united-states-summit-trump-kim-jong-un



"The most common criticism levelled at Trump is that he failed to secure 
complete, veritable, irreversible denuclearisation (CVID)...both sides 
reached an agreement that reaffirmed the goal of denuclearisation and 
peace, thereby opening the way for complete denuclearisation of the 
Korean Peninsula."



This crap about a "first step toward peace or denuclearization" is 
misleading to the extreme. Why would anyone expect "denuclearisation of 
the Korean Peninsula" or anywhere else? What is called for in any 
negotiations to which the Leviathan is a part, as the history of all 
such negotiations readily attests, is the complete, abject, 
unconditional surrender of the other side. We hold uncountable nuclear 
weapons, while they slink back into servility, and whatever the 
short-run outcome transnationals dictate all the terms of trade, 
globally, and can sanction, restrict and punish recalcitrants at will. 
The countries and corporations around and about the center in the US 
won't give an inch. Nuclear proliferation, with its growing 
accessibility, decreasing cost and pragmatic necessity, absent systemic 
change, is a virtual certainty. We should be clear about that on the 
left by now. We should by now have cleared the air and risen above the 
effects of news reports and commentary to which all are subject, by a 
dwindling number of concentrated media, which successfully confine our 
collective history to contrived reports of yesterday's happenings and 
self-serving corporate diversion, with nothing about today's material 
designs so much as suggested. It's small wonder that people are unaware, 
and there's no need to forgive or remonstrate. If nuclear war is on the 
horizon, no one will have had a say, or a clue. And throwing up blind 
liberal pap about heightened hopes, making much of staged history, 
doesn't help a bit.



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[Marxism] [UCE] Michael Klare: Is a War With China on the Horizon?

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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portent and ratchet

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176438/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_is_a_war_with_china_on_the_horizon/#more


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[Marxism] How Latinos Are Shaping America’s Future

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/07/latinos-hispanic-power-america-immigration-future/ 




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[Marxism] The Plot Against López Obrador and the violent history of Mexican elections - Dan La Botz

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/lopez-obrador-mexico-elections-amlo-repression

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/mexican-business-elite-us-government-brace-likely-win-leftist-obrador-mexicos-president.html

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Re: [Marxism] 42% of Americans now want Trump impeached

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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I stashed this in draft file yesterday as a thought exercise but today I 
think what the hey I'll send it anyway, maybe there's something in it 
for somebody.


Mark Lause wrote

"President Donald Trump is a mere 1 percentage point away from former 
commander in chief Richard Nixon when it comes to the number of 
Americans who want him impeached, according to a new poll released 
Friday."http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-approval-rating-991900 



Yes, good, but 51% don't think so, and what do the corporate honchos 
think, and therefore the paid-up Congress? And what of Pence? And then 
the Speaker of the House (still undetermined?). I am reading that they 
are coming around to a more favorable view of Trump (one reason outgoing 
House speaker Ryan and others seem to be falling into line with Trump) - 
probably because they've gotten to him, possibly because he has served 
their purpose/ is serving their purpose by his unorthodox behavior and 
has given the sagging corporate status quo a shaking and/or he better 
realizes how the game is played, corporate "personifications" are taming 
much of the counter-productive screw loose maverick in him and 
recognizing that Trump still has a preponderance of the constituency 
with him, which could increase as he plays out his populist stance 
(barring economic failure), and most importantly that capital's dominant 
sector is back in control of policy - as they virtually always have 
been, by any means necessary.


What Gary MacLennan says about this in the preceding post regarding UK 
(Re: [Marxism] WHY THE UNFOLDING MASS RADICALISATION AND POSSIBLE 
REVOLUTIONARY UPHEAVALS) may be relevant, in that he speculates that 
there's a section of [global?] capital that actually wants government 
investment and redistribution, wherever in UK but notably as I 
understand it, in the US, the tech sector - I'd add because austerity 
policy is seen by many as at an impasse, perceived viable alternatives 
are lacking, inequality of relative income is blatantly increasing, and 
policy options are up for grabs.


Maybe so, but hear me out as to the feasibility of "government 
investment and redistribution": Anwar Shaikh in his book 'Capitalism: 
Competition, Conflict, Crises' includes Keynes in what he characterizes 
as the "classical school" of economic theorists, mainly in that Keynes's 
thesis (in part) is that regulation, government and other economic 
agents' intervention in the economy to expand the money supply and 
enhance redistribution, can restore "effective demand" in a slump, which 
is seen as being consistent with the law of value favored by Marx, as 
well as by Smith and Ricardo in other forms. Except that Keynes doesn't 
go far enough (he died of a heart attack at age 57); he doesn't extend 
his theory to include the really truly longer run.  The longer run in 
which according to Shaikh (and Marx - although Keynes had never read 
Marx as I recall) pumping up the economy by injecting currency may 
stimulate demand and therefore restore investment (all in the context of 
unmanageable state, corporate/private indebtedness and financial 
instability), but that in turn results in higher employment, therefore a 
tighter labor market, strengthening of labor's bargaining position, a 
consequent rise in labor's profit share, which produces a wage-price 
ratcheting and inflation and which in turn reduces capital's profit 
share, which is reflected in a fall in the rate of profit, which results 
in corporate disinclination to invest, which results in higher 
unemployment; so square one over the short-to-mid-term period, and this 
is a main reason that Keynes is no longer included in standard economics 
textbooks alongside Walras, Jevons, Marshall, Hayek, Von Mises and 
Friedman. As policy option, Keynes's policy recommendations, as 
interpreted by his epigones, were for the stated reasons unsuccessful in 
maintaining a healthy economy in the 70s.


Whew. Something like that. Like the children's tune House that Jack 
Built (the maiden all forlorn who milked the cow with the crumpled horn 
and on) but it sure as hell ain't child's play.


Then my question is, if there's merit to this, and with respect to the 
Pinochet option in UK, if Corbyn proves to be intractable to policy 
acceptable to a likely dominant status quo faction of capital (doubtful 
that he will hold out, because of his options and alternatives in 
managing an ailing, complex system of profit-and-expansion imperatives), 
which sector if any in that event controls the military and the 
intelligence apparatus, an

[Marxism] Francis Boyle - Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Retirement: End of Roe v. Wade?

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://therealnews.com/stories/justice-anthony-kennedys-retirement-end-of-roe-vs-wade 




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Re: [Marxism] Marxism Without Progress | Boston Review

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

Bruce Robbins reviews:

Reading Marx
Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza
Polity, $19.95 (paper)

Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory
Mike Davis
Verso, $26.95 (cloth)

http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/bruce-robbins-marxism-without-progress

Mike Davis's book is available only through today for the next 15 hours 
or so, July 1st, as an ebook at verso.com for $1.00.


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[Marxism] [UCE] “What to the American Slave Is Your 4th of July?”: James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’s Historic Speech

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/4/what_to_the_slave_is_4th


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[Marxism] Trade War and Depression by Michael Roberts

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/trade-war-and-depression/


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Re: [Marxism] “It Really Comes Down to Empowering the Working Class”

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

I'm afraid the DSA (yes, I joined) comrade and I have different notions 
of what it means to "seize power":


Jacobin: But then on the other side, you have people saying socialists 
should only run outside the Democratic Party. What’s your answer to them?


Julia Salazar: They should tell that to the over 150,000 people in my 
district, who are living in fear every day of being displaced from their 
homes, and who are registered Democrats in a state with closed 
primaries. It’s unquestionably strategic here in New York — though not 
everywhere, I should add — to run as a Democrat if you want to seize 
power as a leftist. To mobilize people around socialist politics you 
have to engage Democratic voters, and you can’t do that in any 
meaningful way without running on the Democratic Party line in my district


https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/julia-salazar-interview-socialist-new-york-senatoining 



I'd be interested in the demographics. "45,000 and growing." Who's 
joining and what's the class and particularly working class base? Age 
group is no doubt younger, and if it's mainly students many if not most 
will become working class later. But class solidarity among workers is 
what's crucial as to whether anything such as this can morph into a 
labor party in the US. And to go on the line, risking loss of one's 
lifeline, one's mortgaged essentials and the security of one's 
household, becomes increasingly difficult against those holding the 
whip-hand wielding highly developed, militarized, powerful 
counter-tactics; and this remains a most important criterion in 
measuring the success of any sustained movement towards fundamental 
change. Not only that, but can DSA develop from being an organizing tool 
within the Democratic Party (if that's its present baseline), can it 
maintain organizational focus and discipline, can it be perceived to be 
moving in all its actions toward parity or substantive equality in a 
very complicated field of battle, so as to build and retain credibility?



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[Marxism] [UCE] Antarctic Melting is Speeding Up - Science News July 7 2018

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace. In just the last 
five years, the frozen continent has shed ice nearly three times faster 
on average than it did over the previous 20 years.


An international team of scientists has combined data from two dozen 
satellite surveys in the most comprehensive assessment of Antarctica’s 
ice sheet mass yet. The conclusion: The frozen continent lost an 
estimated 2,720 billion metric tons of ice from 1992 to 2017, and much 
of that loss occurred in recent years, particularly in West Antarctica. 
Before 2012, the continent shed ice at a rate of 76 billion tons each 
year on average, but from 2012 to 2017, the rate increased to 219 
billion tons annually/./


Full: 
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antarctica-lost-3-trillion-metric-tons-ice-since-1992-sea-level-rise?mode=magazine&context=197053 




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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Paul Gildig on the "stupid" socialist climate change strategy

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Yes, I realized that mismatch after I'd sent it, but it doesn't change 
the nature of my problems with what Gilding advocates. It reads like a 
snatch of Greenpeace literature,  or the no-growth strategies concocted 
years ago in Rome and promptly forgotten. He can avoid the issue of 
growth under capitalism but that doesn't improve on his course of 
action. I repeat: how under conditions of exploitation of wage labor to 
make adequate return - profitability - on investments in order to 
expand, as an absolute imperative which is the sine qua non and essence 
of capitalism, can anyone seriously envision any substantial change in 
the basic conditions under which capitalism must operate? What 
capitalist personification is going to have the latitude extended by 
corporate shareholders to so weaken the firm's competitive position?


Cooperative production of alternate forms of energy is already in the 
hopper for environmental planners. But in an economic system built from 
top to bottom on high energy consumption, with places like India and 
China and Iran and Turkey in addition to the usual players moving ass 
over teakettle to put two cars in every garage and on pain of survival 
increase share of market in an endless array of goods requiring high 
amounts of energy, with no overall global government oversight and 
planning for parity, how can you turn the gigantic liner around before 
it hits the iceberg - short of fundamental systemic change? And I'll 
add, from the bottom up, not top-down, or forgeddit. And how envision a 
"partial collapse" of capitalism under these imperatives? Of course I 
agree that the shortest route is the only route, and I take your meaning 
and I certainly share your sense of urgency. Someone has to point out 
the serious questions raised with the adequacy of the map on which the 
proposed shorter route is being charted.


On 7/9/2018 6:25 AM, ehr...@marx.economics.utah.edu wrote:

Ralph, you misrepresent what Terrence McNally in Alternet
says about Paul Gilding:


[Paul Gilding] apparently sees the climate crisis as an
"unmatched business opportunity," consistent with growth
with an "ethic of sustainability."

This sounds like a straight capitalist approach, while the
full quote, which you supply in the same email, says:


Coming decades will see loss, suffering and conflict, but
[Paul Gilding] believes the crisis offers us both an
unmatched business opportunity as old industries collapse
to be replaced by new ones, and a chance to replace our
addiction to growth with an ethic of sustainability."

(1) It is an unmatched business opportunity after a partial
COLLAPSE of the economy, for those businesses which are now
suppressed (for instance by the continued flood of subsidies
and lack of regulation or enfocement of regulationw of fossil
and nuclear industries.

(2) According to this source, Gilding does not believe that
growth can be CONSISTENT with an ethic of sustainability,
but that growth must be REPLACED by an ethic of
sustainability.

Therefore I hope that other readers were not discouraged to
listen to the interview I recommended, which, I repeat, is at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2z7AiLVwE4&t=

In my judgment, Gilding is too much of a techno-optimist,
and he is not critical enough of geo-engineering.
But the point which I wanted to make with my email is:

Mixing up the class struggle with the mass movement to
preserve the conditions which keep the living conditions on
this planet so that humans can continue to live comfortably
is a bad strategy.

Gilding came to this conclusion based on his activism
experience at Greenpeace, and based on his systemic
approach.  He applies the rule that one can best survive a
crisis by embracing the changes, and the adaptive cycle, see

https://www.resalliance.org/adaptive-cycle

The crisis which humanity will face is not the end of
everything, but valuable technologies and skills developed
in the old system will be liberated from the rigid
structures trying to preserve the old system and can be put
to work to serve humanity better.  Picking up the pieces and
rearranging them is a more effective approach than
trying to re-start everything from scratch.

Gilding finds it significant that coal companies have lost a
lot of their stock market value recently, i.e. damage to the
environment can also be bad for business.  He uses his
insight into the systemic connections to advise businesses,
so that they know how to produce without doing so much
damage to the environment.  This makes sense to me.  Even
capitalist businesses have a stake in the preservation of a
hospitable climate.  If they produce unsustainably, then
thei

Re: [Marxism] The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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 Re: [Marxism] The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around
 Him Knows It



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Ken Hiebert wrote
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/trump-is-mentally-unwell-and-everyone-around-him-knows-it.html 



From the article:
Scores of psychiatric professionals say the latter 
. 
Some of their peers — and a large number of laymen — have insisted that 
the matter can only be settled by a psychiatrist who has personally, 
privately evaluated the president. That argument has always struck me as 
nuts./

/

If these people who see a pattern of mental illness are right, plainly 
this is deadly dangerous for the whole planet, especially given this 
man's demonstrated attitude and actions to date. He has brought in 
people  generally perceived as alarmingly irrational on all major 
issues. I'll cite John Bolton as his principal foreign policy advisor, 
with his madly careening record and actions on display, and the 
replacement of CEO of Exxon Mobil Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, 
who was supposedly an emissary from a more rational sector of capital, 
by the ideologue Mike Pompeo, and stop there. But up and down the list 
of secretaries and advisors it's a well-documented disaster.


So what can be done? Aside from the difficulty of getting adequate 
diagnostic evidence, invoking the 25th Amendment is extremely iffy on 
its face:/

/

   "Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal
   officers of the executive departments or of such other body as
   Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore
   of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their
   written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the
   powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall
   immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting
   President.

   Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro
   tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of
   Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he
   shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice
   President and a majority of either the principal officers of the
   executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law
   provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of
   the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their
   written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the
   powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the
   issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not
   in session. If the Congress within twenty-one days after receipt of
   the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session
   within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble,
   determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is
   unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice
   President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President;
   otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his
   office."

Think about that, With a Republican majority, including SCOTUS, so 
mindless, so corrupt, so ideologically straitjacketed and ineffectual 
that rational people roll their eyes. And then there's the supine 
so-called opposition wing of the hopelessly compromised Congress. If all 
is true, it could hardly look much more worse. If only it were just a 
comic opera, and we'd all gasp and afterwards go home to bed. Only the 
corporate decision makers and their hated CIA, and the appointed special 
counsel seem to have any purchase; and even that's doubtful, with the 
kinds of security and insulation from the law available to any sitting 
president.



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Re: [Marxism] The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Oops, last paragraph "...could hardly look much worse."

Ken Hiebert wrote
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/trump-is-mentally-unwell-and-everyone-around-him-knows-it.html 



From the article:
Scores of psychiatric professionals say the latter 
. 
Some of their peers — and a large number of laymen — have insisted that 
the matter can only be settled by a psychiatrist who has personally, 
privately evaluated the president. That argument has always struck me as 
nuts./

/

If these people who see a pattern of mental illness are right, plainly 
this is deadly dangerous for the whole planet, especially given this 
man's demonstrated attitude and actions to date. He has brought in 
people  generally perceived as alarmingly irrational on all major 
issues. I'll cite John Bolton as his principal foreign policy advisor, 
with his madly careening record and actions on display, and the 
replacement of CEO of Exxon Mobil Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, 
who was supposedly an emissary from a more rational sector of capital, 
by the ideologue Mike Pompeo, and stop there. But up and down the list 
of secretaries and advisors it's a well-documented disaster.


So what can be done? Aside from the difficulty of getting adequate 
diagnostic evidence, invoking the 25th Amendment is extremely iffy on 
its face:/

/

   "Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal
   officers of the executive departments or of such other body as
   Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore
   of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their
   written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the
   powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall
   immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting
   President.

   Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro
   tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of
   Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he
   shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice
   President and a majority of either the principal officers of the
   executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law
   provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of
   the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their
   written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the
   powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the
   issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not
   in session. If the Congress within twenty-one days after receipt of
   the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session
   within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble,
   determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is
   unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice
   President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President;
   otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his
   office."

Think about that, With a Republican majority, including SCOTUS, so 
mindless, so corrupt, so ideologically straitjacketed and ineffectual 
that rational people roll their eyes. And then there's the supine 
so-called opposition wing of the hopelessly compromised Congress. If all 
is true, it could hardly look much more worse. If only it were just a 
comic opera, and we'd all gasp and afterwards go home to bed. Only the 
corporate decision makers and their hated CIA, and the appointed special 
counsel seem to have any purchase; and even that's doubtful, with the 
kinds of security and insulation from the law available to any sitting 
president.



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Democrats delivered one thing in the past 100 days: disappointment | Cornel West | Opinion | The Guardian

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/24/democrats-delivered-one-thing-100-days-disappointment


Only for those who had appointments. Cornel West the sanctimonious 
liberal can't let go.



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Comeytose in Washington

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Well,  US megacorps have never been some sort of monolith, but rather 
have been segmented according to their various, competing, far-flung 
interests. And one of the mitigating factors for labor has been 
capital's centrifugal tendencies. If only we understood how to exploit 
that fact in an organized manner.


US corporations doing business with Germany when the US entered the war 
in 1941 (and this article doesn't mention the privileged, complex 
entanglements of finance capital):


"The year following the end of World War II, GE stood accused of 
criminal conspiracy with Krupp, a major German munitions firm. Their 
partnership artificially raised the cost of U.S. defense preparations 
while helping to subsidize Hitler’s rearmament of Germany. The 
arrangement continued even after Nazi tanks smashed into Poland. GE was 
not alone among U.S. big business in having cordial, profitable 
arrangements with the corporations of Nazi Germany. Kodak, DuPont and 
Shell Oil are also known to have had business dealing with Germany. Due 
to a recent reparations case, the activities of General Motors and 
Ford..." http://www.ranknfile-ue.org/uen_nastybiz.html



   Louis Proyect wrote

Friction with Russia only sharpened after Ukraine and Syria erupted. 
Despite Roger Annis, Stephen F. Cohen, Mike Whitney, David Duke, Michel 
Chossudovsky, Robert Parry, Noam Chomsky, Diana Johnstone and Marine Le 
Pen, the American ruling class did not view Putin in the same way it 
viewed Brezhnev. Remember that George W. Bush referred to Putin as 
Pooty-Poot and that Hillary Clinton called Assad a reformer. Plus, Exxon 
was partners with Russian energy companies in massive exploration 
projects. Not to speak of these bastions of American capitalism doing 
business in Russia:


https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/08/03/headline-halah-t/

Here's who's doing business with the bad guys.

On July 13, Pfizer closed a joint venture agreement with Russian 
pharmaceutical company NovaMedica.


Boeing has been in Russia for decades. About five years ago, it 
announced plans to invest $27 billion over the next 30 years. In July 
2015, an agreement was signed between Russian titanium manufacturer 
VSMPO-Avisma Corporation, Boeing and the Ural Federal University for 
joint research and development projects.


Ford has been in Russia for 13 years. In April 2015, the joint 
Russian-American venture Ford Sollers launched the production of the 
Ford Transit. The American brand launched four new vehicles in Russia 
last year, including the Focus and Fiesta models sold here.


U.S. companies with an existing presence in Russia include, PepsiCo PEP 
-0.12%, Procter&Gamble, McDonald's, Mondelez International, General 
Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Cargill, Alcoa, and General Electric. GE 
recently signed a joint venture with oil firm Rosneft in expectation 
that Washington will actually one day lift sanctions on oil firms.



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Re: [Marxism] In praise of Trump pulling out of the Paris climate pact | TheHill

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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I think so too. No one knows beyond doubt but we have to look at the 
opposition to the concept and consequences of climate change and the 
reasons for concealment, squarely.


"Clarity instead of hope," or shock and rethinking, will not likely be 
the reaction of so many over so confusing an issue as withdrawal from 
the clearly pusillanimous Paris Agreement, with no sanctions among 
perpetrators for non-compliance; about which the msm and officialdom and 
capital generally, in the globe's major, most profitable markets, are so 
silent and seemingly unconcerned and so many are as a result so poorly 
informed.


It's again here in the US more likely to be, if any reaction at all 
among people whose lives are so little affected, "Oh well, Trump's the 
spokesperson in chief; he must know something we don't know, and there's 
little response to his actions from anyone except from some of those who 
call us 'the deplorables', and the Greenpeace crazies."


Policy setters and their rich cohorts in the US, where those bondholders 
most affected reside and who are for the most part kept fully aware, 
know that the likely effects of raising this issue in all its 
cataclysmic dimensions will have a devastating effect on capital 
accumulation; capital is entirely incapable of sustaining the hit that 
full response entails for them - the ridiculous global value chains, 
12,000-mile supply lines, corollary access to cheap, global immobile 
labor and the contrived division of the working class supplanting its 
collective strength, colossal waste and mis-use of planetary resources, 
all the severe, irreversible, pervasive impacts that are entailed.


My liberal, so-called friends generally,  too internally preoccupied,  
who as John says haven't a clue about class and its consequences or the 
inner workings of capital, are not really that much concerned either.


It isn't that all is necessarily lost, but that it sure's hell doesn't help.


John Reimann wrote

"This article is entirely worthy of a liberal like its Greenpeace author.

Ken Ward writes: "If Trump withdraws from the Paris agreement, at least 
we will have clarity instead of hope." Shades of the old Stalinist view 
"after Hitler then us"! On this basis, Ward should support Trump's 
deportations of undocumented immigrants and his stepped-up bombing 
campaign in Syria. Why not? The worse it gets, the better it gets 
according to Ward.


And what conclusion does Ward draw? "*the shock and rethinking it will 
cause in some circles just might precipitate political and cultural 
changes we need to stave off climate cataclysm.*"


Evidently this does not include his circle, since his conclusion is that 
we must turn more to the courts and to individual actions of civil 
disobedience. Like all liberals, Ward is completely blind to class 
interests, class conflict and class struggle.


History shows that the overthrow of bourgeois democracy leads not to 
disillusionment in that form of capitalist government, but just the 
opposite - *increased* illusion in it. It will be the same for the Paris 
Climate Accord. Not only that, but increased illusions in the liberals 
and the Democratic Party. But what is history to liberals like Ken Ward?


John Reimann"



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[Marxism] Theresa May’s Failed Gamble

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/uk-election-theresa-may-political-strategy-brexit-by-jacek-rostowski-2017-06?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b55b742433-sunday_newsletter_11_6_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-b55b742433-105613817 



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Re: [Marxism] Banned from discussing in DSA

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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John Reimann wrote

"Today, the leadership of DSA banned a discussion on building a working 
class political party. As explained in this video, I was to make a 
presentation to the delegates to the upcoming national convention on 
this issue, but just before that subject came up I was bounced off the 
video conference call. I’m being told it was because I “left” it but 
that is untrue."


Read the full story and see the video of what I would have said here



The DSA has that reputation, a faction aligned with the Democratic 
Party, and to the extent that they are controlled by a leadership that 
won't discuss the option you describe that reputation is deserved, if 
so, if all that you say is true, and if this local leadership is 
representative of the national leadership, it shows that they are simply 
leading a growing number of people searching for an alternative into a 
blind alley, a graveyard, for that's as we know what the Democratic 
Party is. It is more and more apparent that the Bernie movement 
represents, as he rejects an alternative party option and goes about 
being chairperson of "outreach" for the the powerful Clintonian faction 
in the party - the entrenched faction that has brought us welfare 
"reform," Romney-type health care neglect, the carceral state, licensing 
of Wall Street predation and brutal imprisonment and expulsion of 
immigrants. I admit to having for a time placed hope in Bernie the 
self-described "socialist" Democratic Party caucus member to break in 
the direction of a third party and having been jolted awake again.


If you have no opportunity for dialogue with these people, then I'd go 
elsewhere. This is an old pattern in politics, to which we're all 
vulnerable in our efforts, and I have to wonder about the class base of 
this kind of organization.


And then at the other end is the Trump movement, where as you say in 
your video 1/3 of working class people for various reasons troubled 
themselves to vote and selected a right wing option. Trump may get a 
program going for massive rehabilitation of an infrastructure that has 
been badly neglected for at least the past 20 years, and that may result 
in millions re-employed, for a time, and that is contingent on getting 
the Democrats and at least a plurality of tight-fisted fiscal 
Republicans to fund it. What he will not and cannot do is bring back 
jobs lost to automation and artificial intelligence, and those jobs 
leaving the US for cheaper labor in poorer regions. That is the larger 
picture, on which return of a vibrant, productive economy would depend 
and over which neither Trump nor anyone else has any control. Certainly 
that also includes the environmental disaster we seem to be facing. 
Least of all does he have options in dealing with the rest of the globe, 
in an increasingly connected and polar context. And In many ways, isn't 
Trump a news-hogging diversion while the bondholders ravage the commons?


So there's disorder at the border but while the authoritarian, 
nationalist  right wing, takes over they offer no panaceas with staying 
power. What it does offer is the prospect of inadvertent larger war 
amidst growing nationalism, toxic tariffs and trade barriers. And if the 
result is a repressive, militarized state, that won't get them far, 
particularly in a country with at least the trappings of a history of 
democratic traditions and a large but atrophying so-called middle class. 
It's a stick ultimately without a carrot as the saying goes, operating 
in the context of dwindling opportunity and growing alienation, not just 
at the parties but at the whole system. If I weren't persuaded as to 
that, and if I felt that acting in one's own interest in any and all 
contexts means to most people forever acting alone and not together, I'd 
feel there's no hope left, for the left or anyone else. Watch for 
movement to prevent the cities from further "urban renewal," where much 
of the funding for infrastructure rehabilitation would go (and where the 
opportunities for shutting  down entire urban complexes are greatest 
with the chance that displacement of the poor can coalesce with other 
interests, including Walmart-type working class resentment, in and out 
of jobs.


So, John, keep the faith and keep your hackles up but if possible your 
voice from getting too shrill.



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Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Michael Lebowitz  wrote

Impossible not to respond to Andrew Stewart's query: "Does anyone have a 
decent, understandable brief that explains the operation of the Soviet 
economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going tobe a whole 
other debate)?"


Here was my entry: "Contradictions of 'Real Socialism': the Conductor 
and the Conducted", published by Monthly Review Press in 2012 (with a 
Cuban edition in 2015 and revised Spanish translations forthcoming in 
Chile, Ecuador and Spain) and reviewed nicely by Louis at 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/the-contradictions-of-real-socialism/


and

Walter Daum wrote

I offer a chapter of my book, The Life and Death of Stalinism, published 
in 1990:


http://lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter5_stalinistcapitalism.pdf.

Since then Soviet archives have been opened to scholars, and I believe 
that the broad ideas in this chapter are illustrated in, for example, 
the book The Political Economy of Stalinism by Paul R. Gregory, which 
might be available online. t.



I have recently read Michael's fine book and just finished reading 
Walter Daum's, both for an online discussion group, and I found both 
enlightening, informative and helpful. Michael's book is the more recent 
(2012?), containing much food for thought - lessons to be learned, as 
has been true of all of his books.  Walter's was written in the period 
from 1985-1989 and therefore is kind of prescient. It's exhaustively 
researched and closely reasoned on the principles of Marxism and on the 
topic of the rise and fall of Stalinism and the breakup of the Soviet 
Union. So readem both; they offer somewhat differing views, both worth 
considering. Walter's is even online yet, and Michael's is very 
accessible in paperback.



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Trump’s Fledgling Presidency Has Already Collapsed

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect On 8/8/17 12:35 PM wrote,

Jeff wrote:
Let's see: an authoritarian figure gaining increased or dictatorial 
powers after rallying his nation to war. Do possibilities of that sort 
not concern readers of this list?


No, there will be no dictatorship in the USA--not as long as bourgeois 
democracy can ensure Nissan workers voting against their own class 
interests. Why would the American ruling class sanction a risky and 
unnecessary fascist state when the electoral machine keeps everybody 
under its thumb so well? With the largest socialist group in the USA 
determined to support Democratic candidates, why rock the boat?

_

I agree and disagree, Lou.

We may not have the what we formally call a dictatorship in the classic 
sense, but don't we already have lock down means of social control, in 
place increasingly with the coming of the Clintonites - who still in 
case anyone hasn't noticed control the Democratic Party?


Consider the fact that beginning more or less with Bill Clinton we have 
been becoming as a society an authoritarian state, with the unleashing 
of the banks domestically and globally to prey without having to pay, 
increasingly indebted to the bondholders, while employment becomes more 
and more uncertain and inadequate to our needs for sustenance - health, 
education and welfare. With the screws on so tightly that the great 
preponderance of us, including the rather crucial, now-encumbered 
students, are no longer at liberty to effectively protest, fearing that 
with the debtor/carceral/surveillance/military'imperialist regime 
developing more and more we can lose our jobs and therefore our cars, 
homes, furnishings, education, tchotchkes and life chances. As capital 
continues to base expansion on printing money not constrained by its 
relationship to gold and silver, piling one humongous number on the last 
through 'quantitative easing,' bailouts, the Pentagon and what have you 
- debt which is a claim on our future value and which we and our progeny 
must pay, our futures, as David Harvey says, are being foreclosed, by 
the debtor economy that has been largely, steadily moving in alongside 
neoliberalism during the past thirty years.


And then by way of recourse, more than a few of us had been counting on 
the 76-year old Bernie, almost as millions counted on the contrived, 
empty promises of a much-younger Obama in 2008. Here's my take on the 
prospects with Bernie, and how he probably sees it as well: since his 
election to the House in 1990, ostensibly as an independent, he has been 
carrying water for the Mississippi of the North, the state of Vermont, 
through Congressional horse-trading, caucusing with the Democrats, 
influential committee assignments and access to power, retention of 
which is all vital to the well-being of his largely-deprived 
constituency. So to spell that out, he is in thrall to a networking 
system, he reports to Schumer and the Wall Street leadership (he's now 
'Senator Outreach' of the party, in an era where no New Deal with any 
source of fresh jobs with any legs is in prospect), and if he failed to 
deliver in his home base his long-time electoral constituency could 
evaporate, and all the knives would come at him come the next election. 
So what could anyone expect from this lifelong establishment politician? 
How could he abandon all that and try to lead a motley gaggle out to 
another party without any established, well-seated organization or 
disciplined, time-tested, experienced backers, his vulnerability to all 
the twists of establishment formal electoral procedures when the party 
dumps him completely, or steady access to media and national attention - 
however much he might still be able to raise funds independent of Wall 
Street?


Isn't it just about axiomatic that an establishment politician many 
years in the saddle in that corrupt institution is not  the sort we can 
pin our hopes on? Who then? As with the guy who came in for a shave, the 
barber lathered him, took off the sheet and said that'll be five dollars 
and the guy said how about my shave, to which the barber responded and I 
retort, Oh, we just lather here.




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[Marxism] A clear analysis of the North Korean-American nuclear danger

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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This is published in Counterpunch. As nearly as I can tell this author 
is a Burkean conservative for whom a thorough materialist analysis is a 
third rail, but he otherwise has a very helpful view of the background.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/06/mayday-korea-america-on-the-brink-of-nuclear-war/ 




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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Shilling for the Kremlin: Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, and The Rolling Stones Sell Their Souls to Putinism – The Russian Reader

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

https://therussianreader.com/2017/09/07/shilling-for-the-kremlin-chris-hedges-noam-chomsky-and-the-rolling-stones-sell-their-souls-to-putiniting 
invitations to be covered by n openly avowed counter-part ot BBC or VOA.
 




I suggest that since people like Chomsky and Hedges here in the west, 
who can't get a hearing anywhere in the western msm because they're 
speaking out, eloquently in most cases, about especially US official 
conduct, which is outrageous in so many major ways by any reasonable 
standard and exposure of which pains the powerful so deeply (look at 
what's happened to Ellsberg, Assange, Manning, Snowden), that they and 
others have resort to a Russian counterpart of BBC and VOA to get that 
message out. And I suggest that the reason there's a hearing in the west 
for RT is because what they produce there about the west including the 
US often strikes home and is in many if not most cases completely 
credible. And I suggest that this screed against them serves the 
interests of those who suppress information in the west and those with 
the most to lose by exposure.



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Re: [Marxism] The Russian Reader: Chutzpah

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Thomas Campbell wrote

https://therussianreader.com/2017/09/12/chutzpah/

Here’s the score, boys and girls. This is what happens, sooner or later, 
to everyone who has a beef, however minor, with the Putin regime. They 
get a visit from a “policeman” who is indistinguishable, in his 
behavior, looks, and speech, from an ordinary thug.



For all that, justification on the ground and all that, what is the 
essential difference between RT, BBC and VOA? Yes, the Russian regime is 
from what I know everything you say it is. and which for reasons of 
state and economic insecurity that we could go into is, 
counter-productively in the long run and like most third world regimes, 
more repressive, corrupt and hostile to dissent than many western 
governments. So then how about the US regime? In terms of its relative 
effect on the lives or life chances of countless working class 
inhabitants of the planet, and its threat to the long-term viability of 
our species, when it threatens to spread nuclear annihilation and 
selective murder by drone and space technology all over the place, 
denies and impedes any meaningful action on climate deterioration, 
prevents labor mobility and rise in living standards in every corner of 
the globe while enhancing capital mobility without impedance to the 
benefit of US capital, and consumes the preponderance of the world's 
assets, many irreplaceable? Need I elaborate further? Have you for 
example in the past few days seen our media outlets' smug, self-serving 
coverage of North Korea, 9-11 and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma? Would you 
be posting, not just on VOA, but on the organs of a vicious US media 
conspiracy which conceals all that I describe and requires truth-seekers 
with vital information to resort to an outlet no less venal but open to 
an essential critique of US corporate and governmental actions?



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[Marxism] Walker and Trump’s Foxconn Deal May Be Worst in American History

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://ourfuture.org/20170913/walker-and-trumps-foxconn-deal-may-be-worst-in-american-history?utm_source=progressive_breakfast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbreak

Now that Wisconsin is thoroughly softened up by repeated defeats for 
labor, several years of successful anti-worker moves, in comes their 
ultra-right-wing Governor Scott Walker arm-in-arm with Trump and 
Foxconn, the Taiwanese company which brought China mass suicides and 
long, unhealthy, onerous working conditions. Foxconn relocates to 
Wisconsin because they're being offered a $3 billion subsidy to relocate 
to that state that they couldn't refuse, paid for by Wisconsin 
taxpayers, along with the inevitable repatriation of profits drained 
from Wisconsin inhabitants, not even due to be circulated in their own 
area but to the coffers of the stockholders of this giant predatory 
foreign corporation. That plus a leg up on the race to the bottom for 
another segment of US workers due to be underpaid and overworked, who 
were once schooled to expect a race to the top and now will be that much 
closer to their counterparts in China on wages and working conditions.


It's well to keep in mind, though, that we are in a sustained economic 
slump with an increasingly debt-encumbered and insecure working class 
and inexorable increase in automation across the spectrum as capital 
scrambles for diminishing market share - and that following the 1929 
crash, joblessness, homelessness and Hoovervilles, it took a period of 
years before the workers managed to organize and fight back. We can work 
towards that and hope, but this time around for nothing less than a 
united global fight-back. That will take in this country disillusionment 
with the prospect of a working class divided from and opposed to foreign 
workers and sharing in the rip-off from their cheaper labor. Anything 
short of that, with the mobility and power of concentrated capital 
increasing constantly and spreading globally, is pyrrhic.





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[Marxism] North Korea Fires Missile Over Japan, Prompting New Sanctions Threats

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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North Korea Fires Missile Over Japan, Prompting New Sanctions Threats

Headline Sep 15, 2017

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/9/15/headlines/north_korea_fires_missile_over_japan_prompting_new_sanctions_threats

North Korea fired a ballistic missile across northern Japan Friday, just 
days after the U.N. Security Council approved a new round of sanctions 
against the North Korean regime. The intermediate-range missile 
triggered air raid sirens across the island of Hokkaido, drawing 
condemnation from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who called it 
"totally unacceptable." In response to the test, South Korea conducted a 
missile drill of its own, releasing a video showing the launch of 
missiles capable of reaching any part of North Korea. This is South 
Korean President Moon Jae-in.


   *President Moon Jae-in*: "North Korea should clearly realize that it
   is entering a path of downfall, due to a diplomatic and economic
   isolation as much as it increases frequency and strength of reckless
   provocation."

At the U.N., the Security Council is set to hold an emergency meeting on 
North Korea this afternoon. In a statement, Secretary of State Rex 
Tillerson called on China and Russia to take "direct action"—including 
new sanctions on oil exports and North Korean labor. Last month, 
President Trump threatened to unleash "fire and fury" on North Korea, 
and the U.S. has not ruled out a nuclear first strike.




A glance at the map shows that North Korean access to the sea is almost 
completely blocked by Japan. There's virtually no way that an 
intermediate-range missile could be fired to fall to seaward except over 
Japan, and instead of onto the inhabited Asian land mass of Russia or 
China. in this case, over Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island, 
with the least population. Of Japan's 127 million people, only a little 
over 5 million live on Hokkaido. I'm sure apologies all around. They 
brew a decent beverage on Hokkaido, by the way, Sapporo beer.



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[Marxism] NSA posture on Syria

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://theintercept.com/document/2017/09/12/nsa-posture-on-syria/

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[Marxism] [UCE] Re: Fwd: The Ken Burns Vietnam War Documentary Glosses Over Devastating Civilian Toll

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/the-ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll/ 




The same happened in North Korea, conceivably far worse. North Korea is 
now being threatened again with unimaginably greater destruction.  And 
North Korea's history during the bombing and invasion is a story that 
achingly needs telling to a totally callous world in a time of growing 
tension over their development of nuclear weapons, in the way that Nick 
Turse briefly lays out in this article about Vietnam.


In 1975 I was in Tanzania. This was the headquarters for a number of the 
continent's liberation struggles. That atmosphere was contagious. I had 
read IF Stone's book on Korea, I had read about "juche," or self 
reliance, the name for the regime's official ideology, I had no reason 
to believe US sources about what was taking place in this isolated, 
besieged country, and I went to the North Korean embassy to get the 
collected works of Kim Il Sung, which I had heard had been made 
available in English for Africans. I was met by a young Korean woman 
outside the embassy, who spoke no English. She was in tears and 
overwhelmed, trying in every way she could to convey to this American, 
at least one of us, what my country had done to her country, and I 
listened with respect and concern, but the language barrier and any 
expression in either direction was very difficult. She did give me the 
collection, and since i was traveling over land in my several years 
odyssey across the world, making it impossible to take the collection 
with me, I left the works with African friends. Now of course I wish 
that I had kept it, given its historical relevance, and its invaluable 
perspective from the other side concerning a system that has somehow 
perdured despite unfathomable odds for almost 70 years, amid all the 
distorted information we've being fed.



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[Marxism] [UCE] Re: Fwd: The Ken Burns Vietnam War Documentary Glosses Over Devastating Civilian Toll

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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I sent this last night, it's marked 'sent' in  my file bit didn't get 
there. Trying again.


IF Stone's 'The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950-51' (1952) is 
online at


https://www.docdroid.net/dz6t/the-hidden-history-of-the-korean-war-1950-1951-a-nonconformist-history-of-our-times-i-f-stone.pdf#page=6 




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[Marxism] Gaius Publius: The American Flag and What It Stands For

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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A thoughtful piece on Kaepernick and all.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/gaius-publius-american-flag-stands.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29


I had an experience yesterday afternoon at our kitchen table, probably 
repeated daily at many tables, that says much to me about race and white 
responses. Our next door neighbor is an outgoing person, who has sought 
us out, bringing us potatoes and apples and herbs from her garden. She's 
disabled. her husband is the animal control officer in our county, and I 
gather from what she said that she's spent a lot of her life in 
low-income public housing. Yesterday she told us about her experience in 
Phoenix. Arizona, in a housing project. I had asked her if she liked 
living in Arizona. She replied that the place was all right but that it 
was the people there that she didn't like. My wife and I nodded, 
expecting (in our isolation, really) that what she was referring to was 
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump recently pardoned for racial profiling, 
and the racist, xenophobic atmosphere in that state.


Then she told about how cars were routinely stripped and ransacked in 
her Phoenix neighborhood. She told of having a Vespa, which her brother 
had hauled all the way up to the third floor landing, next to their 
entrance for safekeeping. And even then, it was repeatedly stripped, 
right in front of their noses. Then she turned red with anger and said, 
"Those nig...I don't know how they do it; they're so sneaky." "Nig..." 
came out and she stopped herself, suddenly not knowing which side we 
were on.


So there we had it. Here was a friendly, outgoing neighbor who only knew 
that she had been ripped off, but also who it was who did it and what 
they represented to her. Not a particularly unique experience, typifies 
the problem and goes to the heart of what's wrong. She had no 
understanding at all as to why this was happening, happening to her, and 
what the context is. She didn't know the history of exclusion and 
shunning and hatred and fear that was all part of being Black in a poor 
neighborhood in the US, how for most the only survival mode they can 
expect to have is in the "informal economy", which means to survive you 
steal from or in other ways short your immediate but possibly more 
fortunate neighbor, white or Black. If you try to go to areas where the 
real money is, the police, sheriffs like Arpaio who feed in that trough, 
quickly have you in lockup. In many ways it reminds me of what Mike 
Davis described in The Planet of Slums, where people living in refuse 
piles and ghettos on the cliff sides are forcing others like themselves 
to pay rent to them for being allowed to occupy part of the turf that 
they happen to have taken over first. And a whole monstrous system sits 
behind all thatfear and rage and obliviousness. That's the cultural and 
sub-cultural mindset in a world of get mine capitalist accumulation and 
devil take the hindmost.


Welcome to the neighborhood, and how proceed from here?


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[Marxism] [UCE] On Che Day replacing Columbus Day on Monday, October 9

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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http://la-epoca.com.bo/index.php?opt=front&mod=detalle&id=3949

https://www.theguardian.com/world/1967/oct/10/cuba.fromthearchive


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Re: [Marxism] Istvan Meszaros

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Mészáros is the author of works justly praised as magisterial, like 
/Beyond Capital/ and /Social Structures of Forms of Consciousness/, but 
his work can seem daunting and some may not stay the course to 
appreciate the value of his offerings.


I have really learned a lot from Meszaros. I believe that one day he 
will receive his due as one of the most effective interrogators of our 
time, and one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.


The Necessity of Social Control (2014) is a recent concise, accessible 
overview of Mészáros’s ideas, a broad survey of his work from his 
critique of bourgeois economics to the structural crisis of the capital 
system to the transition to socialism. Reading it may stir the reader to 
go further into and receive greater benefit from his writings.


John Bellamy Foster in his foreword to The Necessity of Social Control:

“István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical 
materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically 
alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, 
the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style 
post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the 
transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure 
and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms 
of thought—is unequaled in our time.”


Tribute to Meszaros from Judith Orr, author of Abortion Wars, the fight 
for reproductive rights (Policy Press) and Marxism and Women’s 
Liberation (Bookmarks Publications): 
https://www.facebook.com/judith.orr.581/posts/10159391768355427


His works online, in addition to various videos and articles: 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/meszaros/index.htm




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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists - Bloomberg

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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On 10/18/2017 7:03 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists 


https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists


"No one would like to see capitalism transform into the kind of dystopia 
envisioned by Karl Marx. That’s why even though the decline in labor’s 
share has so far been relatively modest, economists are racing to 
diagnose the cause before the problem gets any worse."


Read: 'We have to shape up to ward off communism, the age-old bugaboo, 
the 'spectre haunting Europe'" - which has never been given a chance to 
prove its merits, because the terms of trade on which all depend for 
life-sustaining resources are rigidly dictated to all the globe by 
capital, and most importantly, the sources of true conditions are 
concealed and distorted by the capitalist kept press and monopolized 
popular culture, backed by overwhelming police and military coercion - 
and Marx envisioned a system which this Bloomberg hack cannot 
acknowledge for a moment, whatever he may by now understand.



"The IMF economists also predict that global financial integration 
should help alleviate the pressure on labor in poor countries. If 
American, European, Japanese and Taiwanese companies are able to invest 
in a developing country like China, the inflow of foreign money will 
boost incomes for local workers and compete down the profits of local 
capital owners."


Walt Rostow and his 'stages of growth' platform still being mindlessly 
channeled, after 65 years,  ignoring that 65 years later much of the 
planet's inhabitants lives on $2 a day or less, the disparity between 
North and South wage rates are falling not rising, and we're not one 
flea-hop closer to solving the world's, the climate's and the working 
class's pressing problems. And completely ignoring anything to the left 
of Rostow, Stiglitz or Krugman, such as John Smith's fine book 
'Imperialism in the 20th Century,' which if any loutish, mouthpiece 
pundit would take the trouble to read, lays it all out plain and clear.


Here is what John Smith has to say about Rostow:

The Suppression of free labor mobility and the making of the South

The  proclaimed free movement of capital  and  commodities must also be 
applied to that which must be above all else: human beings. No more 
bloodstained walls like the one being constructed along the American- 
Mexican border, which costs hundreds of lives each year. The persecution 
of immigrants must cease! Xenophobia must end, not solidarity! —Fidel 
Castro, Durban, 2 September 1998


A facile analogy between the modernization processes taking  place in 
the Global South since the Second World War and the nineteenth-century 
development of capitalism in Europe and North America is central to 
capitalist  ideology in both its liberal and neoliberal  variants. 
Convergence between developing and developed nations was both the 
premise and the prediction of  Walter Rostow’s paradigm-setting The 
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which argued that 
developing countries would naturally pass through the same stages of 
development as did Europe and North America a century earlier, from 
agrarian societies to industrialized societies, eventually attaining 
development and convergence with developed countries. Sixty-five years 
on, and only Taiwan and South Korea have risen from the ranks of 
developing nations, and the global crisis will test how secure is their 
grip on the higher rungs of the development ladder. Rostow’s seminal 
work helped to  turn this  deterministic  and Eurocentric  notion  into  
the intellectual foundation both for the mainstream academic theories of 
development and for the policies promoted by imperialist governments and 
international financial institutions (IFIs) from the 1960s until now. 
Rostow argued that Europe’s takeoff resulted from internal processes:


'All that lies behind the breakup of the Middle Ages is relevant to the 
creation of the preconditions for takeoff in Western Europe. Among the 
Western European states, Britain, favored by geography, natural 
resources, trading possibilities, social and political structure, was 
the first to develop  fully  the  preconditions for takeoff. The more 
general case in modern history, however, saw the stage of preconditions 
arise not  endogenously  but  from  some external intrusion by more 
advanced societies.'


But is  it  true  that  Britain  and Europe’s  “takeoff ”  was  due to  
endogenous factors alone, as Rostow assert

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists - Bloomberg

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Correction: "the disparity between North and South wage rates is falling 
not rising" should read "rising not falling."




On 10/18/2017 7:03 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists 


https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists


"No one would like to see capitalism transform into the kind of 
dystopia envisioned by Karl Marx. That’s why even though the decline 
in labor’s share has so far been relatively modest, economists are 
racing to diagnose the cause before the problem gets any worse."


Read: 'We have to shape up to ward off communism, the age-old bugaboo, 
the 'spectre haunting Europe'" - which has never been given a chance 
to prove its merits, because the terms of trade on which all depend 
for life-sustaining resources are rigidly dictated to all the globe by 
capital, and most importantly, the sources of true conditions are 
concealed and distorted by the capitalist kept press and monopolized 
popular culture, backed by overwhelming police and military coercion - 
and Marx envisioned a system which this Bloomberg hack cannot 
acknowledge for a moment, whatever he may by now understand.



"The IMF economists also predict that global financial integration 
should help alleviate the pressure on labor in poor countries. If 
American, European, Japanese and Taiwanese companies are able to 
invest in a developing country like China, the inflow of foreign money 
will boost incomes for local workers and compete down the profits of 
local capital owners."


Walt Rostow and his 'stages of growth' platform still being mindlessly 
channeled, after 65 years,  ignoring that 65 years later much of the 
planet's inhabitants lives on $2 a day or less, the disparity between 
North and South wage rates are falling not rising, and we're not one 
flea-hop closer to solving the world's, the climate's and the working 
class's pressing problems. And completely ignoring anything to the 
left of Rostow, Stiglitz or Krugman, such as John Smith's fine book 
'Imperialism in the 20th Century,' which if any loutish, mouthpiece 
pundit would take the trouble to read, lays it all out plain and clear.


Here is what John Smith has to say about Rostow:

The Suppression of free labor mobility and the making of the South

The  proclaimed free movement of capital  and  commodities must also 
be applied to that which must be above all else: human beings. No more 
bloodstained walls like the one being constructed along the American- 
Mexican border, which costs hundreds of lives each year. The 
persecution of immigrants must cease! Xenophobia must end, not 
solidarity! —Fidel Castro, Durban, 2 September 1998


A facile analogy between the modernization processes taking  place in 
the Global South since the Second World War and the nineteenth-century 
development of capitalism in Europe and North America is central to 
capitalist  ideology in both its liberal and neoliberal  variants. 
Convergence between developing and developed nations was both the 
premise and the prediction of  Walter Rostow’s paradigm-setting The 
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which argued 
that developing countries would naturally pass through the same stages 
of development as did Europe and North America a century earlier, from 
agrarian societies to industrialized societies, eventually attaining 
development and convergence with developed countries. Sixty-five years 
on, and only Taiwan and South Korea have risen from the ranks of 
developing nations, and the global crisis will test how secure is 
their grip on the higher rungs of the development ladder. Rostow’s 
seminal work helped to  turn  this deterministic  and Eurocentric  
notion  into  the  intellectual foundation both for the mainstream 
academic theories of development and for the policies promoted by 
imperialist governments and international financial institutions 
(IFIs) from the 1960s until now. Rostow argued that Europe’s takeoff 
resulted from internal processes:


'All that lies behind the breakup of the Middle Ages is relevant to 
the creation of the preconditions for takeoff in Western Europe. Among 
the Western European states, Britain, favored by geography, natural 
resources, trading possibilities, social and political structure, was 
the first to develop  fully  the preconditions for takeoff. The more 
general case in modern history, however, saw the stage of 
preconditions arise not endogenously  but  from  some  external 
intrusion by more advanced soci

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists - Bloomberg

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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John Smith in the quoted passage from 
http://resistir.info/livros/imperialism_john_smith.pdf writes: 
"Sixty-five years on, and only Taiwan and South Korea have risen from 
the ranks of developing nations, and the global crisis will test how 
secure is their grip on the higher rungs of the development ladder."


Here's an excerpt from 'Neoliberalism: Myths and Reality' by Martin 
Hart-Landsberg with respect to South Korea (presumably the same applies 
to Taiwan) 
https://monthlyreview.org/2006/04/01/neoliberalism-myths-and-reality 
that develops Smith's observation:


"Mainstream economists claim that this rise in manufactured exports 
demonstrates the benefits of liberalization, and thus the importance of 
WTO-style liberalization agreements for development. However, this 
argument falsely identifies FDI and exports of manufactures with 
development, thereby seriously misrepresenting the dynamics of 
transnational capital accumulation. The reality is that participation in 
transnational corporate controlled production networks has done little 
to support rising standards of living, economic stability, or national 
development prospects.


There are many reasons for this failure. First, those countries that 
have succeeded in attracting FDI have usually done so in the context of 
liberalizing and deregulating their economies. This has generally 
resulted in the destruction of their domestic import-competing 
industries, causing unemployment, a rapid rise in imports, and 
industrial hollowing out. Second, the activities located in the third 
world rarely transfer skills or technology, or encourage domestic 
industrial linkages. This means that these activities are seldom able to 
promote a dynamic or nationally integrated process of development. 
Furthermore the exports produced are highly import dependent, thereby 
greatly reducing their foreign exchange earning benefits.


Finally, the transnational accumulation process makes third world growth 
increasingly dependent on external demand. In most cases, the primary 
final market for these networks is the United States, which means that 
third world growth comes to depend ever more on the ability of the 
United States to sustain ever larger trade deficits—an increasingly 
dubious proposition.


Few countries have escaped these problems. For example, UNCTAD studied 
the economic performances of “seven of the more advanced developing 
countries” over the period 1981–96: Hong Kong (China), Malaysia, Mexico, 
Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan Province of China, and Turkey. 
These are among the most successful third world exporters of 
manufactures. Yet, because much of their export activity is organized 
within transnational corporate controlled production networks, the gains 
to worker well being or national development have been limited.


For example, average manufacturing value added for the group as a whole 
remained consistently below the value of manufactured exports over the 
entire period, with the ratio declining from 76 percent in 1981 to 55 
percent in 1996. And, although the group’s average ratio of manufactured 
exports to GDP rose sharply, its average ratio of manufacturing value 
added to GDP remained generally unchanged.21 Moreover, while the group 
as a whole generally maintained a rough balance in manufactured goods 
trade until the late 1980s, after that point imports grew much faster 
than exports. Mexico’s experience perhaps best symbolizes the bankruptcy 
of this growth strategy: “between 1980 and 1997 Mexico’s share in world 
manufactured exports rose tenfold, while its share in world 
manufacturing valued added fell by more than one third, and its share in 
world income (at current dollars) [fell] by about 13 percent.”22"


Moreover, in another article we find that liberalization and relaxation 
of protectionist policies and export controls have meant that Western 
transnational "vulture investors" have come in and obtained controlling 
shares in subsidiaries and sectors of South Korea's main companies, or 
bought them outright, including Daewoo. Samsung, Hyundai, Korea First 
Bank, Kor Am Bank, LG-LCD, Ssangyong Group - - and the South Korean 
economy has become increasingly transnationalized, at the expense of the 
working 
class.https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B14qbn0SD1qDQVl1Zm5WU2NhS0U/view





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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Economic warfare in in Venezuela | MR Online

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

Introduction by Steve Ellner

For several years, university professor Pasqualina C. Curcio has 
presented a wealth of empirical information in order to refute the 
notion that market logic, government incompetence and a flawed socialist 
model are responsible for the severe problems of shortages and inflation 
that afflict Venezuela. In The Visible Hand of the Market: Economic 
Warfare in Venezuela, Curcio discards the various explanations put 
forward by the Venezuelan opposition and the corporate media and 
concludes that the shortages have been induced as has the nation’s 
triple-digit inflation. The shortages are the result of hoarding and 
contraband, not due to the decline in national production or the failure 
of the government to provide the commercial sector with the necessary 
foreign currency to pay for imports. In fact, for the years that she 
analyzes between 2003 and 2013, the correlations claimed by government 
adversaries were not borne out by the facts: declining national 
production did not produce shortages nor did the state’s failure to sell 
sufficient dollars to finance imports. Furthermore, the types of goods 
that are in short supply are those controlled by oligopolistic 
companies, as opposed to small-sized businesses. All this demonstrates 
that what Curcio calls “planned shortages,” or economic sabotage, are 
largely responsible for the pressing economic problems facing the 
nation, similar to the case in Chile under Allende and in other 
leftist-governing nations throughout history.


full: https://mronline.org/2017/10/23/economic-warfare-in-in-venezuela/


What is written here raises a lot of questions: This book The Visible 
Hand of the Market: Economic Warfare in Venezuela has been written to 
correct for pervasive misinformation peddled by global politicians and 
media. It purports to detail how national food, medicines and hygiene 
products monopolies have contrived to produce disruption, disaffection 
and chaos.


Chavez's death and the little-known Maduro's accession, severely 
weakened as he narrowly won against all the forces arrayed against him, 
presented the oligarchy with their golden opportunity. They haven't 
carried it off. The book lists their main weapons: 1) planned shortage 
of essential materials; 2) induced inflation; 3) boycott in the supply 
of basic goods; 4) covert trade embargo and 5) international financial 
blockade, with gigantic transnational corporations and imperial power 
behind it all. Add to this bitter, protracted counter-revolutionary 
obstruction in the streets.


Despite massive opposition from banking, industry, market forces, the 
media and many in the bureaucracy, the wealthy classes and powerful US 
imperialist opposition, and of course with the positive support of the 
mass of the less well-off and abjectly poor sectors of the country, 
could it be of significance that because the military still supports the 
Bolivarian project throughout all the opposition's antics (unlike Chile 
in 1973) that it is still standing? Few know at close hand the 
machinations of corporate power as do the military, Chavez after all was 
one of them, and the oligarchy has failed to win them over.


Are the failure of disruptive tactics, street warfare, divisions in 
opposition leadership, and elections just completed favorable to the 
government (winning 18 of 21 gubernatorial contests), a sign of a 
turnaround and the spluttering defeat of the counter-revolution? Are the 
essential moral and material resources of the regime and above all of 
the people, and course-correction in the design of the revolution going 
forward enough? Petrol prices are rising again. What next? As in 
pre-revolutionary Russia, people must be hungering for reliable, honest, 
resolute leadership, information and a road map. This book, ordered by 
Maduros to be distributed massively as part of the new offensive, and 
its prompt translation into English, the language of imperial power, 
could conceivably have enormous consequences in aid of the revolution.





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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Economic warfare in in Venezuela | MR Online

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Richard Fidler wrote

A warning, however. Pasqualina's article (a chapter in her book) 
contains no statistics beyond 2013, that is, before the precipitous drop 
in hydrocarbons prices on the world (and Venezuelan) market. That 
changed a lot, if not everything. A few months ago, she published an 
article arguing that Venezuela was not really dependent on hydrocarbon 
exploitation, or at least not nearly as dependent as is commonly 
thought. See Mitos sobre la economía venezolana (I) (versión ilustrada), 
http://www.15yultimo.com/2017/06/17/mitos-sobre-la-economia-venezolana-i-version-ilustrada/. 
She also argued that manufacturing production had held up well in the 
recent period, another unconventional reading. She promised a follow-up 
article outlining what she thinks is the road to be taken now toward 
"overcoming the so-called rentist petroleum model," but to date I am 
unable to locate it.


Richard


Looking quickly through the first 122 pages of the book 
[https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/THE-VISIBLE-HAND-OF-THE-MARKET.-ECONOMIC-WARFARE-IN-VENEZUELA.-PASQUALINA-CURCIO-C.pdf], 
it appears that all subsequent chapters to that point are updated either 
through the fiscal year 2014, the calendar year 2015,or where feasible 
up through April 2016, presumably about the time it was published.



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[Marxism] Kali Akuno’s Oct 21 remarks on sustainable organizing in Jackson MS

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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I suggest that we all listen carefully to Kali Akuno’s Oct 21 remarks 
here on YouTube [about 1 hr. 18 min.], about Jackson, MS and the major 
efforts being made by socialists in the Black community there to cope 
with material conditions, think short term as it contributes to long 
term goals and sustain community in the process. This includes 
self-support, acquisition of land for growing their own food and 
housing, refraining from electoral politics when they see clearly that 
success there simply means managing repressive austerity, with a far 
right white legislature coming to MS in January that is going to make 
things much tougher for this community. As in many places, the 
unemployment rate in Jackson exceeds 50%. A lotta sense is going down 
there and much to learn from. Building on the work of Fanny Lou Hamer, 
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Malcolm X, with emphasis on 
theoretical and practical clarity. This to me is an approximation, an 
example of how left organizing has to proceed in the patch that we are 
now in.


https://blackagendareport.com/democratic-party-affiliation-mississippi-compromise-made-error-says-cooperation-jacksons-kali-akuno 




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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Get rid of capitalism? Millennials are ready to talk about it

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Manuel Barrera wrote

Wondering if anyone in NYC attended this event and if there will be an 
analysis?


Get rid of capitalism? Millennials are ready to talk about it 
http://a.msn.com/00/en-us/AAuv5lU?ocid=se



Manuel Barrera, PhD


Debate url: 
https://www.facebook.com/jacobinmag/videos/vb.143021112391265/1935924563100902/?type=2&theater 




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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Three Richest Americans Now Own More Wealth Than Bottom Half of US Combined: Report | Common Dreams

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect

   
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/11/08/three-richest-americans-now-own-more-wealth-bottom-half-us-combined-report



Reminder:

"The contradiction between the general social power into which capital 
develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the individual 
capitalists over these social conditions of production, on the other, 
becomes ever more irreconcilable, and yet contains the solution of the 
problem, because it implies at the same time the transformation of the 
conditions of production into general, common, social conditions. This 
transformation stems from the development of the productive forces under 
capitalist production, and from the ways and means by which this 
development takes place."


(Capital Vol. III Part III, p. 264, International Publishers edition, 1967)


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Jacobin interview with Antarsya leader

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Andrew Pollack wrote

Subject: Jacobin interview with Antarsya leader

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/antarsya-syriza-communist-party-greece-euro/



Several things struck me as I read this discussion, not comprehensive or 
in any particular order but maybe central in many respects. First, the 
tendency to speak of the student movement and its twists and turns in 
terms that did not relate it to the lives of actual working, struggling 
people in the midst of a deep depression - their hopes and their fears 
in light of their experiences and assessment of the situation, the 
alternatives and the prospects as they see them, and how that relates to 
the feasibility of any specific program, to the left of Syriza 
especially; second, the lack of detail or responsive analysis when asked 
to identify the strains of Althusserianism that he saw in parts of the 
student movement and their perceived significance - in effect, he shined 
it on and it wasn't pursued (although possibly in view of avoidance to 
use time most productively); third, the absence of any engagement with 
the real problems, in detail, in working within a hostile capitalist 
structure to effect socialist transition, effectively foiling the 
bankers' rigid ploys in a way that at the same time engages the 
strengths of the Greek working class constituency - this discussion is 
absent here, and it has to underlie elucidation of any viable program of 
transition, every step of the way, or it's all about organizational 
leftish muck; and fourth, absence of a detailed critique in whatever 
thumbnail form of the tactical strengths and weaknesses and the 
resulting prospects for Syriza, and how Antarsya would better it.


I have another question that has not been adequately dealt with to my 
mind: the significance for the prospects for a radical outcome of the 
presence of a somewhat uniquely large small business component in the 
Greek economy.




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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Conference Manifesto - NYTimes.com

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Louis Proyect wrote
...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/the-conference-manifesto/


An article that begins with "We are weary of academic conferences." 
Worth reading for those who are presenting at the Left Forum, because it 
describes all too many left conferences that I have attended.


There has to be a way to do this effectively. Maybe back to platonic 
method as one of the best forms of discourse, for those who may not 
fully remember, "a form of inquiry and discussion between individuals, 
based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical [exchange] 
and to illuminate ideas. It is a dialectical  method, often involving a 
discussion in which the defense of one point of view is questioned; one 
participant may lead another to contradict themselves in some way, thus 
strengthening the inquirer's own point." (Wikipedia)


But maybe forward to another form of dialectical clarity, if a more 
effective such relationship to one another can be visualized? I recall 
that when I was about seventeen, in the late 1930s in the depths of the 
depression, I accompanied a friend to a party in a badly run-down house 
in the poorest part of my home town. It was one of the first times I had 
ever gotten smashed. I found myself off in a corner of the room, talking 
with a couple, our hosts, who had just been through a long, agonizing 
wildcat strike, which they had lost. As I remember that party, they 
described in detail to me and a few others their rage, piling up over 
years, at the appallingly bad conditions of work that had caused them to 
act together to try to change things, their radical vision of a better 
world, the months of facing off against every resource that their 
powerful employer threw at them - strike-breaking, beatings and scabs, 
being sacked, cops interfering with picket lines, false accusations 
causing repeated arrests - all of the tactics that a corporation has at 
their disposal including the backing of the law and the state. They 
recounted how they were left, after prolonged, unsuccessful resistance, 
with months of unpaid rent, irate landlord and threats of eviction, 
running out of food, sending children off to school with no breakfast or 
lunch, efforts at solidarity and sharing of dwindling resources, illness 
and fatigue and bitterness and ultimately abject failure. All they had 
at the end was each other, sharing their defeat and their impoverished 
condition, and a lot of unanswered questions.


I have never forgotten that party. It's indescribable, really, as a 
vicarious event. It left its mark on me for life. Unanswered questions. 
Point is, to me being there and being part of that struggle can be 
conveyed effectively, but it can't be done either on a narrative, or an 
abstract, level alone - at least not without placing the abstractions as 
explanatory, clarifying (historical and materialist) theory in a solid 
framework of relevant, vivid painful experience, struggle, the ground 
bass if you will which a great many of us have never personally shared. 
And it's the most important function we can perform for the time being - 
along with acting on it, because we find ourselves in a period largely 
without a program. The suits don't have one, certainly, but neither do we.





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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Conference Manifesto - NYTimes.com

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Yeah, well, personal attacks seem to be part of the territory when you 
try to say something meaningful or controversial out there in public. My 
daughter is a self-acknowledged alcoholic, disarmingly so if you read 
her books. And she has grossly falsified and exaggerated my part in her 
life. It's what you do, often, especially if your field is fiction, to 
sell your commodity. My take on parenting is perform the act if you 
can't refrain, do your best but expect nothing and then you are less 
likely to be disappointed. We adopted my spouse's gifted 10-year old 
autistic granddaughter a few years ago, so I'm having another chance at 
it. When my wife showed me the review of this book in Book Forum I 
drafted a letter demanding that this be expunged. But then I found that 
her publisher was part of the Bertellsmann publishing empire, with their 
formidable battery of lawyers, and the book was already in print. And so 
yes I was seventeen back then, 91 now, and still somewhat sentient. I 
wish the same to you, and when will I learn to shut up.


----

On 5/10/15 1:11 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote:


   But maybe forward to another form of dialectical clarity, if a more
   effective such relationship to one another can be visualized? I recall
   that when I was about seventeen, in the late 1930s in the depths of the
   depression, I accompanied a friend to a party in a badly run-down house
   in the poorest part of my home town. It was one of the first times I had
   ever gotten smashed.


Holy mackerel. Someone older than me (and Gary McLennan and Hans 
Ehrbar). Ralph, were you *really* seventeen in the late 1930s?


Also, is this you?

Ralph Johansen, Christensen’s father, was charismatic but distant, a 
ponytailed Marxist lawyer who defended draft dodgers and Black Panthers. 
His hold on the daughter he named Laurie Kate Johansen continued long 
after her mother bravely left him and moved with her three daughters to 
Arizona to pursue her education. (When Christensen’s first stepfather, 
Jim Christensen, adopted the girls, their father’s name was removed from 
their birth certificates. She dropped the name Laurie at 14.)


full: 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2013/08/23/696410fc-e97f-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html 




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[Marxism] Tsipras’ Bailout Referendum Sham by Yves Smith

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Tsipras’ Bailout Referendum Sham
Posted on June 27, 2015 by Yves Smith
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/tsipras-bailout-referendum-sham.html

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Re: [Marxism] Tsipras’ Bailout Referendum Sham by Yves Smith

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Sure, but it'll take a day or three. I have to be in Grant's Pass 
tomorrow and then I go back there on the 1st. Sounds worthwhile, I'll 
read Lenin and Kevin.


On 6/28/2015 7:01 PM, Andrew Pollack wrote:
Ralph could you summarize your lengthy contribution above in 3 or 4 
bullet points (to give us incentive to read it after wading through 
Yves' offensive nonsense)?
Yves hasn't a clue about political dynamics. In contrast, Richard 
Seymour and Kevin Ovenden among others, who like us have no illusions in
Tsipras, are explaining how working class Greeks can use this 
referendum to advance the struggle, and how we can help them.


On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism 
mailto:marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu>> wrote:



On 6/27/2015 12:39 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:


    On 6/27/15 3:30 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote:

Tsipras’ Bailout Referendum Sham
Posted on June 27, 2015 by Yves Smith
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/tsipras-bailout-referendum-sham.html


"Greek defiance of its creditors will make it more, not less
dependent on them in the next year."

So, it was more radical not to defy the creditors? Gosh, Naked
Capitalism is more dialectical than I could have imagined.



More like rock and hard place? The implication I get from that
statement is that Yves seems to agree with assessment that
referendum is too late in the day, a strategic error in the
context, quoting: 'As Costas Lapavitsas of Syriza’s central
committee pointed out in early March
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/lapavitsas-varoufakis-grexit-syriza/>,
it was evident that the Troika and Eurogroup were not willing to
negotiate a new deal, in both senses of the word, with Greece.
Tsipras’ strategy had failed and it was time to change course',
because creditors could now [if not then] care less. And back then
Greece had more capital reserves with which to change course,
which are now largely gone. I have been following Yves Smith, and
from my reading he has been about as generally supportive of
Syriza as anyone (if sometimes critically so). But again, 'change
course' to Grexit? Well, yes, maybe, given the choices, but I'd
have to rely on those most affected to form an opinion.





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[Marxism] Class structure in Greece, tendencies of transformation amid crisis, impacts on organisational forms, structures

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Thanks to Andrew Pollack for pointing this out as well as the other 
articles referenced there:


Historical Materialism article paywalled - available via Richard Seymour 
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2015/01/notes-on-greece.html, where Seymour 
writes,


"It is imperative to get this right.  Syriza's election is the first 
real event on the European radical left for decades.  I do not mind 
being over-excited about this fact.  I am well aware of the limits of 
this success, and of the ways in which left governments can be 
domesticated.  Yet I would sooner get ahead of myself with enthusiasm 
than submit to the wised-up cynicism according to which every gain is an 
accident, and every betrayal was pre-ordained.  And this breakthrough 
does demand some careful research and theoretical work.


To that end, I'm going to try to post links to good, scholarly articles 
offering background on Greek social formation, its working class 
movements and the political variations therein.  This post is a start in 
that direction."




An examination of class structure in Greece, its tendencies of 
transformation amid the crisis, and its impacts on the organisational 
forms and structures of the social movement

Historical Materialism
Eirini Gaitanou

Abstract

The study of the Greek class structure is necessary for approaching and 
understanding the forms and structures of the labour and social movement 
in Greece. The class structure and the specific characteristics of the 
Greek social formation present special features compared to other 
developed capitalist countries of Europe. These features have 
historically resulted to the appearance of broader petty-bourgeois 
strata, in parallel to (and not competitively to) capitalist 
development. The tendency in the last twenty years (during the 
restructuring process) has been the expansion of capital into new areas 
and sectors of capitalist circulation, leading to the establishment of a 
range of services as capitalist commodities, and an expansion of 
unproductive, but necessary for the realisation of the surplus-value, 
activities (expanded reproduction of capitalism). Further, during the 
current crisis, we are witnessing a massive job destruction, along with 
a significant tendency of class polarisation and violent 
proletarianisation of the petty-bourgeois strata. Massive unemployment 
and precarious work are largely expanded, whilst the stable work model 
is eroded. This reality affects both the emergence and the forms of 
organisation of the labor and social movement. The working class is 
highly fragmented and heterogeneous, and the trade union movement has 
several weaknesses and pecularities. At the same time, large sections of 
the working strata cannot be expressed through the traditional trade 
unionism, because of conjunctural and structural reasons. Thus, there 
appear various forms of organisation that are beyond the scope of the 
traditional labor movement. The aim of this paper is to explore this 
landscape and the various possibilities open to collective action, its 
forms and manifestations at the political level.



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[Marxism] The Greek referendum and the tasks of the Left by Stavros Mavroudeas - Counterpunch

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/03/the-greek-referendum-and-the-tasks-of-the-left/#.VZa803-7F1Q.facebook 




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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Whatever happens to Greece, the euro is unsustainable | Business Spectator

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Louis Proyect wrote

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/7/3/european-crisis/whatever-happens-greece-euro-unsustainable

Paywall again

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Whatever happens to Greece, the euro is unsustainable | Business Spectator

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Louis Proyect wrote

Use this instead: 
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/whatever-happens-to-greece-the-euro-is-unsustainable/story-fnp85lcq-1227427130625 



http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/7/3/european-crisis/whatever-happens-greece-euro-unsustainable

Thanks but same result, says it's for subscribers only, but when I put 
your first url in google it came up



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[Marxism] Greece debt crisis: Greek voters reject bailout offer, BBC News 1 hour ago

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33403665


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Re: [Marxism] Badiou on Greece

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Andrew Pollack wrote

Talk about your world-historic events - ME agreeing with BADIOU!!!
Some great points here:
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2111-alain-badiou-eleven-points-inspired-by-the-situation-in-greece

Alain Badiou: Eleven points inspired by the situation in Greece

By Miri Davidson  / 
09 July 2015


/By Alain Badiou 
, Athens, 7 July. 
Originally published in Liberation 
. 
Translated from the French by David Broder.


http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2111-alain-badiou-eleven-points-inspired-by-the-situation-in-greece

/

//
Some great points, possibly, but there are several things here that I 
don't understand:


Badiou:
"2. Isn’t it true that part of nationalist opinion, or even of the far 
Right, also voted "No" to the financial institutions’ demands – to the 
diktat from Europe’s reactionary governments? Well, yes, we know that 
any purely negative vote will be partly confused. It has always been the 
case that the far Right can reject certain things that the far Left also 
rejects. The only clear thing is the affirmation of what we want. But 
everyone knows that what Syriza wants is opposed to what the 
nationalists and the fascists want. So the vote is not just a generic 
vote against the anti-popular demands of globalised capitalism and its 
European servants. It is also, for the moment, a vote of confidence in 
the Tsipras government."



How distinguish the far right's support for the 'no' vote from the far 
left's? Is it still important to have a way to know, other than the 
impressionistic? After all, the far right is sowing much confusion, 
trying to steal the left's thunder in Greece and elsewhere, by taking up 
the banner of anti-capitalism. Does class analysis still figure? If so, 
why does he disparage the distinction between left and right as below? 
Why is it only tied to parliamentary politics, as it has been since it 
emerged from the French Revolution? And as far as nationalist opinion 
goes, isn't part of the problem for the left that workers too often 
still do not make a clear distinction between national and international 
in pursuit of their own interests, at least partly because they do not 
distinguish between left and right as class-based?




Badiou:
"3. The fact that this is happening in Greece and not – as ought to be 
the case – everywhere else in Europe, indicates that the European "Left" 
has sunk into an irreversible coma."



Irreversible coma? irreversible? Is this an accurate translation? 
Assuming it is, isn't this indifferent language for a self-identified 
Marxist? What of the 'conjuncture', the historically changing conditions 
that affect the struggle against capital? Does irreversible still have 
its dictionary meaning? And if 'irreversible coma', where is the 
'international popular support' that he calls for to come from? Thin air?



Badiou:
"Podemos repudiate the distinction between "Left" and "Right". I do, 
too. It belongs to the old world of parliamentary politics, which must 
be destroyed."



I'd like to see how his repudiation of "left" and "right" plays out. 
Where is the distinction drawn by Marx between left and right on the 
basis of a class's relation to the command centers of capital? How then 
make any meaningful distinctions between authoritarians, or "fascists", 
and socialists? How does Badiou see one's class position on the spectrum 
related to the law of value? Or is that meaningless jargon to him?


Just asking. I have read very little of Badiou. On the basis of this 
snippet, I would much rather continue a careful reading of Meszaros.




Alain Badiou: Eleven points inspired by the situation in Greece

By Miri Davidson  / 
09 July 2015


/By Alain Badiou 
, Athens, 7 July. 
Originally published in Liberation 
. 
Translated from the French by David Broder.


http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2111-alain-badiou-eleven-points-inspired-by-the-situation-in-greece
/

Copyright: Giovanni Tusa 2014.

It is urgently necessary to internationalise the G

Re: [Marxism] Badiou on Greece

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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I apologize for not striking the extraneous text..


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Re: [Marxism] Badiou on Greece

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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On a quick search: "Iglesias told the journalist Jacobo Rivero. Left 
and right, he added, are metaphors that are no longer “useful in 
political terms”: “the fundamental divide now [is] between oligarchy and 
democracy, between a social majority and a privileged minority.” Or, as 
Podemos likes to put it, between /la gente/ and /la casta/, the people 
and the caste."

http://www.thenation.com/article/can-podemos-win-spain/

That may sell populism, it may be necessary to alter terms, for instance 
(although that's an old argument, "socialism" and "communism" included - 
long since refuted to my recollection), but aside from being “useful in 
political terms”, how meaningful are they as a basis for analysis and 
therefore for consistent practice?


Maybe I'm as outmoded as the terms, maybe I'm unread, but youth inquires.




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Re: [Marxism] Greece accepts bailout terms

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Syriza, at least its predominating faction, seems to have resolved a 
seemingly intractable contradiction by grasping the regressive aspect, 
splitting, as Mao had it, the "revolutionary front", but that may be an 
ultra view under the circumstances. A faction not ripe, or times not 
ripe because of the absence of European solidarity, or possibly still as 
a situation inaccurately read. Into ignominious historical obscurity in 
any event, if true, then; someone mentioned Blum - "/Tout est 
possible!/" (Everything is possible) and in the end another coalition 
paralyzed by nationalism, economic crisis and geopolitical fears. But 
even if disillusionment and apathy for the time being, they by no 
stretch take the left into obscurity with them. (After all, the left's 
already obscure?) I will remember two things, though: that the Syriza 
coalition was predominantly reformist in its approach ("it is the Left’s 
historical duty, at this particular juncture, to stabilise capitalism; 
to save European capitalism from itself and from the inane handlers of 
the Eurozone’s inevitable crisis"), fearing (or unable) to take control 
of commanding heights, and that the Greek class structure (leaving aside 
the over all European class structure and the absence of pan-European 
solidarity with Syriza) was, although moving toward proletariat in 
composition, still small-business-informal 
economy-tourist-and-colonialist-minded - a peripheral country within a 
metropolitan complex, with metropolitan predilections.



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[Marxism] Fwd: Greece-- Might Be of Some Interest

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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 Forwarded Message 
Subject:Greece-- Might Be of Some Interest
Date:   Thu, 2 Jul 2015 23:01:27 -0400
From:   S.Artesian 
To: mdriscol...@charter.net



http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.com/2015/05/prospects-and-results.html




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Re: [Marxism] Marxism] FW: [SocialistProject] Bullet: Requiem at an Empty Grave? Syriza's Momentous Day

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Lenin's Tomb responds

http://www.leninology.co.uk/

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Re: [Marxism] [SocialistProject] Bullet: Requiem at an Empty Grave? Syriza's Momentous Day

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Michael Yates wrote

(...)

Louis has said that his interest in Syriza lies only in what lessons it 
can teach those in the US trying to build a radical party. What I would 
say is that what is needed is a radical re-conception of democracy, one 
that takes seriously the development, through both education and action, 
of the people's capacities to govern themselves. Meszaros and Michael 
Lebowitz have much to teach us about this.



Here are just two examples from among myriad. I just happened to read 
this morning these passages from Meszaros, thinking it might be useful 
to share them, and behold! comes this opportunity.


   It is no exaggeration to say that with 1989 a long historical
   phase - the one initiated by the October Revolution of 1917 -
   came to its end. From now on, whatever might be the future of
   socialism, it will have to be established on radically new
   foundations, beyond the tragedies and failures of Soviet type
   development which became blocked very soon after the conquest of
   power in Russia by Lenin and his followers.
   (...)
   To be sure, historical time - emanating from the dynamics of
   social interchanges - cannot possibly flow at a steady pace.
   Given the greatly varying intensity of social conflicts and
   determinations, we may experience historical intervals when
   everything seems to grind to a complete standstill, stubbornly
   refusing to move for a prolonged period of time. And by the same
   token, the eruption and intensification of structural conflicts
   may result in the most unexpected concatenation of apparently
   unstoppable events, accomplishing within days incomparably more
   than in decades beforehand.

   Istvan Meszaros, Beyond Capital, London: Merlin Press 1995 at
   pp. 284 and 283.

Then also last night I viewed the debate between Stathis Kouvelakis and 
Alex Callinicos on Greece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1paxMRddO0M, 
in which Kouvelakis of the Left Platform concludes his statement by 
saying, "You might know that I work as a political theorist and I have 
also worked on Marx's theory, and also particularly dear and very 
central to my work is the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul 
Sartre wrote, 'Every time I was mistaken it was because I haven't been 
sufficiently radical,' and I fully share this quotation - provided, 
provided - (holding up a finger amidst applause) hold on, there is a 
catch here, there is a catch. There is a catch, and the catch is that 
radical, for me at least, doesn't mean the repetition of the old recipes 
but, as one comrade, actually the speaker of the Syriza parliamentary 
group and prominent member of the Left Platform Zoi Konstantopoulou said 
yesterday, 'opening up our wings to the unknown.' Thank you."


However, throughout the presentations of both discussants, I kept 
thinking of something unmentioned, even in some other from, that 90% of 
Greece's needs, elements of its lifeline in the context of inexorably 
increasing interdependence, are supplied from outside Greece. And then 
by way of sober warning, I think of Richard Strauss's tone-poem of 
Cervantes's epic of the knight-errant Don Quixote, tilting with his 
sword at windmills, thinking they are giants, whereupon he falls at the 
first brush against the windmill's sails, shattering his lance. 
Cervantes tells us about how Don Quixote became who he was: “Through too 
little sleep and too much reading of books on knighthood, he dried up 
his brains in such a way that he wholly lost his judgement...“


So, the opening of wings to the unknown, that's beautiful and evocative, 
but it encounters material reality, implying in the Left Platform's 
program Grexit and cutting off creditors who supply capital for imports, 
who when asked for credit after Grexit, demand collateral - and then what?


So yes, on the other foot under Tsipras's leadership Syriza conveyed 
confidence in reform of Europe 'to save it from itself', as the only way 
to save Greece - a strategic error, and now they seek in disarray to 
preserve their lifeline to the Euro. Likely, in assuming the role of 
capital management on behalf of the creditors, aligning with the police 
and military against the antagonist, labor.


Rock and hard place. What lessons learned? I echo Michael Yates and 
refer one and all fwiw to Lebowitz and Meszaros.



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[Marxism] The Main Street Manifesto, Nouriel Roubini

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'Dr. Doom' 
sends shocks of recognition/shivers up Wall Street spine


The Main Street Manifesto
Jun 24, 2020
Nouriel Roubini 



The historic protests sweeping America were long overdue, not just as a 
response to racism and police violence, but also as a revolt against 
entrenched plutocracy. With a growing number of Americans falling into 
unemployment and economic insecurity, while major corporations take 
bailouts and slash labor costs, something had to give.





Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at New York University's Stern 
School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Macro Associates 
, was Senior Economist for International 
Affairs in the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 
Clinton Administration. He has worked for the International Monetary 
Fund, the US Federal Reserve, and the World Bank. His website is 
NourielRoubini.com .


https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/main-street-manifesto-for-covid19-crisis-by-nouriel-roubini-2020-06

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[Marxism] Nearly half of American adults are now unemployed

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nearly-half-of-american-adults-are-now-unemployed/ar-BB167gf0?li=BBnbfcN 


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[Marxism] 'All of us began with Marta Harnecker'

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''All of us began with Marta Harnecker'

'It is no exaggeration to affirm that Marta Harnecker was arguably the 
most important disseminator of Marx and Lenin’s ideas among successive 
waves of activists in Latin America...'


Not only among Spanish-speaking students of Marx. I first read Marta's 
work around 1980, and I'm sure many others everywhere benefited as well. 
And from the writings of her partner Michael Lebowitz, his many books 
including Beyond Capitalism, Build It Now, The Socialist Imperative.


By the way, I notice that this article was translated by Federico 
Fuentes, who had differences with Harnecker and Lebowitz over the 
Bolivarian Project, but who all emphasize the extent to which socialist 
change, as the author of this appreciation writes, 'involves a complex 
equation in whichnew organisational forms are not built - and will never 
be built - a priori, but rather are the result of the struggles of the 
times. They are products of and produce a platform of real and concrete 
demands, capable of transforming reality and shifting the balance of 
forces, while raising consciousness and drawing in other people and 
sectors to the project. But not to demand the possible. The neoliberal 
project affirms that almost nothing is possible. Marta, on the contrary, 
regularly recalled and emphasised that politics is the art of making 
possible the impossible.'


From what I know I am sure that, have to hope that, given the 
experience over all that workers in Venezuela have had in the Bolivarian 
Project and the attempted implementation of the forward-looking 
provisions of the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela, they can never 
go back to and accept willingly a capitalist regime.


The Bolivarian Constitution, as Lebowitz has written, 'calls for 
democratic planning and participatory budgeting at all levels of society 
and upon “self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms.”' 
This is reinforced by 'the communal path to socialism that Chavez 
refined in his last years.'  This seems so even in the midst of renewed 
impoverishment and the over-dependence on their primary export product, 
brought on by what could be seen in many of its aspects as the arguably 
Bonapartist nature of the regime from the time of its origins, 
attempting to straddle rather than outright eliminate its capitalist 
underpinnings.


This worker-peasant adherence appears to be in the main why the project 
persists despite many errors, including not adequately promoting 
agricultural self-sufficiency and failure to root out the corruption in 
the bourgeois bureaucracy from which it necessarily sprang.


Not even the top Venezuelan military brass seem able or willing to 
engineer a coup at this point, particularly since the bourgeois 
opposition is so weak and has so many divisions, the hand of the the US 
government is so patently visible in this oil-rich country, and a 
preponderant number of peasants and workers still appear to stand behind 
the Maduro government; and this despite evident stagnation of the 
project, reversion to privation and chronic shortages of essential goods.


And I feel that despite disillusion, the influence of people like 
Harnecker and Lebowitz and Istvan Meszaros, through Chavez, has left its 
permanent mark on people's perception of how the seemingly 'impossible 
can become the possible.' And the determination that change has to start 
somewhere, even if its proponents face mountainous obstacles in trying 
to go it alone in a powerful, hostile capitalist world.




http://links.org.au/all-of-us-began-with-marta-harnecker


   All of us began with Marta Harnecker

/In memory of Marta Harnecker, who passed away on June 14, 2019/

By *Miguel Enrique Stédile *

June 25, 2020 — /Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ 
 — 
During an interview, then-Bolivia Vice President Álvaro García Linera 
and Spanish state parliamentarian Pablo Iglesias were exchanging ideas 
on classic texts and their own initiation into politics when the Spanish 
activist proclaimed: “All of us began with Marta Harnecker”. This 
statement is not only true for today’s young leftists but for thousands 
of people who have defended Marxism and socialism in the past four decades.


It is no exaggeration to affirm that Marta Harnecker was arguably the 
most important disseminator of Marx and Lenin’s ideas among successive 
waves of activists in Latin America, starting with the publication of 
her “Booklets for Popular Education” in the 1970s and follo

Re: [Marxism] Trump in ?fragile? mood and may drop out of 2020 race if poll numbers don?t improve, GOP insiders tell Fox News | The Independent

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John Reimann wrote

As for Howie Hawkins and the Green Party: I had had hopes that it might 
develop into something - might start to develop a wider working class 
base - after Sanders lost in 2016. I think it's pretty clear since then 
that they won't. A real working class party will develop out of the 
struggle in the streets, on the jobs, and inside the unions. I have yet 
to see the Green Party play any significant role in any of that. To my 
knowledge, for example, they aren't even in the discussion within the 
protests against the George Floyd murder and the related murders.


Those like me who live in a shoo-in state for the Democrats at least 
don''t have to wrestle internally about voting for the greater dis-evil. 
We can write in Howie Hawkins, who appears to have a very good track 
record as a socialist candidate in NY state, as a way of recording our 
protest.

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Re: [Marxism] "Capitalism after Coronavirus"

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Mr. Gore, a former vice president of the United States, is chairman and 
Mr. Blood is senior partner of Generation Investment Management."


That's a kick: Gore and Blood.

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[Marxism] 06-30-20 Ruling Class Counteroffensive in the Works by William Robinson - LA Progressive

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 LA Progressive


 Ruling Class Counteroffensive in the Works


 *Ruling Class It’s Capitalism, Stupid*

*https://www.laprogressive.com/capitalism-2-2/?fbclid=IwAR3_J8qdVqdcaVDExAWM0gI8KngQxN1zMvi4GXCjVNzVNIYPJrvmQhEqevE
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*A*s anti-racist protests continue unabated across the United States, 
the ruling groups have been forced momentarily onto the defense by the 
sheer scale of the uprising, the first full-scale pushback against 
global police state 
 in the 
richest and most powerful country in the world.  Yet absent a more 
frontal attack on the root causes of racism, the uprising may be hard 
pressed to resist a counteroffensive from above involving a combination 
of repression, mild reform, and cooptation.


The powers that be are already embracing the language of struggle 
against “systemic racism.”  Racial justice is now being espoused by 
political and economic elites.  CEOs of major global banks and 
corporations whose policies have perpetuated racial inequality have 
taken the knee, declared their “solidarity” 
 
with aggrieved communities, as have Democratic and Republican Party 
stalwarts, as they attempt to commodify and convert “black lives matter” 
into a corporate logo. Lest the anti-racist struggle end up emptied of 
its transformative potential it must identify and target capitalism as 
the system that gave rise to and continuously reproduces racism.  
Ethnic, racial, gender and sexual oppression are not tangential but 
constitutive of capitalism.  There can be no general emancipation 
without liberation from these forms of oppression.   Yet the opposite is 
equally true: there can be no liberation from these forms of oppression 
without liberating ourselves from capitalism.


“We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said 
that the by-product, what comes off capitalism, that happens to be 
racism,” noted half a century ago Fred Hampton 
, 
the charismatic Chicago leader of the Black Panther Party shortly before 
his extra-judicial execution by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969.  
Hampton went on: “That capitalism comes first and next is racism.  That 
when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money.  So first the 
idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to 
make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to 
come from capitalism.  It had to be capitalism first and racism was a 
byproduct of that.”



 *To the extent that the struggle against police brutality is
 limited to targeting disproportionate police violence against
 racially oppressed communities the less we will be able to
 confront the underlying structural causes of this violence.*

Yet Hampton’s anti-capitalist perspective appears, at least at this 
time, to be largely absent.  To the extent that the struggle against 
police brutality is limited to targeting disproportionate police 
violence against racially oppressed communities the less we will be able 
to confront the underlying structural causes of this violence.  Racist 
police are but an extension of the capitalist state.  They exist to 
defend property from the propertyless, to enforce the power of capital 
and the rich over the poor and dispossessed majority who in the United 
States come disproportionately from racially oppressed communities.  In 
the big picture, the solution is not to reform law enforcement since law 
enforcement means enforcing a legal system that under capitalism is 
intended to protect the rich and the powerful from the poor and the 
dispossessed through criminalization of the latter or simply through 
enforcement of property rights.


As is now well known, the top one percent of humanity owns over half of 
the world’s wealth 
 
and the top 20 percent own 94.5 percent of that wealth, while the 
remaining 80 percent have to make do with just 5.5 percent.  Such savage 
social inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the 
system is unable to reverse them it turns to ever more violent forms of 
containment to manage immiserated populations.  The police are a 
coercive instrument of the capitalist state to control surplus labor, 
the poor, and the working class.  In the United States, workers from 
racially oppressed groups disproportionately swell the ranks of surplus 
labor, as do wo

[Marxism] Popular protagonism in Venezuela’s transition to socialism: A conversation with Michael Lebowitz

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http://links.org.au/popular-protagonism-venezuela-transition-socialism-michael-lebowitz 


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[Marxism] Chris Hedges: America faces a historic choice — "ugly corporate tyranny" or revolution | Salon.com July 16, 2020

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Chris Hedges: America faces a historic choice — "ugly corporate tyranny" 
or revolution | Salon.com

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/16/chris-hedges-america-faces-a-historic-choice--ugly-corporate-tyranny-or-revolution/

If I were writing it, I wouldn't change much in this compelling analysis 
by Chris Hedges, except that I would place greater emphasis on class as 
a determinant, and even more emphasis on ruling class power as a barrier 
well-designed to inhibit forward movement.


To recapitulate what I and many others on these lists see:

We are in a country that still very much dominates the globe, ever since 
WW2, with the primacy of the dollar as the world medium at which prices 
are set, the world's most powerful market, reputation among the poor and 
the darker-skinned around the globe as most desirable place to be - 
simultaneously driven by need, deprivation, hate and fear; the most 
powerful military, economic, political and cultural regime in history, a 
buffering middle class that benefits from that power with the most 
secure and relatively comfortable living conditions (matched and 
buttressed in more "developed" allied countries) in the history of the 
species, which protects the powerful from the full force of revolt among 
those most adversely affected.


The power, ever increasing, of the primary driver of capital 
accumulation, the competitive, piratical, no-holds-barred compulsion to 
extract profit at least cost from new investment increments of surplus 
to maximize market share, and the need to shape and condition the world 
socioeconomic system to comport with that imperative.


As is now becoming generally recognized on the left, It seems that 
whatever change for the better there will be will only come in this 
world when it is an active prospect here in the United States, the 
"belly," since without America on board, the dominant factor in 
production, exchange and distribution, change faces overwhelming odds.


Also we have, so far, no history on this continent of invasion, or 
generally acknowledged threat of physical destruction from other parts 
of the world. No chastening background. Nor have we yet any meaningful, 
generalized history of overt class consciousness in this regime of 
"equal opportunity," as much as that may appear to be coming undone or 
at least questioned.


It's this privileged position and rulers' power that gives me qualms 
about Hedge's assertion that "hope for change lies in the streets" of 
the United States. Expected feints yes, given the extent of continuing 
protest, toward change in the reactions of the powerful, like the 
current toleration of "Black Lives Matter" painting of dominant streets, 
the removal or renaming of offensive racist icons, corporate assent in 
many quarters to police reform, and the political donning of 
kente-cloth; but only to divert protest long enough to better facilitate 
means of repression.


Hedges does acknowledge the overwhelming police and ultimately 
military-carceral power to repress that movement, but that will gain 
force only once the domestic media are silenced by common boardroom 
assent, just as they have been since Vietnam in showcasing American 
savaging of others on the planet.


I'd say change of whatever extent will soon have to go underground and 
largely off the streets, over a long, painful period, not depend on 
exchange through the surveillance-capable and confined electronic media 
controlled by capital in that process, and be closely organized around a 
developing, viable vision of change, in order to overcome or mitigate 
the increasingly unequal, intractable socioeconomic and irreversible 
environmental catastrophe we see happening before our eyes.




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Re: [Marxism] Oregon Public Broadcasting: Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Alan Ginsberg wrote

Very scary

https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-law-enforcement-unmarked-vehicles-portland-protesters/



I just sent this to a long-time friend in Manhattan, who had told me 
that his Black grandson, who has been at U of Oregon in Eugene and is 
now at home in Portland, was hit by a rubber bullet at a protest this 
week. That's all that my friend knows. He has told me that his two 
grandchildren of a "mixed marriage" have said they are now afraid to 
drive across country to visit him. I had just sent him the article by 
Hedges.


This may seem a little off topic, maybe not. I also just finished, this 
morning, Hazan's book A Peoples History of the French Revolution. There 
too there was confusion, hysteria around protection of property and 
seigniorial privilege against popular protest amidst starvation and 
hoarding and speculation, "public safety" commissions, guillotining 
unrestrained, extremism run rampant, at any cost. And worldwide 
reaction. Coincidentally, federal officers were first reported seen on 
the Portland streets on July 14.


Think I'm paranoid? So be it. Beats heedless. Unless we see effective, 
massive protest around this too, going over to permanent revolution. The 
fire this time.




Case in point. This is really frightening.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-law-enforcement-unmarked-vehicles-portland-protesters/

I have to say that there's every reason to be afraid for your grandson 
if he's involved in this. Homeland Security, or its equivalents in the 
government, has been operating kind of in the shadows for at least the 
past 20 years and must have a sizeable dossier. It's chilling but it's 
what we can expect, and get out the way. Trump may even be planning a 
coup or its equivalent (even possibly with Democrats' collusion) if, 
despite current confusion and division, he and his cohorts think they 
can get enough middle class Americans to conclude in this fluid period 
that law and order are essential to prevent chaos.


The men in this video 
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/17/after-trump-deploys-secret-police-portland-imagine-what-happens-if-he-gets-four-more?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email 
are wearing combat garb, drab-type masks concealing identity, the only 
identifying information is "police" on chests, no identifying names or 
badge numbers visible or readable, nothing showing that they are even 
federal marshals, could be private goons employed by Eric Prince (Trump 
would like that), in hired, unmarked private vans. We don't know. A shot 
across the bow?


I no longer think that this is hyperbole, although part of me would 
surely like to believe so. I think it's part and parcel of the 
developing breakdown of capitalist legitimacy worldwide.


I remember how cointelpro has operated to provoke incidents and 
demoralize protesters, from the Black Panthers, blackmailing Martin 
Luther King, forged documents, their liaison with local police 
department surveillance, you name it, I'm sure it's ongoing, and there's 
no limit to what they can do. Today we learn that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 
liver cancer has recurred, prospect of a 6-3 rightwing Court; and we no 
longer have a Bill of Rights. The justification in Portland, of course, 
is protection of federal property and the inability of local authorities 
to contend with it. Federal property is everywhere; so is cointelpro.


Why should Americans think that we are somehow insulated from the most 
draconian measures to ensure capitalist "domestic tranquility," just 
because historically we have had a vibrant consensus on the part of a 
relatively prosperous middle class around "democratic values?" Why 
should we think that rabid US transnational corporate reaction only 
applies beyond our borders? Think "special forces," think Guantanamo, 
satellite surveillance, drones and destruction and the erosion of 
so-called national sovereignty among nation-states, when they can 
assassinate or permanently detain without charge or even acknowledgment 
anyone they please at will, anywhere.


The Corona virus pandemic, its follow-ons and unknown fortuitous 
happenings may give further impetus to the upending of our economy, as 
we can well imagine, and accelerate both protest and repression.

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[Marxism] Notes on Labor Migration as an Internationally Unregulated Human Supply Chain

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'When I read that a coyote referred to the migrant he was smuggling as a 
“package,” I was immediately reminded of the Atlantic slave trade, with 
its human “cargo.” It has always seemed reasonable to me to 
conceptualize the Atlantic Slave Trade — the triangular trade — as a 
supply chain'..A human supply chain. This would have the advantage, by 
focusing on the international working class as a whole, of avoiding 
siloed victimology narratives[2] like “forced labor” — what, exactly, is 
not forced about the global norm of wage labor?


...they consider the workers as inputs to the global supply chain of 
manufactured goods, and do not consider the supply of those human inputs 
(“cargo,” “packages”) as constituting a supply chain in and of itself. 
Hence they can only think in contractual, and not class terms. (It’s a 
bit like trying to dope out the supply chain for the iPhone by examining 
bills of lading.)


...a strategy of asking questions about human capital requirements that 
borrows from the questions supply chain managers typically ask, such as 
“Do we have the right parts in stock?” or, “Do we know where to get 
these parts when we need them?” and, “Does it cost a lot of money to 
carry inventory?”


...a deep bench in a supply chain is a costly way of preparing for 
demand. “The same applies to traditional succession management—you’re 
paying people to essentially ‘sit on the shelf,’


In its “workforce optimization” initiative, IBM is taking a supply chain 
management approach to solving these problems, cataloging skill sets as 
human inventory and applying the same supply chain technology used for 
the company’s hardware to respond quickly to short-term needs and plan 
for long-term demands. This approach makes sense, says Bruce Richardson, 
chief research officer at AMR Research. “As happens in a supply chain, 
you can find you have too much of one ‘product’ and not enough of 
another in the labor chain,” he says.


'Transnational migration is a market, of course: labor supply (made up 
of migrants) fills the labor demand of employers. In a functioning 
marketplace, demand and supply meet and reach an agreement on price (in 
this case, wages, benefits and working conditions) within the guidelines 
of the law and other contexts, such as collective bargaining agreements.'


...employers’ recruitment of would-be migrants from other countries, 
unlike their use of undocumented workers already in the United States, 
creates a transnational network of labor intermediaries—the 'human 
supply chain'—whose operation undermines the rule of law in the 
workplace, benefiting U.S. companies by reducing labor costs while 
creating distributional harms for U.S. workers, and placing temporary 
migrant workers in situations of severe subordination. It identifies the 
human supply chain as a key structure of the global economy, a close 
analog to the more familiar product supply chains through which U.S. 
companies manufacture products abroad.


B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE

Apple Fresh is a (fictitious) apple cider maker in Washington State…. 
Like all employers, Apple Fresh is responsible for ensuring that its 
employees’ wages, benefits, and working conditions comport with legal 
and contractual minimums. It must also pay social-security premiums on 
its employees’ behalf and cover their unemployment and workers’ 
compensation insurance. … As part of its effort to meet those demands, 
Apple Fresh decides to outsource its apple pressing to one of several 
food processors in the market, Presser Inc., which can produce the cider 
more cheaply and efficiently. Once it signs a contract with Presser, 
Apple Fresh is released from responsibility for the social insurance and 
many of the working conditions of the workers who press its apples, 
because it is no longer their employer. Presser now bears those 
obligations. …


In year two of the contract, Presser decides to try to decrease turnover 
and increase its profit margin by using temporary migrant workers to 
staff its plant. Its owner had been contacted not long before by the 
U.S. agent of a labor-recruitment firm in Mexico City…


[Read rent-seeking intermediaries, including the types of 'outsourcing,' 
variously described in John Smith's Imperialism in the 21st Century]


… to discuss the advantages of contracting the firm to hire H-2B 
migrants, including lower costs and a steady supply of uncomplaining 
workers. Presser’s human-resources department calls the agent and asks 
him to begin the recruitment process. The agent in turn contacts the 
firm in Mexico City, which has sub-agents in a Mexican state capita

[Marxism] The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom by Chris Hedges

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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What a masterful multiple hammerlock, killing birds with one stone, 
choose the metaphor to fit this hopelessly distorted picture. The wheels 
of US justice simultaneously make the moves to rein in/discipline the 
maverick Trump and company (needed, if for real, but will in no way 
serve the interests/needs of the working class) - conveniently, for 
geopolitical purposes, nail Russia as pariah nation - pressure hapless 
Ecuador and its comprador regime, who under liberal rule had forgotten 
its place - and put Assange the journalist in final jeopardy, to be 
expelled and arrested as unindicted - or covertly indicted - "traitor" 
(a non-citizen traitor) and co-conspirator and strung up for exposing 
the raw, savage bones of the system. And the press raves on. While the 
SCOTUS is poised to clamp its jaws on press freedom. and whatever else 
it can get its hands on.


Bye bye first amendment, hello toxic times.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-war-on-assange-is-a-war-on-press-freedom/ 




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Re: [Marxism] Watergate’s John Dean on Why Trump Will Survive the Russia Scandal – Rolling Stone

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/watergate-john-dean-why-trump-will-survive-russia-scandal-2-700723/

Catching up on my inbox, fwiw this is my comment in Rolling Stone:

While I don't disagree with what John Dean says here, this whole Russia 
Gate business is in any comprehensive view an exercise in denial/avoidance.


Interference in other nations' internal affairs is SOP presently and 
historically.


We can easily list more than 100 incidents of direct and indirect 
interference by the US in foreign elections or with foreign regimes, 
really the same thing. This has been in covert or overt, with virtual 
impunity it is thought, and devastating to the affected people and their 
country. In fact, what capitalist regime would not be doing this, given 
the capability?


Second, it's hard to quite figure out how the so-called interference 
really affected the outcome, if at all. Yes, it could be a threat to 
voters' rights, but my god stack that alongside of our government's 
savage conduct globally and internally, which we as a deluded people 
tolerate or ignore, to our seeming benefit.


Third, we are in an era of cyber warfare and generalized surveillance, 
without as yet effective defenses. So everyone able to spy in this 
manner is doing so, at their own peril if they do not.


Fourth, much or most of this is driven by transnational corporations, 
financial, industrial and other commercial, whose life-or-death drive 
for profitable expansion and therefore increased market share chases all 
over the globe in a constant vicious cycle of indirect and direct 
violence. Why would we think the hegemonic nations, following US's lead, 
are acting/have acted against regimes like Iran, Iraq, Libya,  China, 
Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba, on occasion countries like Brazil or 
Argentina or Mexico? Because, in one way or another, by either 
arrogating their own labor and material resources to their own state 
interests and/or national corporate interests, these subaltern entities 
in the international pecking order are interfering in the free flow of 
capital investment and access to material and labor resources by 
dominant capital and their captive state headquarters, without regard to 
borders or sovereignty. On that note, every so-called developed economy, 
without exception, has initially acted to protect its own infant 
industry, until such time as it might or might not reach the tier of 
hegemonic players. By any means feasible.


This is obviously true in the case of Russia and their material 
resources, including their claim on a substantial portion of Arctic and 
other territory with rich, vast, untapped oil and other mineral 
resources. Russia is a nation that has had more or less effective 
deterrence against that kind of intrusion for many years, since they 
became a major nuclear state. This threat is most often sooner or later 
countered, by boycott, financial impedance, diplomatic measures or 
frequently extreme violence, through elimination of a palpable threat or 
as a perceived threat to the path of capital dominance or unimpeded 
convenience, or in setting an example for others who would stand in the 
way.


So I say, let's come off it on this Russia scandal. It's not going to 
bring Trump and "trumpism" down, even weaken them, or affect the course 
of events in any significant way. This is garbage, this is an inexorably 
conflicted system of capital accumulation, and this hand-wringing over 
the so-called Russian scandal deflects from attention to real, onerous 
threats, such as imminent climate destruction and increasing global 
inequality and poverty.




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[Marxism] We Know Protests Work. So Why Aren't We Protesting? | HuffPost

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

The answer is obvious. We lack a powerful left.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-butler-protests_us_5b564158e4b0fd5c73c8127f

Well yes, and then why do we lack a powerful left? Why is its absence 
now global?


Why is it the case that there is no left despite the failure of 
capitalist reform in the stagnating economies of the advanced countries? 
The continuing expansion of capital in emergent areas of the globe is 
one reason, although all signs are that as AI becomes more prevalent and 
more sophisticated and depreciates in cost and increasingly reduces 
economies to a state of increasing labor reserves, and as the closely 
connected, centrifugal global economy stagnates, even these areas will 
face growing unemployment and conflict sooner rather than later. Then 
there's already continuing decline of capital's creds in providing the 
needed governance to fulfill needs of people throughout the planet. And 
the absence, largely because of the failure of the experiments in 
socialism in the USSR, China, Vietnam, Chile, Venezuela, soon-to-be Cuba 
and on - in the absence of a credible left vision that does not entail a 
command economy driven by accumulation through surplus value and 
dictatorial conditions for labor.


Eventually, we almost every time have learned from our mistakes, albeit 
in the case of systemic alternatives as now, for billions around the 
globe with enormous, protracted devastation and pain. Without the pain 
and in the shortest order, that's the hope.



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[Marxism] Tomgram: Michael Klare, Trump's Grand Strategy

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176451/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_trump%27s_grand_strategy/#more 




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Re: [Marxism] As Affordable Housing Crisis Grows, HUD Sits on the Sidelines

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

NY Times, July 28, 2018
As Affordable Housing Crisis Grows, HUD Sits on the Sidelines
By Glenn Thrush

This past week I read this moving account of what it's like to be a poor 
person in the inner cities of America. It's graphic and compelling. The 
story is told by an expert, painstaking ethnographer named Matthew 
Desmond, who now teaches at Princeton. Desmond immersed himself for 
months in  a run-down trailer park and then a multiple dwelling house in 
inner-city Milwaukee. He gained the confidence of the people around him 
sufficiently to be able to follow them closely in the endless hunt for 
housing after multiple evictions, into the small claims rental courts, 
through the street culture of a large city, camped out on the streets 
with their meager belongings when the sheriffs showed up. He documented 
the ruinous, racking effects of the housing crisis as it is experienced 
by millions in the US.


This is the synopsis online:

Evicted


   Poverty and Profit in the American City

By Matthew Desmond
/
Evicted /(2016) tells the heartbreaking story of the individuals and 
families who struggle to get by in the United States’ poorest cities. 
Despite their best efforts, many of these people have fallen into a 
vicious cycle of poverty that has left them at the mercy of greedy 
property owners who don’t hesitate to evict families at the slightest 
provocation. To take a closer look at the details of their lives, we’ll 
focus on the inner city of Milwaukee and the tenants and landlords who 
populate this deeply segregated area.



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[Marxism] Fwd: Naomi Klein's challenge to the NYT bombshell on climate

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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 Forwarded Message 









Naomi Klein's challenge to the NYT bombshell on climate
Sat, 4 Aug 2018 19:04:24 -0700

Writing on behalf of the ruling class in the leading organ of its 
educated faction, Rich blames all of us for passing up the last 
opportunity to fix climate change. He thus reinforces the myth of a 
"human nature" on which capitalism justifies its existence.-mm


Anyway, read and respond to Rich at

nathan...@nathanielrich.com 

Klein writes in The Intercept:

And yet we blew it — “we” being humans, who apparently are just too 
shortsighted to safeguard our future. Just in case we missed the point 
of who and what is to blame for the fact that we are now “losing earth,” 
Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page call out: “All the facts were 
known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”


Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who 
sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. (Imagine 
tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the U.S. government to 
come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to 
yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that 
humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the 
political system is corrupt and busted?)


This misreading has been pointed out 
 
out by many climate scientists and historians since the online version 
of the piece dropped on Wednesday. Others have remarked on the maddening 
invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe 
a screamingly homogenous group of U.S. power players. Throughout Rich’s 
accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global 
South who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, 
somehow able to care about future generations despite being human. The 
voices of women, meanwhile, are almost as rare in Rich’s text as 
sightings of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker — and when we ladies 
do appear, it is mainly as long-suffering wives of tragically heroic men."


Read it all at

https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/climate-change-new-york-times-magazine/ 




Writing on behalf of the ruling class in the leading organ of its 
educated faction, Rich blames all of us for passing up the last 
opportunity to fix climate change. He thus reinforces the myth of a 
"human nature" on which capitalism justifies its existence.-mm



 Anyway, read and respond to Rich at


nathan...@nathanielrich.com 


Klein writes in /The Intercept:/

And yet we blew it — “we” being humans, who apparently are just too 
shortsighted to safeguard our future. Just in case we missed the point 
of who and what is to blame for the fact that we are now “losing earth,” 
Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page callout: “All the facts were 
known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”


Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who 
sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. (Imagine 
tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the U.S. government to 
come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to 
yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that 
humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the 
political system is corrupt and busted?)


This misreading has beenpointed out 
by 
many climate scientists and historians since the online version of the 
piece dropped on Wednesday. Others have remarked on the maddening 
invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe 
a screamingly homogenous group of U.S. power players. Throughout Rich’s 
accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global 
South who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, 
somehow able to care about future generations despite being human. The 
voices of women, meanwhile, are almost as rare in Rich’s text as 
sightings of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker — and when we ladies 
do appear, it is mainly as long-suffering wives of tragically heroic men."


Read it all at

https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/climate-change-new-york-times-magazine/ 

Re: [Marxism] The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists | Portside

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://portside.org/2018-08-08/ragged-trousered-philanthropists

Book's online at 
http://www.freeclassicebooks.com/Robert%20Tressell/The%20Ragged%20Trousered%20Philanthropists.pdf




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Re: [Marxism] Zimbabwe elections

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Could it be that nationalism, tribalism, regionalism, nuclear 
family-ism, invidious distinction-ism, all these primitive associations, 
for now, continue in the main to trump socialism? And that instead of 
being an adjunct of socialism in its extension, this is seized and used 
against us by capital local and global . . . , until some powerful jolt 
to social relations is brought about that turns that towards universal, 
collective identity? We have experience that points in that direction: 
the failure of nationalism and national liberation movements to change 
our situation for the better, the failure of Euro-communism, social 
democracy and the ongoing failure of reformism generally, the failure of 
socialism in one country, also still being demonstrated, the failure of 
the notion that workers (no longer even "employees," but "associates" at 
big boxes, now "bankers" in finance, etc.) rise and fall with the fate 
of the corporation that exploits them, instead of organizing 
collectively across capital's contrived boundaries to extirpate the 
beast? So amidst gathering economic, social and environmental chaos 
"Trumpism" will soon fail, and then where to?


I have this simple-minded drawing I once made, copy of somebody's 
cartoon. In the first panel it shows a bunch of people deep in a hole, 
with the caption, "Once upon a time, there was a bunch of people stuck 
in a hole."  In the second panel, "Attempts were made by various 
individuals to get out of the hole, third panel, "such as arm flapping . 
. .  fourth panel "jumping" . . . , fifth panel "meditation and 
levitation" . . .  sixth panel "This went on for hundreds of years, 
until they had tried everything except helping each other out . . . The 
last panel shows people climbing on each other's shoulders and holding 
one person's foot in another's hands, with the caption, "So they helped 
each other out."



Louis Proyect wrote

On 8/9/18 11:55 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:

   Why could it not have started in Zimbabwe?


I think the answer is fairly obvious. ZANU-PF, like the ANC, like the 
MPLA in Angola, Frelimo in Mozambique, and like SWAPO in Namibia, were 
all national liberation movements with only a tangential relationship to 
socialism. When I was involved with Tecnica in the early 90s, I used to 
get reports from our volunteers working in all of these places about how 
unlike the FSLN they were. All of these volunteers had spent time in 
Nicaragua previously. I remember vividly how creeped out a volunteer who 
worked in Zimbabwe was by government officials.



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[Marxism] [UCE] Re: The future of class struggle in the US | International Socialist Review

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

Lee Sustar cites Bert Cochran in his analysis.

https://isreview.org/issue/109/future-class-struggle-us


Have those who read this article noticed that there is not one reference 
to the increasing globalization of capital and how that affects labor 
organizing within the boundaries of single nation-states - and the 
absolute necessity for workers to organize globally in the face of that 
fact - as the only means for survival? The whole article deals solely 
with the problems facing the US working class, alone and lonely. Strange 
to see in a journal calling itself International Socialist Review.



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[Marxism] Amidst Rising Heat Waves, UN says Cooling is a Human Right, not a Luxury

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Another lethal form of inequality: millions at risk of death from heat 
in poor countries, but people in wealthy countries have the air 
conditioning - and the air conditioners in turn exacerbate global heat.


http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/08/amidst-rising-heat-waves-un-says-cooling-human-right-not-luxury/ 




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Re: [Marxism] Hothouse Earth?

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Ian Angus wrote

“The Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could 
lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions. …


"Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not 
enough to stabilize the Earth System."


http://climateandcapitalism.com/2018/08/12/hothouse-earth-1/

I think calling this epoch "Capitalocene" instead of "Anthropocene" 
makes the most sense, in line with the term "ecosocialist." In an 
ongoing struggle with increasing direction towards essential systemic 
change, calling it for what it is becomes important, historically and 
currently. "Anthropocene" doesn't nail it, for obvious reasons. I sense 
that Ian Angus agrees, but it's not mentioned here, and I'd like to know 
whether.



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[Marxism] ‘Anthropocene or Capitalocene?’ misses the point by Ian Angus [2016]

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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MM wrote

> On Aug 13, 2018, at 6:59 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism 
 wrote:

>
> I think calling this epoch "Capitalocene" instead of "Anthropocene" 
makes the most sense, in line with the term "ecosocialist." In an 
ongoing struggle with increasing direction towards essential systemic 
change, calling it for what it is becomes important, historically and 
currently. "Anthropocene" doesn't nail it, for obvious reasons. I sense 
that Ian Angus agrees, but it's not mentioned here, and I'd like to know 
whether.


Ian addressed this a couple of years ago in his review of Jason Moore’s 
book:


http://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/09/26/anthropocene-or-capitalocene-misses-the-point/

I have read the article, thanks, and I quote below all that seems 
relevant there to my question. Angus does not agree with the term 
"Capitolicene" but refers readers to his book. Unfair, we should not 
have to read the book to get the answer to a disagreement he alludes to 
that he says he has with others. The difference between the terms 
"Anthropocene" and Capitalocene" is one he is fully aware of. It 
ascribes cause, the former in a misleading way.
Why not a brief explanation in this review backing his disagreement? I 
may be missing something, but I can speculate that it's because he 
considers it important to join the discussion with scientists and 
activists whose orientation is not ecosocialist, join alliances without 
appearing to be rigidly sectarian. Or that it's a problem that pre-dates 
capitalism, which seems clearly not his position. Given the extreme 
urgency of the issue and the absence of any alternative to ecosocialism 
to address the problem, as he well says, if that's the reason then I 
question his conclusion.


I once had a similar experience. long ago. We were a liberal group led 
by the Friends Committee on Legislation, a Quaker group, discussing 
content of our pamphlet opposing nuclear testing, proposing cessation of 
nuclear testing as a first step towards disarmament. A group of 
Trotskyists came into the meeting, arguing against the premise that 
nuclear disarmament was a first step toward disarmament or much of 
anything else, that the solution was to attack capitalism and global 
inequality as basic cause. I agree now, of course, but then we as 
liberals instead of examining their argument were spooked by the 
sectarian packing of the meeting and what we perceived to be an attempt 
to constitute a majority and to take over. We took the discussion 
elsewhere and published the pamphlet with our premise intact. Shame on 
me, but that seems to be how tremulous liberals still react to organized 
socialists. So it's a continuing dilemma, to be approached carefully.


From the article:

"...Andreas Malm says that “a more scientifically accurate 
designation…would be ‘the Capitalocene,’” he makes clear that he is 
referring to the “new geological epoch” that will last far longer than 
capitalism itself.10 I disagree with Malm about the name..."


"Most people who think the Anthropocene should be called Capitalocene 
are not challenging the science — they simply want to focus attention on 
capitalism’s responsibility for the crisis in the Earth System that 
scientists have identified."


"Moore is not alone in preferring the label Capitalocene, but most 
people who support that term agree that Earth System scientists have 
correctly identified a new stage in planetary history: they simply want 
a name that focuses attention on capitalism’s responsibility for the 
crisis.


"The IGBP concluded that the “Earth System as a whole” is experiencing 
unprecedented and qualitative change caused by recent human action. Its 
2004 synthesis report was explicit: “The second half of the twentieth 
century is unique in the entire history of human existence on earth…. 
The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation 
of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of 
humankind.”2"


"Marx and Engels studied and adopted ideas from the scientists of their 
day—Liebig on soil fertility, Morgan on early societies, Darwin on 
evolution, and more. We should follow their example and learn from 
today’s scientists, especially those who are studying the planetary 
emergency."


"If the Left stays out of the discussion, if we condemn it from the 
sidelines, we will be leaving Anthropocene science and scientists under 
the ideological swa

Re: [Marxism] Trump approval ratings down: MAGA turned on its head

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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John Reimann wrote

If socialists were seriously following world developments and knew how 
to handle perspectives, they would be explaining the irreversible 
decline in the power of US capitalism. They would be explaining how only 
the working class, organized as an independent global force, can even 
start to prevent the global chaos that is developing. They would not be 
so paralyzed by fear of supporting liberals that they dismiss these 
developments. It doesn't mean socialists should support the liberal 
capitalist order; it simply means it is disappearing no matter what the 
capitalists do.




This is good. I would add as well an understanding and articulation of 
how with the persistent drop in the rate of profit, the turn toward 
finance as the source of greater profitability and with financial power 
thereby strengthened in a debtor economy, and the accompanying decline 
in investment in the productive sectors of the US and triad economies, 
the movement of production by the transnational corporations away from 
the developed regions in search of greater profitability in the 
productive sector through cheaper labor and favorable infrastructural 
inducements in poorer regions, to the detriment of the triad countries' 
tax base among other things, how with these basic developments that 
decline in clout is not reaching critical mass - not yet - though 
inexorable and accelerating.


I would add moreover the barriers to be overcome, in capital's partly 
conscious, partly fortuitous but necessarily historically temporary 
separation of the global working class by restricting labor mobility 
from poorer to more wealthy regions, and the ability of capital to 
sustain movable areas of cheap labor and a shifting global chain of 
production that in turn produce invidious distinctions, which obstruct 
militant labor organization across borders.


Then there's all the permutations of environmental destruction.

And we should return to a thorough analysis of the shift in corporate 
global organization and actions, taking precedence over continuously 
mapping the behavior of nation-states and their bureaucratic and 
governmental personifications. Without knowledge of the first, no sense 
can be made of the second, or of effective strategies for the left.




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Re: [Marxism] [Pen-L] On the Origins of Capitalism 2

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Part 2 of Dimmock on Brenner

Brenner argued that for these Marxist historians whose analysis varies 
little from Adam Smith, 'the historical origin of capitalism becomes 
that of the origins of trade-based division of labor,' along the lines 
that Marx laid out in The German Ideology.' Like Smith, their accounts 
of the transition from feudalism to capitalism are rooted in the initial 
establishment of trade routes. Following Henri Pirenne, 'for Sweezy...it 
is the re-establishment of Mediterranean commerce after the Mohammedan 
invasions; for Wallerstein (who follows Frank), it is the great voyages 
of discovery and conquests which paved the way for the rise of the world 
market.' For Brenner there cannot be a straightforward determination of 
economic and demographic forces by technical changes or improvements in 
production because the application of techniques is dependent upon not 
only the desirability and opportunity but 19/ crucially the ability of 
lords or peasants to make changes, and not only as individuals and 
families but as lordly political communities in fundamental conflict 
with peasant political communities. As he says, 'Economic needs or 
desires cannot explain their own satisfaction, nor can opportunities 
account for the capacity to take advantage of them.'


[...]

20/ ...the relationships among feudal lords and between feudal lords and 
feudal monarchies, their social cohesion and processes of political 
centralization and state formation, now joined center stage with 
struggles  between communities of feudal lords and political communities 
of peasants. The driving force of history was now explicitly not simply 
the vertical class-struggle dialectic between producers and 
appropriators, peasants and lords - ...but the closely interconnected 
horizontal relations within the main classes. The development of 
capitalist social-property relations was no longer simply a question of 
the 'break-through' to self-sustaining growth, but rather the problem of 
a 'transition' from one specific set of social-property relations to 
another.


...Brenner's historical materialist approach...takes seriously Marx's 
emphasis in his later critique of political economy on the specificity 
of modes of production. Brenner asserts that specific structures of 
social-property relations will give rise to specific strategies for the 
reproduction of these relations. In feudal society, in common with most 
pre-capitalist societies, and in fundamental contrast with capitalist 
society - a system which appears as the antithesis or negation of 
feudalism - the vast amount of production was agrarian or land-based, 
and the vast amount of land was held or possessed (though rarely owned 
outright) by peasants or small-scale cultivators. First and foremost, 
peasants produced for family subsistence and marketed only surpluses 
beyond their needs for reproduction and their financial obligations to 
lords. For feudal lords to derive a steady income, they were therefore 
forced to coerce the peasantry to give up the surplus from the produce 
of the peasants' holdings. Additionally, in order to limit the market in 
free labor, lords forced peasants to work on the lords' own land, the 
home farm or demesne. The relationship determining the 21/ economic 
reproduction and survival of these main classes was therefore of a 
political or extra-economic nature. This relationship was in fundamental 
contrast to that in capitalism where the economic reproduction of the 
main classes is fundamentally, though not entirely, of an economic 
nature due to its mediation by the market. In other words, in 
capitalism, workers' labor power is bought and sold in the marketplace, 
and is not directly coerced by political communities, which is typically 
the case in feudalism. This political or extra-economic relationship is 
at the core of reproduction strategies of lords and peasants in most 
parts of medieval Europe.


Peasants desired to maintain the possession of their lands and in the 
best conditions possible. Brenner argues that the desirable conditions 
for peasants were full property rights on the land and payment of a 
small fixed, non-economic rent. However, as they demonstrated in clear 
examples of class conflict in the fourteenth century, peasants had 
visions and practical demands for the entire removal of the lord and the 
manor, This was by no means a desire for capitalism. Peasants aimed to 
achieve this goal towards better conditions vis-a-vis their lords by 
strengthening their local communal organizations or institutions of 
self-government, and by defending the force of custom in their lord's 
mano

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Re: The origins of capitalism

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

In all the years I have been reading Brenner, Post, Wood, Post et al, I 
have never seen a single reference to chapter 31 on "Genesis of the 
Industrial Capitalist". For people so sure of their superior knowledge 
of Marxism, how does this omission take place? Remarkable.



All of the material you have referenced here has to do with matters not 
at issue.


We've been down this path before. Brenner's focus is on how capitalism 
ORIGINATED, its speciated emergence and conception in a form and in 
conditions which without human design or intention produced it as the 
dominant form of production; in a specific form and locale, as a 
specific form of the organization of production, and not in all the 
forms of accumulation which contributed to these origins and their 
development in all sorts of places around the globe.


And that became Marx's focus in the Grundrisse and in volume 3 of 
Capital, implicit and explicit, as opposed to his theory of origins in 
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where his initial 
influence is Adam Smith and his exposition is trans-historical and 
therefore, as he realized on further reflection, conducive to a reading 
of the capitalist mode as just waiting there for proper conditions for 
the release of our natural human concupiscence, our pent-up, innate 
propensity to exchange and our built-in avarice and competitiveness. If 
that were the case, forget socialism.

. . . .

Louis Proyect wrote

Karl Marx:

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, 
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the 
beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of 
Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, 
signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These 
idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On 
their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the 
globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from 
Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is 
still going on in the opium wars against China, &c."

. . . .

You cite this passage as confirmation that Marx saw the genesis of 
capitalism in the realm of primitive accumulation, whereas as I've said, 
it was in the realm of those factors enabling, contributing, but 
ancillary to the actual origins of capitalism in agrarian England.

. . . .

Louis Proyect wrote

In all the years I have been reading Brenner, Post, Wood, Post et al, I 
have never seen a single reference to chapter 31 on "Genesis of the 
Industrial Capitalist". For people so sure of their superior knowledge 
of Marxism, how does this omission take place? Remarkable.

. . . .

From Chapter 51, volume 3:

"The confrontation of produced conditions of labour and of the products 
of labour generally, as capital, with the direct producers implies from 
the outset a definite social character of the material conditions of 
labour in relation to the labourers, and thereby a definite relationship 
into which they enter with the owners of the means of production and 
among themselves during production itself. The transformation of these 
conditions of labour into capital implies in turn the expropriation of 
the direct producers from the land, and thus a definite form of landed 
property."


The relevant passage here of course is "The transformation of these 
conditions of labour into capital implies in turn the expropriation of 
the direct producers from the land, and thus a definite form of landed 
property." Marx in other words is saying that the specific conditions 
for the genesis of capitalism, of the actual historical mode of 
production extracting surplus value from landless workers, lies not in 
the external sources of accumulation that enable  its appearance and may 
well be a sine qua non of that process), but the actual origin lies in 
the relationship between lord and peasant in 'the expropriation of the 
direct producers from the land, and thus a definite form of landed 
property.'


Which is Brenner's point: the transformation of these conditions of 
labour into capital implies in turn the expropriation of the direct 
producers from the land, and thus a definite form of landed property, 
material conditions of labor, definite social relations and definite 
social property relations - - all originating in the English countryside.**







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[Marxism] I am much more up to speed on Charles Post's attempt to apply the Brenner thesis to the USA. Like Brenner, takes great pains to disassociate forced labor from free wage labor in obvious defi

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Louis Proyect wrote

The other day Ralph Johansen asked me about the Brenner thesis.

I am much more up to speed on Charles Post's attempt to apply the 
Brenner thesis to the USA. Like Brenner, takes great pains to 
disassociate forced labor from free wage labor in obvious defiance of 
the history found in Horne's new book. Horne goes to great length to 
make the connections utterly absent in Political Marxism. Of the 
greatest interest to me is the interrelationship between the Barbados 
and New England. If petty commodity production in New England was a 
response to the demands generated by the growth of manufacturing, where 
did the capital used to launch manufacturing come from?


The answer is the Barbados slave trade and sugar production as this 
article points out:


https://connecticuthistory.org/connecticut-and-the-west-indies-trade/

If you go to Post's book, there are about 200 words referencing Barbados 
but none connects them to New England. No wonder there has never been a 
single Black scholar who has bought into Political Marxism.


Lou, I respect your voracious coverage of all kinds of topics, which you 
toss back to the list as you dig. I don't know about Post, but I sort of 
despair at your treatment of Brenner. My reading is different. Brenner 
is focused on the initial impetus to capitalism, its specific unique 
appearance. His efforts have no relevance to mercantilism, to 
development of capitalism in America or anywhere else, subsequent to its 
initial appearance in agrarian England, especially from 1400-1600.  
Except for its more or less simultaneous appearance in the Flemish-Dutch 
lowlands. Dimmock responds in detail to Brenner's critics, non-Marxists 
and Marxists, including Henry Heller, Chris Harman, Neil Davidson, S.R. 
Epstein, and others. effectively as I read him. And from a search online 
I have seen no reply from any (Harman is no longer with us), in the four 
years since publication of Dimmock's book. I doubt that this is because 
they think it's no longer relevant.


As to the presence in the Americas especially of capitalist production 
using slaves, Marx though sparse in treatment of the slave mode of 
production 
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch02.htm was very 
clear about it being a one-off, temporally brief and grafted form on 
what I'd call the metabolic corpus of capitalism, which takes 
pre-capitalist forms, customs and modes into its over all organization 
of production to the extent that they enable or enhance the capitalist 
mode, and sloughs them off when they no longer serve that purpose.


I don't know if you've seen this; others as well.

As here"

"In plantation colonies where commercial speculations figure from the 
start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist 
mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the 
slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labor, which is the basis of 
capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is 
conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce 
has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the 
same person is capitalist and landowner." -- Marx, Theories of Surplus 
Value, Part II, pages 302-3


Here

"...although the slave thus raised for the market had become an element 
of annual reproduction, this method did not suffice for a long time, so 
that the African slave trade was continued as long as possible for the 
purpose of supplying the market." -- Marx, Capital, Volume II, Chicago, 
Charles Kerr & Co., 1909, page 559.


And here

"...as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower 
forms of slave-labor, courvee labor, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool 
of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of 
production, the sale of their products for export becoming their 
principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on 
the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc. Hence the Negro labor in 
the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a 
patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to 
immediate local consumption.  But in proportion, as the export of cotton 
became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro 
and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years' of labor became a 
factor in a calculated and calculating system.  It was no longer a 
question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products.  
It was now a question of production of surplus-labor itself." -- Marx, 
Ca

Re: [Marxism] Connecticut and the West Indies: Sugar Spurs Trans-Atlantic Trade | ConnecticutHistory.org

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Good gravy, I'm bad at composing messages.


Louis Proyect wrote

The other day Ralph Johansen asked me about the Brenner thesis.

I am much more up to speed on Charles Post's attempt to apply the 
Brenner thesis to the USA. Like Brenner, takes great pains to 
disassociate forced labor from free wage labor in obvious defiance of 
the history found in Horne's new book. Horne goes to great length to 
make the connections utterly absent in Political Marxism. Of the 
greatest interest to me is the interrelationship between the Barbados 
and New England. If petty commodity production in New England was a 
response to the demands generated by the growth of manufacturing, where 
did the capital used to launch manufacturing come from?


The answer is the Barbados slave trade and sugar production as this 
article points out:


https://connecticuthistory.org/connecticut-and-the-west-indies-trade/

If you go to Post's book, there are about 200 words referencing Barbados 
but none connects them to New England. No wonder there has never been a 
single Black scholar who has bought into Political Marxism.


Lou, I respect your voracious coverage of all kinds of topics, which you 
toss back to the list as you dig. I don't know about Post, but I sort of 
despair at your treatment of Brenner. My reading is different. Brenner 
is focused on the initial impetus to capitalism, its specific unique 
appearance. His efforts have no relevance to mercantilism, to 
development of capitalism in America or anywhere else, subsequent to its 
initial appearance in agrarian England, especially from 1400-1600.  
Except for its more or less simultaneous appearance in the Flemish-Dutch 
lowlands. Dimmock responds in detail to Brenner's critics, non-Marxists 
and Marxists, including Henry Heller, Chris Harman, Neil Davidson, S.R. 
Epstein, and others. effectively as I read him. And from a search online 
I have seen no reply from any (Harman is no longer with us), in the four 
years since publication of Dimmock's book. I doubt that this is because 
they think it's no longer relevant.


As to the presence in the Americas especially of capitalist production 
using slaves, Marx though sparse in treatment of the slave mode of 
production 
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch02.htm was very 
clear about it being a one-off, temporally brief and grafted form on 
what I'd call the metabolic corpus of capitalism, which takes 
pre-capitalist forms, customs and modes into its over all organization 
of production to the extent that they enable or enhance the capitalist 
mode, and sloughs them off when they no longer serve that purpose.


I don't know if you've seen this; others as well.

As here"

"In plantation colonies where commercial speculations figure from the 
start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist 
mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the 
slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labor, which is the basis of 
capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is 
conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce 
has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the 
same person is capitalist and landowner." -- Marx, Theories of Surplus 
Value, Part II, pages 302-3


Here

"...although the slave thus raised for the market had become an element 
of annual reproduction, this method did not suffice for a long time, so 
that the African slave trade was continued as long as possible for the 
purpose of supplying the market." -- Marx, Capital, Volume II, Chicago, 
Charles Kerr & Co., 1909, page 559.


And here

"...as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower 
forms of slave-labor, courvee labor, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool 
of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of 
production, the sale of their products for export becoming their 
principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on 
the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc. Hence the Negro labor in 
the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a 
patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to 
immediate local consumption.  But in proportion, as the export of cotton 
became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro 
and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years' of labor became a 
factor in a calculated and calculating system.  It was no longer a 
question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products.  
It was now a question of prod

Re: [Marxism] Capitalism and the Brenner thesis

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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The basic problem is that we are talking at cross-purposes. Brenner is 
correct in referring to capitalism as A MODE OF PRODUCTION originating 
in England.


However, people like Jim Blaut and Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisanciogulu, 
the authors of "How the West Came to Rule: the Geopolitical Origins of 
Capitalism", are focused on how the SYSTEM originated. That is what 
interests me, not whether wage labor first became generalized in Norfolk 
in 1535 or whatever else Sebastian Dimmock unearthed. I am much more 
interested in what was happening in Potosi in the 16th century, where 
the largest agglomeration of wage labor in history appeared.


I find the idea that the SYSTEM originated in England preposterous. 
Capitalism is a world system, just as feudalism (tributary, to be more 
exact) was a world system. Trying to establish where feudalism as a mode 
of production began is a sterile exercise.


In fact, until Brenner began his research into these issues, nobody had 
the same kind of goal. In the legendary Sweezy-Dobb debate, Dobb 
actually defended an analysis much more in common with Blaut and 
Anievas/Nisancioglu as pointed out here:


"Moreover, there were indirect ways in which the prosperity of foreign 
trade in the Tudor Age aided industrial development in the ensuing 
century. Some of the fortunes made by foreign adventurers no doubt 
eventually found their way into industrial enterprise; while, as we 
shall presently see, the expansion of overseas markets, ESPECIALLY 
OVERSEAS MARKETS, in the seventeenth century, to some extent acted as a 
lever to the profitability of manufacture at home."


https://louisproyect.org/2007/06/01/robert-brenner-and-primitive-accumulation/


As to the significance of what Brenner and Dimmock among others are 
doing, I quote below from Dimmock's Introduction. By the way, Dimmock 
wrote his thesis on the empirical evidence for the inception of 
capitalism in England, which comprises the second half of his book, and 
in doing so he came into close touch with the views of Brenner's 
critics, especially those writing after the thick of the Brenner debate 
whom he responds to. most effectively in my estimation, in the first 
half of his book. I have seen no rejoinder from Henry Heller, Chris 
Harman, Neil Davidson, S.R. Epstein, all of the other major critics of 
Brenner's thesis non-Marxist and Marxist (Harman is no longer with us), 
in the four years since publication of Dimmock's book.


Quoting from p. 3 of Dimmock's Introduction:

"The phrases 'the origin of capitalism' and 'the transition to 
capitalism' are often used interchangeably. The focus of this book is on 
the 'origin' because it wishes to place emphasis on a period of historic 
rupture, the key stage marking the beginning from a non-capitalist to a 
capitalist society  without necessarily referring to a completed 
transition. If it is recognized that capitalism had a beginning, and 
that it is not simply a term which describes a higher form of 
'commercial society' that has existed since ancient times  , it should 
be concluded that capitalism is another specific form of society with a 
beginning and an end like all other previous specific forms. If this 
conclusion is drawn, discussions about the future of capitalism can be 
informed by knowledge of how such permanent historic ruptures occur, 
right down to the names and motivations of individuals and classes who 
created or attempted to resist them."


Lou, you write: "However, people like Jim Blaut and Alex Anievas and 
Kerem Nisanciogulu, the authors of "How the West Came to Rule: the 
Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism", are focused on how the SYSTEM 
originated. That is what interests me, not whether wage labor first 
became generalized in Norfolk in 1535 or whatever else Sebastian Dimmock 
unearthed. I am much more interested in what was happening in Potosi in 
the 16th century, where the largest agglomeration of wage labor in 
history appeared.


That too. No question. Except, "System": "An organized, purposeful 
structure that consists of interrelated and interdependent elements." "A 
set of detailed methods, procedures and routines created to carry out a 
specific activity, perform a duty, or solve a problem." 
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/system.html. This describes 
what took place in its theretofore unique, initial organized systemic 
forms in the English countryside over the period from 1400 to 1600. The 
"system" was implicit in the "mode of production." And how we see what 
happened in history, what were the motivations of the participant

Re: [Marxism] Capitalism and the Brenner thesis

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

Was slavery a "factor"? V. 1 of Capital and Engels's "Conditions of the 
Working Class in England" are largely examinations of the textile mills 
with the first book constructing a theory based on their workings and 
the second an empirical look at working class life.


There are three essential elements in the production of surplus value: 
labor, raw materials and machinery. Without cotton, could England have 
developed what most people regard as fully realized capitalism? Would 
lease farming in the 15th century in and of itself led to England ruling 
the planet?


To even pose the question shows how flawed Political Marxism is.


Lou, there weren't slaves in America until 19 or so were brought in to 
Virginia in 1619. They weren't of course brought in to plant cotton for 
the mills of Lancaster. That all occurred after the period Robert 
Brenner and Spencer Dimmock are concerned with as the period of the 
origins of capitalism. 1400-1600. As I understand it, it wasn't until 
the late 17th and 18th century that cotton from the Americas became a 
factor in English capitalist production.


And what's that got to do with political Marxism? I first read Brenner's 
argument in NLR in the 70s. I didn't concern myself with his particular 
Marxist orientation. I was following the development of the thesis he 
was laying out. I did the same with his several critics and his 
subsequent responses. I came to the conclusion that Brenner was spot on.


Political Marxism is another subject. We could go there as well. I know 
you've written about political Marxism frequently. My initial encounter 
with the term was in the controversy around G.A. Cohen, maybe in the 70s 
when I first subbed NLR. I learned that he explicitly rejected the 
dialectic and Marxist humanism. I wholeheartedly disagreed. I later 
learned that Brenner identified with this tendency. But I noticed that 
Brenner later did embrace the dialectic. I'll have to go back and look 
for the references, but that was my recollection, and memory may not be 
accurate about this. I don't have the impression that he followed G.A. 
Cohen, beyond his belief that the assumption among Marxists that 
movement in history was primarily through the development of the 
productive forces was misleading and harmful. He maintained, making much 
sense to me, that development in capitalism took place with development 
of social relations, production relations, social property relations, 
and the resulting struggle among and between classes. I won't go look it 
up right now because I have household chores and a trip to the farmers 
market in Brookings today. When I return I'll look up what Dimmock has 
to say about it in several places, and I'll read some of the literature 
online. But please let me know where you think I'm wrong, and why. I'll 
read what you've written in the past, but I'd like a capsule from you 
that sums up your views. Also, to tie it into our exchange on the 
captioned topic, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me how you think 
Brenner's orientation toward political Marxism affects what he has 
written about the origins of capitalism. On that, I don't think your 
tie-in in this message makes any sense.



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Re: [Marxism] Capitalism and the Brenner thesis

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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[I posted this yesterday morning but it doesn't show up on this list. 
Re-posted.]


[Louis Proyect wrote

Was slavery a "factor"? V. 1 of Capital and Engels's "Conditions of the 
Working Class in England" are largely examinations of the textile mills 
with the first book constructing a theory based on their workings and 
the second an empirical look at working class life.


There are three essential elements in the production of surplus value: 
labor, raw materials and machinery. Without cotton, could England have 
developed what most people regard as fully realized capitalism? Would 
lease farming in the 15th century in and of itself led to England ruling 
the planet?


To even pose the question shows how flawed Political Marxism is.


Lou, there weren't slaves in America until 19 or so were brought in to 
Virginia in 1619. They weren't of course brought in to plant cotton for 
the mills of Lancaster. That all occurred after the period Robert 
Brenner and Spencer Dimmock are concerned with as the period of the 
origins of capitalism. 1400-1600. As I understand it, it wasn't until 
the late 17th and 18th century that cotton from the Americas became a 
factor in English capitalist production.


And what's that got to do with political Marxism? I first read Brenner's 
argument in NLR in the 70s. I didn't concern myself with his particular 
Marxist orientation. I was following the development of the thesis he 
was laying out. I did the same with his several critics and his 
subsequent responses. I came to the conclusion that Brenner was spot on.


Political Marxism is another subject. We could go there as well. I know 
you've written about political Marxism frequently. My initial encounter 
with the term was in the controversy around G.A. Cohen, maybe in the 70s 
when I first subbed NLR. I learned that he explicitly rejected the 
dialectic and Marxist humanism. I wholeheartedly disagreed. I later 
learned that Brenner identified with this tendency. But I noticed that 
Brenner later did embrace the dialectic. I'll have to go back and look 
for the references, but that was my recollection, and memory may not be 
accurate about this. I don't have the impression that he followed G.A. 
Cohen, beyond his belief that the assumption among Marxists that 
movement in history was primarily through the development of the 
productive forces was misleading and harmful. He maintained, making much 
sense to me, that development in capitalism took place with development 
of social relations, production relations, social property relations, 
and the resulting struggle among and between classes. I won't go look it 
up right now because I have household chores and a trip to the farmers 
market in Brookings today. When I return I'll look up what Dimmock has 
to say about it in several places, and I'll read some of the literature 
online. But please let me know where you think I'm wrong, and why. I'll 
read what you've written in the past, but I'd like a capsule from you 
that sums up your views. Also, to tie it into our exchange on the 
captioned topic, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me how you think 
Brenner's orientation toward political Marxism affects what he has 
written about the origins of capitalism. On that, I don't think your 
tie-in in this message makes any sense.



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Re: [Marxism] Primitive accumulation

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

I can't get over how Brennerites carefully sidestep what Marx wrote. In 
the case of primitive accumulation, Marx wrote in chapter 31 of V. 1 of 
Capital, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”:


"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, 
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the 
beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of 
Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, 
signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These 
idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation."


"THESE IDYLLIC PROCEEDINGS ARE THE CHIEF MOMENTA OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION."

Get it? Probably not...

From "Robert Brenner and Primitive Accumulation": 
https://louisproyect.org/2007/06/01/robert-brenner-and-primitive-accumulation/




This discussion is sort of taking the form of a Mozart comic opera, 
where confusion arises over something said or done and everyone gets out 
of shape until, at least for Mozart, misunderstanding which had 
threatened to come to blows is reconciled in the last act, and everyone 
is cozy again. Calls for cool. Please remain calm and in your seats.


You have quoted this passage from chapter 31 of Capital before, "the 
commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era 
of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief 
momenta of primitive accumulation."


We're talking past each other as I see it, mainly because there is 
confusion between two different concepts, primitive accumulation and 
origins of capitalism. Or you conflate them.


I quote Dimmock pp. 205-7:

The core of the Marxist debate stems from Marx's statements in the first 
volume of Capital:


"In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are 
epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course 
of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when 
great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of 
subsistence, and hurled onto the labor market as free, unprotected and 
rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, 
of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The 
expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs 
through its various stages in different orders of succession, and at 
different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as 
our example has it the classic form. (Marx, Capital volume 1, Penguin 
ed. p. 876.)


"Heller and Davidson both attempt to limit the impact of the last 
sentence. Rather than take on board the first couple of sentences as 
representing the 'classic form' of expropriation of capitalism in 
England - the sudden and forcible removal of the peasantry which Marx 
states took place at the end of the fifteenth century and beginning the 
the sixteenth century, and that ONLY IN ENGLAND [his emphasis] has it 
the classic form, they say England takes ONLY the classic form. Without 
revealing to us what they think this classic form is, and whether being 
'classic' has any significance, they prefer to focus on Marx's point 
that expropriation takes place  at different times in different places, 
although not AFTER England but before. In the footnote to the above 
quote Marx pointed out that 'capitalist production developed earliest in 
Italy' but was not sustained. So Heller and Davidson take this as their 
cue that capitalism did not originate in England. In fact Heller states 
that '[c]apitalism - from the start a single system - actually began in 
Italy, spread to Germany and then to Holland and France. England was the 
last stop in this progress.' His evidence for this begins with the quote 
from Marx taken from the introduction of his chapter on 'The genesis of 
the industrial capitalist' in the first volume of Capital, although 
rather than Italy, the process in this respect begins with Spain and 
Portugal:


"'The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in 
particular to Spain, Portugal , Holland, France and England, in more or 
less chronological order. These different moments are systematically 
combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the 
combination embraces the colonies, the modern tax system and the system 
of protection.' (Marx, Capital volume 1, Penguin ed., p. 915.)


"What Marx is referring to here is 'primitive accumulation' as the wider 
dispossession and slavery of people in the Americas, Africa and India, 
the discovery of

Re: [Marxism] Primitive accumulation

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

England's "primitive accumulation" was the original accumulation of 
capital (not the original accumulation of property, given that Marx 
himself noted that property is always a political relationship, and 
property long pre-existed capitalism), but that in order to develop 
control over surplus value, capital needed to rule labour-power, which 
itself is a process.



This passage once again has to do with "primitive accumulation." And 
accumulation of capital, primitive or otherwise, is enabling, 
concomitant and result, but it is certainly not dispositive, unlike the 
role of changes in social property relations (not just accumulation of 
property, which of course predated capitalism - although that, too, was 
enhanced with the advent of capitalism), with the specific locus of 
capitalism's origins occurring in the English countryside, So again, 
without changes in social property relations, no capitalism.




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Re: [Marxism] Capitalism and the Brenner thesis

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote
Ralph, the critical element in the period following 1600 is how England 
used its mercantile control over India to destroy the native textile 
industry that enjoyed a monopoly in Europe even though it was based on a 
mode of production that used more labor than the more mechanized British 
factories.


'the period following 1600' - so yes to that, and the conversation ends.


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Re: [Marxism] The 21st Century Has Been Hard On US Households | Martin Hart-Landsberg | Reports from the Economic Front

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo wrote 
 



https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/the-21st-century-has-been-hard-on-us-households/

The 21^st Century has not been a good one for most working people in the 
United States.  In fact, for most of this century, real median household 
income has been below its starting value in January 2000.


The chart below 
 
shows real (inflation-adjusted) and nominal (or current dollar) median 
household income over this century.  As we can see, the fall in real 
median household income over most of the first eight years was nothing 
compared to the hit median household income took over the next 8 
years. This record is even more appalling when one considers that the US 
was officially in an economic expansion from November 2001 to December 
2007, and then again from June 2009 to the present.



I'm quoting in what follows from an ethnographer from Princeton whom I 
posted about a while back named Matthew Desmond. His book is entitled 
'Evicted' (2016) Danvers, MA, Crown Publishing Group.


Desmond immersed himself for months in  a run-down trailer park and then 
a multiple dwelling house in inner-city Milwaukee. He gained the 
confidence of the people around him sufficiently to be able to follow 
them closely in the endless hunt for housing after multiple evictions, 
into the small claims rental courts, through the street culture of a 
large city, camped out on the streets with their meager belongings when 
the sheriffs showed up. He documented the ruinous, racking effects of 
the housing crisis as it is experienced by millions in the US.


Here he reports on what he calls, "the only comprehensive estimate of 
the frequency of involuntary displacement from housing among urban centers:"


"... 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced at least one forced move - 
formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building 
condemnation - in the two years prior to being surveyed...nearly half of 
those forced moves (48 percent) were informal evictions: off-the-books 
displacements not processed through a court, as when the landlord pays 
you to leave or hires a couple of heavies to throw you out. Formal 
eviction was less common, constituting 24 percent of forced moves. An 
additional 23 percent were due to landlord foreclosure, with building 
condemnations accounting for the remaining 5 percent.


"In other words, for every eviction executed through the judicial 
process, there are two others executed beyond the purview of the court, 
without any form of due process.  This means that estimates that do not 
account for  informal evictions downplay the crisis in our cities. If 
public attention and resources are a product of how widespread 
policymakers think a problem is, then studies that produce artificially 
low eviction rates are just wrong; they're harmful.


"Some of the most important findings to come out of the Milwaukee Area 
Renters Study have to do with eviction's fallout. The data linked 
eviction to heightened residential instability, substandard housing, and 
even job loss ... evicted mothers suffer from increase material hardship 
as well as poor physical and mental health.


"...I extracted [from eviction court records] all the eviction cases 
that took place in Milwaukee between 2003 and 2013, hundreds of 
thousands of them. According to these official records, each year almost 
half of for mal, court-ordered evictions in Milwaukee take place in 
predominantly black neighborhoods. Within these neighborhoods women are 
more than twice as likely to be evicted as men.


"...the median age of a tenant in Milwaukee's eviction court was 
thirty-three. The youngest was nineteen; the oldest, sixty-nine The 
median monthly household income of tenants in eviction court was $935, 
and the median amount of back rent owed was about that much ... even 
after accounting for how much the tenant owed the landlord - and other 
factors like household income and race - the presence of children in the 
household almost tripled a tenant's odds of receiving an eviction 
judgment. The effect of living with children on receiving an eviction 
judgment was equivalent to falling four months behind in rent.


"This book is based in Milwaukee...{and is] a fairly typical midsize 
metropolitan area with a fairly typical socioeconomic profile ...


"... We need a robust sociology of

[Marxism] US ends aid to Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45377336


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