[Marxism] on riots

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Lou and I had a spat about this so long ago.  I am less sympathetic now to
riots than I once was. Burning down a building is never near as radical as
occupying it.

Riots don't really challenge private property rights and it is still
private property that is at the heart of capitalism.

Having said that my sympathies, of course, are totally with the people of
the USA in their struggle now against state brutality.

Comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Dipping my toe into Nordic Noir.

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Under the influence of Comrade Proyect's post on Maj Sjowall, I have moved
out of fantasy and into Nordic Noir. Least ways I have made a modest
beginning. I started with Roseanna. I read it all at one setting and that
is an increasingly rare feat for me.

Well what did I think? Well it was a very gripping tale and very cleverly
told in a strangely spare minimalist style. I frankly expected more
obvious politics. The villain if he could be called that was a near 40 year
"deviated prevert". And the heroes were all servants of the state
apparatus. Moreover they didn't appear majorly alienated from that
apparatus. It worked very efficiently at state and national level to solve
the crime with one individualist aha moment - use of the photographs and
film.

Did I enjoy it? Well that is not easy to say. What matters to me when I am
reading fiction is whether I get involved in the fate of the characters.
They have to walk off the page and become part of my social imaginary.  So
far, Beck and his colleagues have failed to do that for me.

Strangely and this may have been authorial intent at work, the killer came
closest to having an emotional impact. He was such a poor pathetic fucked
up suffering misfit. But mental illness does tend to get under my defense
mechanisms and that disturbed rather than entertained me.

So I will wait a few days to get over the stunned feeling I have before
venturing back into Beck.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] US anti-lockdown protests: ‘If you are paranoid about getting sick, just don’t go out’ | Free to read | Financial Times

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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This is such a depressing tale. I get no satisfaction at all from hearing
about people like McDaniel or fundamentalist pastors getting Covid 19 and
dying after defying medical advice.

Our education systems have produced huge reservoirs of ignorance and
stupidity. And clowns like Johnson in the UK and Trump in the USA feed upon
these

comradely

Gary

On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 10:48 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Last month John McDaniel, a 60-year-old from Marion, Ohio, wrote a
> series of Facebook posts in which he described the coronavirus outbreak
> as a “political ploy” and decried the “madness” of the governor’s
> decision to close the state’s restaurants and bars.
>
> “If you are paranoid about getting sick, just don’t go out,” he wrote,
> adding that others should not be prevented from “living [their] lives”.
>
> A few weeks later, Mr McDaniel died from complications related to
> Covid-19, becoming one of more than 40,000 Americans to have perished
> from the disease. In his obituary, his family requested that “everyone
> continue practising social distancing to keep each other safe”.
>
> https://www.ft.com/content/15ca3a5f-bc5c-44a3-99a8-c446f6f6881c
>
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[Marxism] Rebellion the Netflix series.

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have just finished watching Season 1 & 2 of Rebellion (Thank you
Lockdown). Concurrently I am reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.

I am not aware of anyone having posted on *Rebellion* on the List. I would
be astonished if Lou had not.

Phil may read this and he is an absolute encyclopedia when  it comes to the
Irish cause, so I will defer to his knowledge of the historical
inaccuracies.

But I mentioned Nietzsche for a reason. He was an evil fucker and I have no
time at all for Left Nietzscheanism. None.

But he did have a point about the Socratic critic who was
essentially hostile to art. So I try not to demand that art  works take the
form of pamphlets. But I think we do have an ethical duty towards some
truths.

In the first series I enjoyed the stress on the role of women. I approved
of the device of weaving the story of the rebellion around three fictional
female characters (3 Little maids from school).

Aside from this fiction the emphasis on women was historically accurate in
a broad sense. Revolutionary feminism was central to the Republican cause
in 1916 and it took the Catholic Church and De Valera many years to wipe it
out from the historical memory.

My favorite female character was the lesbian assassin. She was a
magnificent brooding creation.  Alas she was banished from the second
season.

Perhaps that was because there was no way at all a female assassin could be
fitted into the Boy's Own operation that Collins ran.

So what is the ethical duty that is owed? Both seasons fell down in their
depiction of the historical characters. The writer(s) got De Valera right,
I think, but cheated to do so.

Connolly was a wooden figure who had not one line of substance to indicate
what he believed.

Pearse is of course a very difficult character to get right. He was
depicted as someone who wrote a letter to his mother praising the Kaiser so
he could have all the leaders executed for treason rather than rebellion.
Bullshit.

The difficulty about Pearse, and Phil will correct me here I trust, is that
his brand of left nationalism is the least politically palatable at the
moment. So he has to be framed as believing in the Blood Sacrifice. That
reading we probably owe to Yeats who was a thorough disciple of Nietzsche
btw.

I will comment on the second season if there is any interest

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders backs Biden: Whither the Left? – International Socialism Project

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I don't live in the States of course but like all citizens of the world I
do have an interest in US political outcomes. This is just to say that you
would have to waterboard me to get me to vote for Biden. Somewhere sometime
this game of the "lesser evil" has to stop. The Left are played for suckers
every bloody four years. Cynical bastards like Obama can take them out at
will.

comradely

Gary



On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 4:18 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> By Lance Selfa
>
> https://internationalsocialism.net/sanders-backs-biden-whither-the-left/
>
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Re: [Marxism] Why Don’t You Just Die! | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I watched the first 5 minutes of the Netflix Trotsky film. I was absolutely
stunned. I had got my 9 yr grandson to sit down with me to watch a film
about "a great Russian revolutionary" and sweet Jesus and His Holy Mother
the opening scene in the train was unbelievable. Shagging to the left of
me. Shagging to the right of me! I rushed to try and turn it off over the
protests of the grandson. When I eventually worked out  how to do it, I
think he may have been scarred for life.

Never a dull moment in lock down.

comradely

Gary

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 5:49 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Unless you are one of those fat slobs wearing a MAGA cap out on the
> street demanding that Chick-fil-A’s be re-opened immediately, you’re
> like me—under house arrest from COVID-19. Assuming that you’ve run out
> of things to watch on Netflix, I have great news. I just watched “Why
> Don’t You Just Die!”, a Russian film originally slated for theatrical
> opening in N.Y. but re-released as VOD yesterday (availability below).
>
> https://louisproyect.org/2020/04/21/why-dont-you-just-die/
>
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Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders Ending Presidential Run

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Hi Wythe,

I think that both the Corbyn and Sanders camps were banking on the fact
that the crisis of capitalism is so acute that the elite would listen to
their reform.proposals.

Not so it would seem.

Basically the Democrat and Right wing Labour strategy is that of the Second
XI. The First XI fucks up totally and the Second XI gets a chance to go on
the field and display their managerial skills.

But in these days of right wing populism, there is no guarantee that the
Second XI will get a go. These are dark days indeed.
comradely

Gary
Gary

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 10:17 AM Wythe Holt jr. via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Sanders chose to run as a Democrat despite lots of warnings and the
> experience of 2016, and while early in his career he might have broken with
> the Democrats he deliberately chose (I think) to demonstrate to all and
> sundry that his radical platform, resonant with and favorable to most young
> voters and many Americans, would (or would not) be supported by the
> mainstreamers.  He found out once again that mainstream Democrat politics
> is purely capitalist politics and that he has wasted his time money and
> perhaps entire career.  Wythe
> ____________
> From: Marxism  on behalf of Gary
> MacLennan via Marxism 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 8, 2020 5:29 PM
> To: Wythe Holt jr.
> Cc: Gary MacLennan
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders Ending Presidential Run
>
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>
> My cup runneth over these days.
>
> Corbyn and Sanders did not get to first base. Yet all they were proposing
> was to save capitalism from capitalists.
>
> I really wish they both would quit the corpses they have tried to activate.
> But Corbyn will never leave Labour. I do not know enough about Sanders, but
> he should defy the Democratic party and run as an third candidate. But of
> course he won't.
>
> It reminds me again and again of Soviet Russia after Stalin's death in
> 1953. Reform was desperately need but all the reformers had been murdered
> and the surviving f/wits could not do it. Or like the Roman Catholic
> Church. It desperately needs reform as well. But those capable of carrying
> out reforms have long been silenced or driven out.
>
> These are grim days but there is a very dark black macabre humor to be
> indulged in watching these neoliberal fuckers trying to imitate Keynes in
> order to save capitalism from neoliberalism.
>
> It is all like Dr Johnson's dog walking on two legs. Not well done but you
> are surprised to see it done at all.
>
> comradely
>
> Gary
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 6:37 AM Mark Lause via Marxism <
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
>
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> >
> > Or how about just using those funds to set up an organizing committee in
> DC
> > capable of bringing several hundred thousand people to the city every
> time
> > that Orange Reagan Zombie tries to put someone on the Supreme Court or
> get
> > another bailout for "working people"?
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Re: [Marxism] By Picking Joe Biden Over Bernie Sanders, Democrats Are Kissing Their Future Goodbye

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Social distancing is not pacifying anyone. True, it prevents mass
mobilization which are crucial for the police of affect. We should not here
that the Tories chose a winter election so Corbyn could not rally thousands
in the summer sun. They did not forget the impact of the mass rallies in
the GE of 2017 and vowed never again.

So social distancing disarms but does not pacify. What we are seeing
gathering is the forces of the storm to come. I have now idea when or where
it will happen  but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the capitalist
elite and their political running dogs will end one day. That is for
certain.

comradely

Gary

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 8:49 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/by-picking-joe-biden-over-bernie-sanders-democrats-are-kissing-their-future-goodbye
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Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders Ending Presidential Run

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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My cup runneth over these days.

Corbyn and Sanders did not get to first base. Yet all they were proposing
was to save capitalism from capitalists.

I really wish they both would quit the corpses they have tried to activate.
But Corbyn will never leave Labour. I do not know enough about Sanders, but
he should defy the Democratic party and run as an third candidate. But of
course he won't.

It reminds me again and again of Soviet Russia after Stalin's death in
1953. Reform was desperately need but all the reformers had been murdered
and the surviving f/wits could not do it. Or like the Roman Catholic
Church. It desperately needs reform as well. But those capable of carrying
out reforms have long been silenced or driven out.

These are grim days but there is a very dark black macabre humor to be
indulged in watching these neoliberal fuckers trying to imitate Keynes in
order to save capitalism from neoliberalism.

It is all like Dr Johnson's dog walking on two legs. Not well done but you
are surprised to see it done at all.

comradely

Gary


On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 6:37 AM Mark Lause via Marxism <
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>
> Or how about just using those funds to set up an organizing committee in DC
> capable of bringing several hundred thousand people to the city every time
> that Orange Reagan Zombie tries to put someone on the Supreme Court or get
> another bailout for "working people"?
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Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders Should Retool His Campaign to Lead the Charge Against Coronavirus

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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My comment on reading this article is that it sounds very sensible. Also I
have a feeling it might happen. There is a total vacuum in terms of
political opposition to Trump. The Democrats appear to think that if they
keep Biden behind locked doors & issue ever shorter soundbites they might
be able to keep the show on the road long enough to sneak a win in
November. But Biden has not got a clue what to do. That is probably also
medically true as well as politically true.

If Trump orders people back to work in the middle of an ever escalating
medical disaster then all bets are off. A health crisis will deepen and so
will the political crisis.

comradely

Gary

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 9:17 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> The co-authors are typical Jacobin Sandernistas but this is a
> well-reasoned article. I only hope that Sanders takes their advice.
>
> https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/bernie-sanders-campaign-coronavirus-crisis
>
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Re: [Marxism] Trump Won’t Order Vital Coronavirus Supplies Because Corporate CEOs Asked Him Not To | Vanity Fair

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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How is all this going to play out. I know that is an impossible if not a
stupid question. But Trump seems about to press the "It's the economy,
stupid" button and let the Health button go to buggery.

Unfortunately, there are no separate buttons. We are dealing with a
totality. I know that is obvious to listers but non-Marxists seem incapable
of joining dots and thinking in terms of a totality. Ignoring health will
destroy the economy DUH!

By the time the full disaster of the Trump presidency unfolds, the
Democrats may have digitally mastered a Biden copy or hologram and we might
actually get some pronouncements from their candidate.

In the mean time my family in the States is suffering from high levels of
anxiety as is everyone who is sane and sensible,.

comradely

Gary

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> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/donald-trump-defense-production-act
>
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[Marxism] on Agamben

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The word everyone is avoiding is "stupid"

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] The Week Bernie Sanders Realized He Was Losing The Primary

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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What is impressive is how the DNC were able to crack the whip and put an
end to the Sanders revolt. Just like that.
Of course like all victories, dialectically this could and certainly should
have very serious consequences for the Democratic Machine. It',s beyond
time that the Left showed the Democrats that they cannot take a left vote
for granted.

Let them go with their cognitively impaired candidate and let them pay the
price

comradely

Gary

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 8:47 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> (So, he only had himself to blame.)
>
> Meanwhile, a small group of senior aides had been pushing Sanders for
> months to go harder on Biden.
>
> The problem: Sanders actually liked him. Personally, they got along
> better than he ever did with Hillary Clinton, aides have said. (The
> former vice president falls into an exclusive category for the Vermont
> senator: the people who were nice to Sanders before he mattered, as two
> aides put it recently.) Back in January, it was the candidate’s decision
> to personally apologize to Biden after one of his surrogates, Zephyr
> Teachout, wrote an op-ed about Biden’s “corruption problem.”
>
> David Sirota, the hard-charging senior adviser who has frequently made
> attacks on Biden go viral on Twitter, became so enraged by his
> unwillingness to budge on the matter that he laid out his concerns in a
> starkly worded email to the candidate and senior aides after Super Tuesday.
>
> The message, two people familiar with the email said: We do this or we
> lose.
>
>
> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rubycramer/bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-joe-biden-campaign
>
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Re: [Marxism] Can Bernie Sanders Make the Democratic Party a Democratic Party? | The Indypendent

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The short answer is "NO". Just as Corbyn failed to make the British Labour
Party a democratic party Sanders will fail at any attempt to democractise
the Democrats.

That is not to say though that there are not real positives around his
campaign.

comradely

Gary

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 10:55 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Ex-ISOer Danny Katch joins Todd Chretien, Paul Le Blanc,
> Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Alan Maass, and Paul Heideman in a Road to
> Damascus conversion to the Democratic Party.
>
>
> https://indypendent.org/2020/02/can-bernie-sanders-make-the-democratic-party-a-democratic-party/
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Re: [Marxism] Boris Johnson Aide Quits After Furor Over Racial Comments

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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There is absolutely no room for complacency about events in the UK. But
conditions are not yet ready there for fascism. Despite the social media
rhetoric the fact that Sabisky had to step down shows that there Is more
distance to be traveled before we can declare theUK  government a fascist
one. Imagine the laughter if someone had described Goering as a racist. He
was and wore that badge proudly.
My guess is that it will take another acute recession/depression and a
revival of the Left before the ruling elites consider the fascist fall-back
option.

comradely

Gary



On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 3:31 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> NY Times, Feb. 18, 2020
> Boris Johnson Aide Quits After Furor Over Racial Comments
> By Stephen Castle
>
> LONDON — The warning signs may have been there last month when Dominic
> Cummings, the influential and iconoclastic aide to Prime Minister Boris
> Johnson of Britain, invited “weirdos and misfits” to apply to work at
> Downing Street.
>
> On Monday, one new recruit was at the center of a furor over his past
> assertions that blacks have a lower IQ than whites, and that enforced
> contraception could prevent “creating a permanent underclass.”
>
> As the opposition Labour Party demanded the dismissal of the adviser,
> Andrew Sabisky, Downing Street declined all comment. It even managed to
> deepen the dispute by refusing to say that Mr. Johnson rejects eugenics,
> the widely dismissed field whose proponents advocate discouraging
> reproduction by people deemed to have undesirable genetic traits.
>
> Then late Monday, Mr. Sabisky himself announced that he was stepping
> down, complaining of “media hysteria.”
>
> The episode has both shone a light on Mr. Johnson’s leadership team and
> illustrated the sway that Mr. Cummings holds in Downing Street, where he
> cuts a distinctive, scruffy figure and has established himself as one of
> the most powerful and polarizing figures in government.
>
> After winning a big parliamentary majority in elections in December, Mr.
> Johnson’s aides appear to feel little obligation to explain themselves,
> especially to a news media they hold in little regard.
>
> The government is at war with the BBC, boycotting some of its flagship
> broadcasts and threatening its future funding. It has also tried to
> divide and rule among political journalists by offering selected
> reporters briefings from top officials.
>
> The decision to hire Mr. Sabisky, may even so prove damaging for Mr.
> Johnson, in part because he has himself used racist language in his
> writing.
>
> Mr. Johnson is already facing questions over who paid for a £15,000
> winter vacation taken by the prime minister and his partner on the
> island of Mustique in December and early January.
>
> It was as he basked there in the Caribbean sunshine that Mr. Cummings,
> one of the architects of the 2016 Brexit campaign, issued his appeal on
> his blog for “super-talented weirdos” to come and work alongside him at
> Downing Street. The idea was to shake up a cadre of top officials, often
> educated at Oxford or Cambridges, that Mr. Cummings considers complacent.
>
> “We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to
> university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, ” Mr.
> Cummings wrote in a post that prompted applications from, among others,
> Uri Geller, the self-styled magician-psychic famous for bending spoons.
>
> Mr. Geller seems not to have gotten a callback. But Mr. Sabisky, who
> describes himself on Twitter as a “researcher” and “super-forecaster,”
> was hired as an adviser in the prime minister’s office.
>
> Then, over the weekend, reports began to surface about his various
> online postings.
>
> On Mr. Cummings’s blog in 2014, for example, Mr. Sabisky suggested
> forced “universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of
> puberty” for what he called the “underclass.”
>
> “Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue,” Mr. Sabisky wrote.
>
> In a Twitter post last May, he wrote that “women’s sport is more
> comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.”
>
> And in a separate blog post, he said that when it came to “intellectual
> disability,” there were greater diagnostic rates for black Americans
> than white ones.
>
> On Monday, Scotland’s first 

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

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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What's wrong with Hindenburg?

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 9:45 AM Mark Lause via Marxism <
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>
> Show of hands here . . . does anybody remember an election where we haven't
> heard about the imminent threat of fascism?  :-)
>
> Still, the alarm would be serious enough to have my attention if it wasn't
> all aimed to get me to vote for Hindenburg . . . .
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[Marxism] Thoughts on lessons from the UK GE

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I am only just now coming out of the depression occasioned by the UK GE
result. The cruelest blow of all was the phenomenon of the increase in the
working class Tory voter. The "Red Wall" collapsed and we now have working
class Tory MPs demanding to be feted at the Durham Miners festival. The
scabs want to be loved.

I listened to the brilliant minds of James Butler & Richard Seymour in the
Novara Media program *After the Defeat.* Richard speculated that something
like Freud's death wish was at work. How else to account for the akrasia
that seized millions of the victims of capital?

But I have avoided the psycholoigal speculations & begun trying to think
what happened through the master-slave motif, Tamas' great article on *The
Truth about Class* and this line from the Manifesto
"man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of
life, and his relations with his kind."

I am basically working with these three questions-


   - The slave has lost the life and death struggle with the master.  What
   does s/he do?
   - How does the residue of caste consciousness in the UK that Tamas
   refers to play out
   - What does sober man do when he realizes what his real conditions are?


The slave seeks above all to survive. S/he does this by trying to entrap
the master in a web of mutual obligations that will soften the defeat.

Caste has made way for class, but class seeks to re-invent itself as Caste.
The bourgeois wants to be noble. This drive was satirized brilliantly in
Visconti's great film *The Leopard*. But the slave too is active. Serf
consciousness is chosen as a better alternative to working class
consciousness. Here the boss become Padre & Padrone and dispenses favours.
Hence the drive in the working class to act loyal and dependable to the
master in return for patronage.
What about the actions of the sober man? Well again, sobriety brings the
hang over and the temptation is to do everything to avoid the realisation
of what our true relations are. The compulsion is resisted and successfully
so in many cases.

But nothing is for ever. One week the serf is faced down in the mud as the
Master passes. The next moment s/he is shitting in the master's library and
burning the books.

It is just such a cruel ugly rupture that is coming IMHO.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Color Out of Space | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Jesus Christ Lou

I got scared just reading your blog. Never ever going to see this movie.
Would not be able to sleep ever again.

Gary








On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 7:39 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, “Color Out of Space” opened
> yesterday at the IFC Center in Manhattan and the Alamo Drafthouse in
> Brooklyn. It was directed and co-written by Richard Stanley, a relative
> of the man who said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” The film stars
> Nicholas Cage as Nathan Gardner, the head of a household that goes off
> its rocker after a small meteorite lands near their rural home.
>
> Unlike the more typical space invasion movie that pits such a family
> against little green men with ray guns, the only threat to their
> well-being is the odd clouds of colored light that have begun appearing
> nearby. They have the effect of making food taste weird and inducing
> strange behavior in human beings, such as Mrs. Gardner slicing off her
> fingers while dicing carrots. It also makes their pet dog, plants, and
> mother nature in general go off-kilter as well.
>
> Cage, who is—as you must know by now—America’s greatest actor turns in a
> scenery-chewing performance as a husband who ignores his children’s
> warnings that things are getting weird. Even as the family starts
> behaving like the Texas chainsaw murderer’s worst nightmare and flowers
> start growing that look like they were painted by Salvador Dali on LSD,
> he soldiers on.
>
> full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/01/25/color-out-of-space/
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Re: [Marxism] ARE WE ON THE BRINK OF A RENEWED WAVE OF RADICALISATION WITHIN BRITAIN UNDER THE SURFACE OF INCREASING REACTION?

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Bless Anthony. Reading him is like stepping into into the Tardus and
whipping off to a vanished era. We are always trembling on the brink of a
revolutionary break through.

If only.

Still who knows. I have noticed that I am slowly transferring my hopes to
Sanders in the USA. I can see the frown on Comrade Proyect's face.

I honestly have no illusions in Sanders or any Democrat. Honestly none. But
the very thought of Trump makes me sick. Only a tad sicker than the thought
of President Biden I hasten to add.

But I am desperate for some hope - any hope.

Happy new year to all comrades on the list.

comradely

Gary



On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 9:16 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> https://anthonybrainapplyingtrotskyismfortodayandtommorw.wordpress.com/2019/12/30/are-we-on-the-brink-of-a-renewed-wave-of-radicalisation-within-britain-under-the-surface-of-increasing-reaction-by-anthony-brain/
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[Marxism] On consciousness (political that is)

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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On twitter I have been sort of stunned by the reaction of the Left tweeters
to the news that the vicious right winger Ian Duncan Smith is to be
knighted. To be honest I was pleased by the news. It confirms everything I
believe about the residue of the caste system in the UK that is also known
as the honors system. But there is no doubting the outrage at the news IDS
was being honored.

I tweeted about it saying comrades should update their myths. But I think I
was mistaken about this. People come from different positions and what
means nothing to me can mean a lot to someone else & clearly that the
architect of the brutal attacks on the poor was to receive a knighthood
hurt a lot of lefties.

Revolutionary politics takes a lot of patience and as I get older I get
less patient. I can see my own personal time line ending while the
political time line stretches ever into the distance. Yet it is a mistake
to want time to pass so politics can make a turn to the left.

We must endure Trump & Johnson and Bolsonaro & all the rest of the shit.
For they will be rejected at some stage.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Australia weather forecast: Temperatures expected to exceed 50C | The Courier-Mail

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I went for my lunch time stroll in the nearby Botanical Gardens but had to
call my walk off. The temperature was probably the hottest I had
experienced and actually I felt it was dangerous to be out in it.

I wish I could say that there was a huge groundswell demanding climate
action.  Instead there is triumphal talk in the Murdoch press of new
Australian coal mines being opened.King Coal now dominates both sides of
the Parliament.

It is obvious now that with humanity things will have to get much worse
before they get better. But the problem with climate change is that a path
back may (will?) not be open to future generations.

I have scrupulously avoided reading any of the fine articles Lou has posted
on the GE in the UK. My grief/depression is just too florid. But I am
working away and may be I will come out of this funk.

Thanks to the lister who sent me the links to Lili Harden's story. For what
it is worth I despise the Clintons and the Democratic Party, probably more
than Trump. The latter at least has never been able to pretend to be
anything other than a piece of shit.

comradely

Gary

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 7:14 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
>
> https://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/australia-is-on-track-to-record-its-hottest-day-ever/news-story/69918fab1f641f92800d5730bcfb2eec
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[Marxism] a query

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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In the photo of Bill Clinton signing his welfare bill in 1996 there are two
black women in the frame. the one on the right is a large woman and to
Clinton's left there is a slimmer black woman in a white dress. Does anyone
who anything about these women?

www.salon.com/2016/08/28/a-failed-policy-based-on-failed-research-the-destructive-legacy-of-bill-clintons-1996-welfare-reform-act


comradely


Gary
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[Marxism] Lou's post

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Lou wrote:



*Finally, relief came in the form of new societies created in virgin
territories in the British colonies like North America, New Zealand (where
the film was produced) and Australia where the class system did not have
the chance to consolidate, or at least not to the extent of Europe.
Unfortunately, the film does not refer to the fate of the indigenous
peoples but frankly there’s not much attention paid to them in Marx either*.




My comment: I enjoyed as always Lou’s film review. It would be great to see
his reviews published as a book one day.



My only comment is on the above snippet. When I came to Australia in 1975,
I was regularly told that my ideas were wrong, because Australia did not
have a class system. I also had the same discussion with a visiting
American academic who told me the USA did not have a class system.



I simply could not find a way to understand such rubbish never mind argue
against it. Quite a vicious class system was everywhere I looked in
Brisbane.



Soon after I arrived, I went on teaching practice supervision to Coorparoo
High School. I sat in a class room where there were holes in the walls. Up
the hill about a 1000 meters away was Brisbane Grammar an elite school that
had better facilities than at my college. Yet the staff at Coorparoo would
have told me there was no class system.



Not until I read Gregor Tamas’ *The truth about class* did I grasp what was
going on. Australians were saying to me “There is no caste system in
Australia (America)”.



BTW it is the residue of caste consciousness that has meant that 34 of the
UK's Prime Ministers have been from Eton School, where caste consciousness
is alive and flourishing.
comradely

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

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Your comment was "Totally fucking insane"  I agree and I struggled to
actually believe what I heard. So the Turks weren't at Normandy - the
cowardly bastards. And they weren't in Vietnam either. Hmmm Come to think
of it Our President wasn't there either.

But seriously how did we come to this?  How did the bourgeoisie allow
cretins to take over politically? In my own Northern Ireland the business
sector face certain disaster if there is a NO Deal Brexit and a hard border
emerges, yet they have allowed the Rapturists to dominate the political
scene.

I keep muttering about the End of Days

comradely

Gary

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>
> Totally fucking insane.
>
>
> https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-abandoning-kurds-syria-didnt-help-during-wwii-allies-2019-10
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Re: [Marxism] Greta Thonburg at UN

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Yes John even the rich and the powerful will choke. I am reminded of these
lines from Brecht's great poem *A worker questions history*

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

comradely

Gary

On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 12:44 PM John Reimann via Marxism <
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>
> Here is Greta Thonburg speaking at UN. It is more than worth listening to.
> Note how the very same delegates that she rips into applaud her
> condemnation of them. Clearly, the capitalist politicians want to seduce
> her into  becoming "realistic", but I find it difficult to see how they
> will succeed. For one, this is not a matter of political or social
> analysis; it's a matter of scientific fact, and she clearly knows the
> facts, and the facts are simply too stark. Nature will not allow room for
> some to benefit in this disaster. This means that a new and radical youth
> movement is coming.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWEpTok6AJo
>
> --
> *“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
> Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
> Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Re: Constance Markievicz 1868-1927

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Thank you for this Philip.

I once gave a talk on poetic truth and I used Yeats' poem with a very few
remarks about the sisters

In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz

William Butler Yeats 


The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

But a raving autumn shears

Blossom from the summer’s wreath;

The older is condemned to death,

Pardoned, drags out lonely years

Conspiring among the ignorant.

I know not what the younger dreams—

Some vague Utopia—and she seems,

When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,

An image of such politics.

Many a time I think to seek

One or the other out and speak

Of that old Georgian mansion, mix

pictures of the mind, recall

That table and the talk of youth,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.



Dear shadows, now you know it all,

All the folly of a fight

With a common wrong or right.

The innocent and the beautiful.

Have no enemy but time;



This is a poem about the Irish radicals and sisters, Eva and Constance
Gore-Booth (Countess Markiewicz). The sisters were aristocrats and lived in
a great mansion at Lissadell.  Yeats as a conservative did not like their
politics.  One was an active trade unionist (Eva) and the other an armed
revolutionary (Constance) and a commandant in the Irish Citizens Army, the
world’s first Red Army. She took part in the uprising of Easter 1916.  Both
sisters also agitated for the vote for women.
The central truth claim of the poem – the innocent and the beautiful have
no enemy but time – cannot survive even the most cursory of inspections.
Equally untrue is the claim that Eva’s politics are somehow “withered old
and gaunt”.  Yet these untruths come to us in a rhetorical flow which gives
them real power despite their sheer wrongness. One can almost understand
here the Platonic impulse to exclude poets from the Republic


On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 11:33 AM Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Constance Markievicz led a remarkable life, traversing the social and
> political landscape from daughter of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy to
> bohemian artist in Paris and London to a founding leader of the workers'
> militia known as the Irish Citizen Army in Dublin and the main founder of
> the first republican paramilitary organisation of 20th century Ireland (Na
> Fianna Eireann).  She was second-in-command of the insurrectionary forces
> at Stephen's Green in the centre of Dublin during the 1916 armed Rebellion
> and sentenced to death for her part.  Because she was a woman, her sentence
> (death by firing squad) was commuted to penal servitude to life.
>
> Markievicz was James Connolly's closest political co-worker and personal
> friend and attempted to continue the struggle for a worker's republic.
> Markievicz also trained  the first paramilitary group (the Fianna) in how
> to use weapons and blow stuff up.  She herself was often well-armed so that
> Connolly once described her as "looking like a walking advertisement for an
> enterprising small arms manufacturer".
>
> In November 1918 she became the first woman elected to the British
> parliament, standing as an Irish republican and socialist.  She became the
> first female cabinet minister in Western Europe, serving as minister of
> labour in the underground Irish parliament.  She opposed the 1921 Treaty
> and fought on the anti-Treaty side in the civil war.  Her speech in the
> Dublin parliament against the Treaty was the only one which drew clear
> class lines.  She died in 1927 of complications arising from peritonitis.
>
> Below are just some of her writings that I collected back in the late 1980s
> and which I began sticking up on The Irish Revolution blog when I started
> it in 2011.
>
> Starting with the statement issued by James Larkin's Workers Union 

Re: [Marxism] C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Ellenah this article from the New York Times is not without interest. It is
fairly rubbishy of course but underneath it all there is a fear that the
way things cannot continue. I think these are all features of a saddle
time. Crisis and critique go hand in hand. The intellectuals comment in
response to the crisis and the crisis deepens. We are in the middle of it
and so it is hard to see an end. But of course all things end.

ae

Gary

On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 8:43 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> NY Times, Aug. 21, 2019
> C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.
> By Farhad Manjoo
>
> A recession looms, and the nation’s C.E.O.s are growing fearful.
>
> It isn’t the potential of downturn itself that has them alarmed —
> downturns come and downturns go, but whatever happens, chief executives,
> like cats, tend to land on their comfortably padded feet.
>
> Instead, the cause of their fear appears to be something more
> fundamental. As Alan Murray, the C.E.O. of Fortune, writes in a cover
> story chronicling the C-suite anxiety: “More and more C.E.O.s worry that
> public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of
> disappearing.” They’re worried that when the next recession breaks,
> revolution might, too. This could be the hour that the ship comes in:
> The coming recession might finally prompt the masses to sharpen their
> pitchforks and demand a reckoning.
>
> Company executives are right to worry. A downturn will mark the end of a
> record period of uninterrupted economic expansion. The American economy
> has been growing for more than a decade, stock indexes recently hit new
> highs, and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low.
>
> And yet the vast majority of Americans will not look back on the last
> decade as years of fat and plenty. This was a gilded expansion, a decade
> of creaking wage growth and profoundly unequal outcomes. The number of
> Americans receiving food stamps is 40 percent higher now than in 2008,
> yet we have twice as many billionaires as we did a decade ago.
>
> This was an expansion driven by outsized gains to a handful of
> “superstar” firms in “superstar” cities. Economic devastation reigned in
> rural areas alongside catastrophic success in urban ones — an expansion
> marked by housing crunches and infrastructure nightmares that every
> level of government seems incapable of addressing. Corporate profits
> grew as if there were no tomorrow, but they didn’t trickle down to
> everyone else. Instead, dividends and stock buybacks got bigger while
> C.E.O. pay went through the rose-gold roof. The rest of us got
> smartphones, money-losing conveniences — Uber, WeWork, Netflix and meal
> delivery apps — and mountains of student debt.
>
> And so, when recession comes, we’ll be right to ask: Was that it? Is
> this the best it gets? And if so, isn’t it time to go full Elizabeth
> Warren — to make some fundamental, radical changes to how the American
> economy works, so that we might prevent decades more of growth that
> disproportionally benefits the titans among us?
>
> But the C.E.O.s now have a plan to head off revolution. They want you to
> know: Actually, they really do care about the world. Like, a lot.
>
> This week, in a statement widely feted by well-meaning Davos types, the
> Business Roundtable — an association of chief executives of nearly 200
> companies, including Apple, Amazon, General Motors and Walmart —
> declared that the era of soulless corporatism was over. The Business
> Roundtable once held that a corporation’s “paramount duty” was to its
> shareholders. Now, the Roundtable is singing a new, more inclusive tune.
> A corporation, it says, should balance the interests of its shareholders
> with those of other “stakeholders,” including customers, employees,
> suppliers and local communities.
>
> In other words: no more Mr. Terrible Guy. Corporations are people, my
> friend, and it turns out that they’re really nice people, both
> interesting and interested, and we really must have them over for dinner
> sometime.
>
> I spent a tedious few minutes this week trying to come up with an
> analogy to convey how thoroughly empty I found the Roundtable’s gesture
> to be. I think I got one: Imagine a co-worker has been stealing your
> lunch from the office 

Re: [Marxism] Owen Jones 'Beaten Up In Blatant Premeditated Assault' | HuffPost UK

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The beating up of Owen Jones is a significant event. The outlines of a far
right politics is emerging in the UK. It is has many confused and confusing
elements associated with it. The central issue that is giving it momentum
has to be the Brexit from the EU. But of course the underlying impetus has
to do with the general crisis of neoliberalism provoked by the 2008 crash.
We are living through the failure of austerity politics/economics to
restore the rate of profitability and a subsequent generalized organic
crisis.

Corbynism can be thought to represent a way out; the Far Right offer
another. My reading of the rise of fascistic politics is that if feeds on
the failures of social democracy. The socialists are given a go first. They
fail/betray and then in come the fascists. The problem for the Right in the
UK is that they have been in power for nearly 10 years and they have piled
misery upon misery. & now the UK Tory Party has been framed and also
self-defined as the party of leaving the EU with out a deal. As Johnson put
it this is driven by a "Fick business" attitude. As a consequence, we have
the bizarre situation where the pound falls when the Tory Prime Minster
speaks and rises when the socialist leader of the Opposition comes up with
a plan to stop a No Deal exit,

So my best guess is that Corbybn will get a chance. He will be in govt with
a parliamentary party - a majority of whom hate him. I cannot see how he
can launch a social democratic program in such a circumstance.

So what should be done? I think one should push for a Corbyn govt. But my
residual Trotskyism tells me that Corbyn won't be able to achieve even the
mild reforms he has proposed. Nonetheless, the Corbyn team have maneuvered
well the last week. Framing Johnson as an arrogant careless and dangerous
bumbler with links to far right master minds seems to be working. Corbyn is
now increasingly positioned as the man who can save the UK from disaster.
The leaders of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have both shot
themselves in the foot because they refused to back Corbyn as a temporary
PM to stop the No Deal Brexit.

How all this will end up, no one knows. But again I have a feeling that the
current organic crisis may morph very suddenly into a political if not a
revolutionary one. Things are potentially that dramatic IMHO

comradely

Gary

On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 4:42 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Owen is a Marxmail alumnus.
>
>
> https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/owen-jones-attacked_uk_5d581b71e4b0eb875f2492d8
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Re: [Marxism] The Downside of Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide: “I was looking to the Epstein case with a lot of hope. Hope for a fair outcome, hope the victims would finally get justice.” | Washington Babyl

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Twitter has this very witty tweet that also has the real ring of truth'
*If you’re surprised Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, just imagine how
surprised HE was.*

comradely

Gary

On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 4:38 AM Andrew Stewart via Marxism <
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>
> https://washingtonbabylon.com/the-downside-of-jeffrey-epsteins-suicide-i-was-looking-to-the-epstein-case-with-a-lot-of-hope-hope-for-a-fair-outcome-hope-the-victims-would-finally-get-justice/
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Re: [Marxism] What will Boris do? | Richard Seymour on Patreon

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I had posted on Corbyn before I read this piece by Richard Seymour on
Johnson ( I will not use the bastard's first name ever). As always with
Richard I am struck by his brilliance and then am left with a struggle
against depression usually of enormous dimensions. But first a very obvious
point. We are heading into a political crisis in the UK and that might well
tip us into a very deep economic crisis as well.

I keep getting asked what is going to happen and always I have to answer "I
do not know" and neither does anyone else. We have a first rate opportunist
up on the Tiger's back in the UK (ditto in the USA). Richard is correct to
say that if Johnson plays the race card he may well win a GE. But there
will be a terrible price to be paid for such a victory. Will he take the
"No Deal" door out of the EU & provoke an economic and political
catastrophe? Will he win the race election and then betray the Brexiters by
staying in the EU while continuing to negotiate another deal?

Let me try and rework these choices by going back into history. In WW2
Britain was facing defeat after the retreat from France. To get the US into
the war Churchill had to open his Empire to American interests. In other
words he played America against Europe but from a position of weakness.
Still it was a popular and successful move.Johnson too would like to play
America against Europe but Trump is no FDR and nearly (or possibly over)
half of the UK is pro-Europe. So a tilt towards Trump would be very
unpopular in the UK. Very. Besides what would it solve?

For me Johnson represents the last throw of the dice for a section of the
English ruling class. He is the inheritor of the ruling caste based
consciousness. But this consciousness is residual in political terms and
can only present it self in its clownish, eccentric bonhomie mode. The
laird must be full of pretended self mockery to distract the peasants from
noticing he is still in the mansion. Contrast that with Churchill who
presented himself in the heroic mode - We will fight them on the beaches
etc.

But there are lies a plenty clinging to the Churchill myth. He did not go
up North to address miners until after the fall of Stalingrad. & I would
bet all I have that the Communist Party facilitated & policed his visit.
Now the North of England has changed since the 1940s but still the
spectacle of Johnson getting pelted with rubber balls in Manchester will
have given the elite some pause.

So will caste make way at last for class in the UK? I suspect that there is
a good section of the bourgeoisie who are terrified of Johnson. They would
love to do a deal with Labour but the price they demand is the axing of
Corbyn. The Labour parliamentary party would deliver that in a flash but
the party membership would not.

For the moment Captain Johnson is in charge.  Or is he? I have tweeted that
he is like the prankster who has convinced everyone he is a brain surgeon.
Now in the theater the patient is on the table fully prepped and the nurses
and other doctors are looking at the Joker, who they think is brilliant
because he has been to Eton and it is time to operate.

We will see how he goes and very shortly too.

comradely

Gary













On Sat, Aug 3, 2019 at 4:51 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> We have to prepare for the worst, but what is the worst?
>
> The predicament facing Boris Johnson is clear. He has just lost a
> byelection in a Leave constituency, Brecon and Radnorshire, to the
> largest Remain party in the constituency, the Liberal Democrats. Had he
> won the Brexit Party's vote, he would have held the seat. The fact is,
> even with Johnson threatening a 'no deal' Brexit, much of the Farageite
> hardcore just doesn't trust him. And they won't until he actually
> delivers. Now he has a majority of one.
>
> https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-will-boris-28859282
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[Marxism] Is it too late for Corbyn?

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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There are only two arenas of politics that I am following closely and they
are the UK and the USA. I am in absolute mourning about Australian politics
and have forbidden all discussion about it from those around me. Otherwise
my reading continues, of course.  I am currently working on Franz
Rosenzweig's *Star of Redemption*. There is enough material there to carry
me into my 90s.

But it is UK that is consuming most of my energies especially via twitter.
Lou in one of his posts remarks that if he were in the UK he would probably
(?) (or was it maybe (?)) be linked in some way to the pro-Corbyn push. He
will comment on this I am sure, if he gets the time.

I will be upfront myself and say that, if I were in the UK at the moment, I
would be in the Labour Party and supporting Corbyn. A year or so ago I
would have been in the Socialist Workers Party until they expelled me over
their inexcusable handling of the rape case.  What I am saying here in the
babble, though, is that there are no easy options for a Leftist in the UK.
But it is the same elsewhere, of course.

So one supports Corbyn, and what does that mean one is supporting?  At
best, it meas that one seeks a return to the Keynesian compromise - some
redistribution and state direction of the economy. In other words a roll
back of the right wing libertarian-ism that gripped the UK from circa 1979
onward. All perfectly moderate and rational and with the clear purpose of
saving capitalism from the capitalists..

But, as always, in politics it is the trajectory stupid. And huge swathes
of the political class will not accept a left wing trajectory, however
mild. I am using "political class" to cover members of parliament, party
apparatchiks (of all parties), the mainstream media and sections of
capital. Still the political class are up against a huge Labour Party
membership, a doggedly committed leader in Corbyn and above all a
deterioration in the hegemonic core of neoliberalism. In the General
Election two years ago that membership fought the political class to a hard
won draw on an anti austerity ie punitive neoliberalism ticket.

Now what?

I have not mentioned the elephant in the living room - BREXIT.  It is
distorting everything. I suspect the Corbynites want it to go away so they
can campaign against austerity. . To be honest, I wish it would go away
too. But it will not go away. Upfront I have no love for the EU. How could
one after what they did to Greece? But on balance faced with the racism
that is the motor engine of Brexit, I am an apologetic remainer with a very
small "r". I would plump for the "soft" Brexit that Corbyn has tried to
deliver - basically remaining as close to the EU as Norway. But the forces
of polarization have pushed a soft Brexit, seemingly, out of the range of
possibilities.

There are so many other factors that I have not mentioned - the notorious
campaign around "antisemitism in the Labour Party" that the Corbynites have
bungled by retreat after retreat, the whole nature of the rise of Johnson
and what that represents in UK and world politics, the climate catastrophe,
the re-emergence of the "Irish Problem", the impact of Trump & Bannonism
etc.

But this post is getting long enough. If it sparks interest I will
participate of course in any thread. But  let  me finish by returning to
the lead question. Can Corbyn ride out the storm and beat the bounce in the
polls that Johnson has secured and win an election that will be fought on
racism with the Tory Party seeking to use the "pauperised rabble" or the
"deplorables" against the progressive middle class?

My answer is a prayerful "yes" with the proviso that he deepen his attack
on the forces that have given us austerity. Corbyn must seek to take
advantage of the hegemonic crisis that has gripped the ruling class by
constructing an anti-capitalist hegemony.  The irony is that, despite all
the gloom, I cling to the belief that such a project has never been more
possible.

as ever

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] BobFromBrockley: The RCP's long march from anti-imperialist outsiders to the doors of Downing Street

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have read this with great interest. There is a real "coming in from the
cold" about how these ex-Trots have climbed the heights. I am an old Irish
Catholic and so am full of notions of betrayal and selling out and being a
traitor. That part of me is beyond scandalised by their embrace of Cameron
and now Johnson.

There is a scene in *Man for all Seasons * where More confronts the traitor
who is sending him to the gallows. The traitor had been made Attorney for
Wales



Why Richard, it profits a man nothing

to give his soul for the whole world.

But for Wales.

My lords! I've done.

I feel like saying something equivalent to the Spiked mob. They have
sold out to get the chance to kiss Farage and Johnson's asses. How in
the name of jesus could they?


comradely


Gary



On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 10:40 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> This week it was announced that Munira Mirza would be joining new prime
> minister Boris Johnson's team as head of Number 10’s policy unit. Mirza,
> mis-identifed by the Independent as "an academic at King’s College
> London" (her actual job there is running their "cultural strategy"), was
> Johnson's Deputy Mayor for Culture and Education during his City Hall
> tenure. Last month, the new crop of Brexit Party MEPs taking up their
> well-paid if "stupid" jobs in Brussels included Claire Fox, professional
> BBC talking head with a reputation as a contrarian libertarian.
>
> Regular readers will know what Mirza and Fox have in common: they are
> both long-term members of the network that emerged out of the
> Revolutionary Communist Party and its magazine Living Marxism (LM). I've
> written before about the LM/RCP network, best known today for its web
> magazine Spiked, and this post draws together some of that material
> given the party's importance in our current, Brexit political moment.
>
>
> full:
> https://brockley.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-rcps-long-march-from-anti.html
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Re: [Marxism] James Heartfield was a candidate with Nigel Farage's Brexit Party

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I am sad to read this Lou. I corresponded with him a few times and he was 
always polite. Lou this is what happens when one switches from Marx to 
Nietzsche but almightyjesus  Farage

Comradely 

Gary



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Re: [Marxism] Are they quite sure about this? | Richard Seymour on Patreon

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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This is a brilliant little snippet by Richard,. As always. I myself tend
though to think that in backing Johnson there is a clear sign that the
Tories intend to fight. Richard thinks they are not far sighted enough for
that. Maybe. But that is where we will end up even if only by default. The
model I believe is Macron's weekly battering of the gilets jaunes. That is
something that was unthinkable until it actually happened. No far sight was
involved, just Macron's options were to batter or to retreat and he chose
to batter. In itself that is a sign of the times we are in.

Johnson will be elected PM and he will batter. The domestic violence
episode will become the equivalent of Trump's "grab them by the pussies".

I keep thinking of the Heraclitus fragment "The god whose oracle is in
Delphi, neither conceals or reveals but gives a sign.
Comrades we are being given lots of signs by the ruling class.

comradely
Gary



On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 10:55 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
>
> There is a recording of a 'domestic incident' between Boris Johnson and
> his partner, Tory communications officer Carrie Symonds. On the
> recording, there is screaming, shouting and banging, and Symonds is
> heard  yelling at Johnson, "get off me" and "get out of my flat". At
> present, three separate neighbours report having heard similar sounds.
> One said it sounded like someone being "murdered". Unsurprisingly, the
> police were called.
>
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[Marxism] Turning up Trump's in the UK

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Trump continues to be something of a puzzle to me. I cannot quite get my
mind around his awful grossness. He continues to be worse than anything I
ever expected..

I would excuse that focus partly because I  think it is a mistake to
understate the seriousness of when our rulers become uncivilised. I know of
course that all structures of oppression or master-slave ensembles rest on
a layer of dirty business. I have said that often. The torturers,
assassins, liars, felon setters, receivers & initiators of corruption are
essential to the rule of the modern capitalist state. But now to me it
looks like someone has lifted up the rock and the unspeakable is everywhere.

 Indeed I have said that many times and I like to think I am making a moral
point here but it is more probable that I am making an aesthetic judgement.

If so, I readily confess that is a political and moral mistake.  It is
really not the bastard's awfulness, or his hair or his pathological lying
or his sustained imitation of a deplorable that should concern us. It is
his capacity to bully & badger the ruling class that should worry us
deeply. The spectacle of the UK establishment grovelling in fear at the
feet of this bully is something I will take with me to the end.

When Trump declared the UK National Health Service was "on the table", for
me it was as if Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lanksy had come to town or like we
were watching a rerun of the Cuban scenes from *Godfather 2, *or like I was
in the middle of the scene from *Godfather 1 *when the Five Families decide
to permit the trade in heroin. Everything was on the table.

The bright side of it all is that the Labour Party activists seem to have
been able to exploit Trump's slavering over the prospect of getting his
paws on the NHS, and it may have been a factor in the Labour Party victory
in the Peterborough by election.

But Trump carries on. He claims now the Queen had the time of her life. She
is 93! I laughed with scorn at all that. But still the feeling remains that
Trump is capable of doing something terrible and no one in the
establishment will dare to stop him.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Social Democracy and Imperialism: The Problem with Kautsky | Left Voice

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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This was really worth a read.  It is so good to be reminded of first
principles in the way that this article does.

I have been absolutely devastated by the results of the Australian
election. I do not want to even think about never mind discuss what
happened. So my political gaze is elsewhere - the UK of course where I have
spent a good deal of psychic energy following the Corbyn movement. On the
surface, at least, Corbyn's project seems to me an attempt to save
capitalism from the capitalists. Of course there is much more to discuss
about it, but I am an old leftist and as much as I support Corbyn I am all
too aware of the limitations of a simple revival of Keynesian-ism

I have also been interested in the fact that the settler-colonial project
underway in Palestine is the first time such a project has been so widely
publicised. Every day on my time line images of Israeli brutality are
displayed.  I understand the impatience of those who support the
Palestinians. Of course. But the steady drip feed of images of IDF and
settler brutality has accelerated the decay of Zionism. Someday the 2nd law
of dialectics will kick in in Palestine and the ME and we will all be
astonished.

comradely


On Sun, May 26, 2019 at 6:13 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
>
> https://www.leftvoice.org/social-democracy-and-imperialism-the-problem-with-kautsky
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Re: [Marxism] Message from Caracas

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Impossible to say of course from here, but I suspect Guaido is coming under
enormous pressure from the Trump cabal to deliver a coup. That would
explain some of the incompetence. At any time soon, I expect Trump to turn
on Guaido and do the apprentice thing and say to Guaido "You're fired!".

comradely

Gary

On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 1:21 AM Ron Jacobs via Marxism <
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>
> https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/01/message-from-caracas/
>
> --
> Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark
> <
> http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2018/01/if-you-have-never-read-any-of-my-essays.html
> >
> *,* Capitalism
> ,
> and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
>  *
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Re: [Marxism] Happy anniversary

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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totally endorse this.

comradely

Gary

On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 1:25 AM Patrick Bond via Marxism <
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>
> Yes, and more than merely keeping the list going, I don't know anyone
> whose suggestions for linked readings - and spicy commentaries - have
> been so valuable as Lou's.
>
> Keep 'em coming!
>
> Patrick
>
> On 2019/05/01 5:04 PM, Michael Yates via Marxism wrote:
> > Let's raise a glass to Louis on this May Day. Through thick and thin, he
> has kept this list going. Congratulations and Happy Birthday! And
> solidarity to all!
> >
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[Marxism] a thought on Badiou on the Gilets Jaunes

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I am far from an expert on France or French politics and so was very
pleased to see Badiou's thoughts on that movement.  But I cannot say I
agree with his conclusions. I suspect that his characterisation of the
movement is fairly correct when it comes to their reactive nostalgic
nature. But to condemn them for not waving the red flag seems to me to be
highly sectarian. Whatever the nuances of their politics the fact is that
they are being brutalised each weekend by the State and that moves me to
sympathy at least.

Clearly they are a contradictory formation, but surely if one was in France
one would be supporting them at some level?

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] You want it darker | Richard Seymour on Patreon

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Jesus Christ and his holy mother help us.  It is Monday morning here in
Brisbane. The new week has begun and if that was not bad enough I open the
List and this.

Jung once said that Joyce was swimming in his neuroses while his daughter
drowned in them. I think of that every time I read one of Richard's
apocalyptic pieces. He is swimming while depressives like me are choking.

Ah well.

A political point though. I do not think it is useful to see Trump or
Bolsonaro as the fulfillment of reactionary desires that have been long
repressed, They are both products of failed liberalism and social
democracy. Trump is the counter identifier of Obama, while Bolsonaro is the
counter identifier of Lula.And the desire is surely relief from the trials
of neoliberalism.

comaradely

Gary

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 2:54 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Ecological disaster, like "the Bomb", is a figure that demands a
> radically new way of thinking, a new language. If, in the case of "the
> Bomb", science seemed to have gifted humans mastery over global
> annihilation, in the case of ecological apocalypse, it indicates the
> limits of human mastery and knowledge. A fundamental crisis, which goes
> to the roots of our being on the planet. Why, then, does it result in
> such paralysis of thought? Why does it tend to yield only a
> reaffirmation of existing choices? Why does it produce such fearful
> nihilism, or despairing resignation? Why is it as though the species has
> just been given x months to live and reacts by doing everything on its
> bucket list: hence, perhaps, partially, the unleashing of long-checked
> reactionary desires, from Trump to Bolsonaro?
>
> full: https://www.patreon.com/posts/you-want-it-23633324
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders Statement on Venezuela - Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Agreed- It is helpful for getting Sanders in perspective..
Comradely

Gary

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 9:26 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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> This is helpful.
>
>
> https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-venezuela
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Re: [Marxism] Assad emerges victorious in a shattered nation | Financial Times

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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They have made a desert and they call it peace

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 2:12 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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> https://www.ft.com/content/be2e629a-1a7a-11e9-b93e-f4351a53f1c3
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Re: [Marxism] Eric Olin Wright's farewell

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Thanks for posting this Lou. I hope when my turn comes I can exhibit as
much courage and dignity as Eric did

comradely

Gary


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On Sun, Jan 20, 2019 at 8:20 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/erikolinwright/journal/view/id/5c425a8fec10033749f6d10c
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[Marxism] a thought on fascism

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I read Richard Seymour's piece on Bolsonaro. As always very intelligent. I
like his formulation of pre-fascism. However, I did have one slight
disagreement.  I think that the precondition for fascism is not the
presence of communism. Rather it is failed social democracy.  The presence
of communism does play a role in getting the elites to be afraid and to
hold their noses and back the fascist thugs.  But the mass base of fascism
requires the formula of social-democratic betrayal and that was present in
Prussia in the 30s and as well in Brazil.

But really we have to shed notions based on the constant conjunction of
events such as If A then B will follow.  That should be rewritten as If A
then there is a tendency for B to follow ceteris paribus.

All eyes on the UK next week. When May puts her deal to parliament. I think
it is going to be very close and I am tipping a May win actually.  But we
will see.

comradely

Gary




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Re: [Marxism] a protest

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Mark
I would tend to go for the Three Stooges myself.  But the truth is probably
that what the Democrats are most concerned with is any attack on the status
quo. They will move heaven and earth to prevent a broad democratic movement
emerging such as Corbynism in the UK. By that reckoning a narrow victory in
the House and "as you were" in the Senate was all they wanted.

I cannot advise US comrades because I am tucked away down under.  The
formula that Trotksyism taught me was that first the Social Democrats have
to fail before Fascism can gain real purchase. Brazil seems a classic
instance of that.  In Australia the Labor Party is about to take over next
year.  Their failure is almost predestined. By that reckoning we should
have a far right wing upsurge from 2022 on wards, when  I will be entering
my 80s. Oh Joy!

comradely

Gary

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 12:56 PM Mark Lause  wrote:

> As in 2016, the question is whether Donald Trump is a political genius or
> the Democrats function rather like the Three Stooges trying to build a
> house.  I know which option makes the most sense to me.
>
>
> Of course, now there is no
>
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[Marxism] a protest

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I am watching the results come in from the East Coast, currently the
Republicans are ahead in the 60 seats that have been called. I want to run
around and scream in protest against being in a position where I am hoping
for the Democrats to save us. I despise the Democrats with every fiber of
my being. I totally endorse every single word of Richard Seymour's
criticism of them and their overweening arrogance and stupidity.

But here we are- Waiting for Pelosi. Jeezuss and his holy mother help us.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] In memory of Fred Feldman (John Riddell)

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Sorry to hear this. Vale Fred

comradely

Gary

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 7:05 AM Richard Fidler via Marxism <
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>
> In memory of Fred Feldman
> (Including: A guide to Fred's online writings)
>
> By John Riddell
>
> Fred Feldman, a widely respected socialist activist and long-time leader
> of the
> U.S. Socialist Workers Party, died August 25, 2018. An accomplished and
> influential writer, Fred had fallen silent in recent years due to ill
> health.
> Fortunately, most of his texts are online and easily accessible. A guide
> to his
> writings is provided below.
>
> Back in the early sixties, as a student activist, Fred was often arrested
> during
> the Freedom Rides for Black human rights.  In 1964, Fred supported the
> Socialists Workers Party (SWP) presidential campaign against L.B. Johnson
> and
> Barry Goldwater. He soon joined the SWP. He wrote voluminously for SWP
> publications, mostly on international issues, and served for many years as
> a
> full-time volunteer on the staff of its publications and of
> Intercontinental
> Press/Inprecor.
>
> Full: http://tinyurl.com/y7cr9sm2
>
>
>
>
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[Marxism] Is Trump a traitor?

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I honestly cannot get interested in the Russian interference question at
all, at all. But this was a very well written article.  The opening
paragraphs are especially fine pieces of polemical writing, that I would
use if I were still teaching writing. Every sentence is like a dagger and
they all go in deep. I wish I had written them!



Comradely



Gary



Risen wrote:

*I find it hard to write about Donald Trump.*

*It is not that he is a complicated subject. Quite the opposite. It is that
everything about him is so painfully obvious. He is a low-rent racist, a
shameless misogynist, and an unbalanced narcissist. He is an unrelenting
liar and a two-bit white identity demagogue. Lest anyone forget these
things, he goes out of his way each day to remind us of them.*

*At the end of the day, he is certain to be left in the dustbin of history,
alongside Father Coughlin and Gen. Edwin Walker. (Exactly – you don’t
remember them, either.)*
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Re: [Marxism] Palestine and apartheid | Richard Seymour on Patreon

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Interesting as always with Richard. But again, as always, his imaginary is
drawn to the intractable, the  complex that cannot  be solved. At times it
seems to me that Ricard's thought is a series of long variations on the
theme of "pessimism of the intellect." The reference to biopolitics &
Foucault is not incidental.  There are echoes here of Nietzschean thought
of the Will to Power as the defining aspect of the human, and so there is
no ground for a resolution or hope for a Utopian rupture.

 I think he also underestimates the historical role of and need for Arab
labour.  It is true that since the 1990s the Israelis have substituted
"foreign" workers (to the level of about  77k) for Palestinians. But the
point is that Israel has always been dependent on Arab leader complicity in
the Zionist project and Arab help within Israel to make the Israeli state
viable.

I also know from my experience of growing up as a Catholic in Northern
Ireland, and Richard would agree with this, that a state which declares a
growing section of its own population as "the enemy" is permanently
unstable.

Richard does make the point that "Israel depends far too much on
international support". That is true, and it is why the BDS movement is
such a threat.

My own critique, and one I fear that Richard would not recognize, is that
Israel's true weakness is that it is not a moral undertaking. It is an
ensemble of what Bhaskar would have called power2 master-slave
relationships. Israel rests on a layer of dirty business - torture, arrest
without trial, spying, bribery, murder, and regular burst of slaughter.
Most states of course also depend on a layer of artisans who specialize in
dirty business. But in Israel the proponents of dirty business are in
charge out there in the open and increasingly they are a scandal to all our
humanity. Moreover, the social media meant that this morning I could see
the dirty work with a consciousness forming immediacy that the likes of
Murdoch and the Mainstream Media can no longer control.

In my youth the idealists at the university boasted were proud of their
work in the kibbutzim. No one does that now. No one.  The Israeli
ambassador to the UK, Regev recently advised the Labour Friends of Israel
that they should highlight the misogyny and homophobia of the opponents of
Israe. That was a desperate attempt to hold on to the notion that there is
something intrinsically good about Israel. The Zionist myth that the
redemption and sanctification of Israel would lead to the redemption and
sanctification of all humanity, has never seemed so sadly bizarre.

All around this troubled world where the Alt-right gather they fly the flag
of Israel.  We are now confronted with the realtity that scumbags, who are
deeply anti-semitic, support Israel.  They are all the way with Netanyahu,
as they march mouthing their filthy chant "Jews will not replace us". There
is no surer sign of the inevitable failure of the Zionist project.

My critique then rests on the proposition that there is a fundamental moral
impulse in the human and no one can violate that imperative for long
without suffering a breakdown. That also applies at the level of the
state.  And to make a final return to Richard's theme, it is here that one
finds the true similarity between South Africa and the Israeli state.

comradely

Gary




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Re: [Marxism] Radical professors and the hazards of social media | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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*

You are correct of course, Lou but twitter does have its uses. If you
pressed me to specify these I would tend to get a bit vague, but I have
learned an enormous amount from the accounts I follow. It is the immediacy
of twitter that is its strength & I suppose also its weakness.
But thanks to twitter I have come to know of Novara Media - the very
brilliant Bastani, Sarkar, Walker and Butler. & I also have seen something
of the atrocities visited on the Palestinians.

comradely

Gary

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Re: [Marxism] Uri Avnery, Israeli Journalist and Peace Activist, Is Dead at 94 - The New York Times

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Avnery represented the acceptable face of Zionism. Now apart from Gideon
Levy that seems a long gone phenomenon. Those who performed the dirty
business of Zionism in secret are now in charge. Slowly but surely the
edifice that Ben Gurion & Co built is crumbling. The role Social Media is
playing is now crucial. The horrifying violence that the IDF administers on
a daily basis to Palestinians is being seen around the world. It is
impossible for me to know but I still believe that the crucial arena of
opinion remains the Arab world, above all in Egypt.  The tacit support of
Arab dictators has made Zionist conquest possible. That support may yet be
witdfrawn.

comradely

Gary

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> Surprisingly positive obit from a Zionist NYT reporter.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/obituaries/uri-avnery-dead.html
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Re: [Marxism] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance wows SF’s Mission. Her speech not so much. - Mission Local

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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It may be too early to call "traitor" at OC. But if she does succumb to
pragmatism, her career is over.

comraely

Gary

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 10:28 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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> (Maybe there's hope for the DSA.)
>
> As such, following Ocasio-Cortez’s 20-minute speech, Alisha Foster, a
> member of the Democratic Socialists of America, said she would have liked
> for the candidate to have been more “explicitly socialist.”
>
> “It felt like a watered-down message. She was jumping around and
> discussing tactics for getting elected, but she avoided the big issue,
> which is capitalism.”
>
>
> https://missionlocal.org/2018/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-a
> ppearance-wows-sfs-mission-her-speech-not-so-much/
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[Marxism] Massacres Down Under

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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My good friend Professor Gracelyn Smallwood has asked me to forward this
link to the list


https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jul/27/
evidence-of-250-massacres-of-indigenous-australians-mapped?utm_source=esp&
utm_medium=Email_campaign=GU+Today+AUS+v1+-+AUS+morning+mail+callout
_term=282150=24906721=ema_632


There has been enormous resistance here for many to the notion of Conquest.
The preferred word is still "Discovery". Such are the ways of settler
-colonial states. The only mildly interesting variation is the Zionist one
of "Homecoming".

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Richard Seymour on how “Project Fear” failed against Jeremy Corbyn | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have the book (1st edition) and it is very good.  I too am a big fan of
RS's & even his Lacanism can be interesting.  But jeezuss kryst his
pessimism is all pervasive.  I put that down to his experience of the ISO
(SWP) "revolution is round the cor4ner comrades" line.

ae

Gary

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 6:44 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> (This is the latest installment of excerpts from Richard Seymour’s book on
> Corbyn. I plan to review the book for CounterPunch next week since it is
> such an extraordinary combination of brilliant analysis and prose mastery
> that suggests Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens in their prime.
> It is criminal that this young man does not have a job writing for the
> Guardian or the Independent rather than the fossils they employ.)
>
> https://louisproyect.org/2018/07/15/richard-seymour-on-how-p
> roject-fear-failed-against-jeremy-corbyn/
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[Marxism] Are we nearing a decisive crisis in the UK?

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Sadly there aren't many posts from comrades to the list recently. I am
inclined to answer the question in the heading in the affirmative. My own
native land - Ulster, Northern Ireland, the 'wee black hole' as we used to
call it is wracked with violence on all sides. Brexit - the vote to leave
the EU has acted as a catalyst to bring all sorts of creatures out into the
light.  Apparently the American ambassador has been making inquiries about
the safety of the Fascist leader -Robinson - while he is in prison. His
followers openly taunt & chase the police in the streets of London.

The right wing of the British Labour Party, known oddly enough as the
Centrists, are still conspiring to bring down the Leftist Leader Corbyn.
Why? One may as well ask the old Stalinists who sided with Yeltsin against
Gorbachev, why they did it, or the scorpion on the frog.

Richard Seymour has talked about a deep crisis in the Tory core that Brexit
has activated.  the Business community does not want Brexit but are
unwilling or unable to bring the Tory Party to heel. The Patty itself seems
to be in the grip of those who fantasize about the days of imperial glory.
Only the Labour Party seems to have a coherent program which could loosely
be described as Keynesian - some redistribution plus government investment.

Hardly radical but in these the dog days of neoliberalism, to talk once
more of public ownership etc is anathema to all those who traded on the
neoliberal/Thatcerhite notion that There Is No Alternative.

I will try some guesses now. I think May will face a challenge. She will
probably hold it off. I think the right wing Blairites will split from
Corbyn to try and form a new party with the pro-EU "moderates" in the Tory
Party and the Liberal Democrats. I  cannot think of any other way they can
stop a Corbyn landslide.

The timing of such a move is crucial.  Some of the rightists including the
Labour Party Deputy Leader, Tom Watson,  have talked of forming a
government of national unity with the Tories. But that move came out of
panic, I think, at the sight of the resignations on Monday and the
consequent fear of a Tory collapse.

Next week when May fronts up to parliament with her Brexit plan is crucial.
The right of the Labour Party want to vote with her to prevent an election,
but the intervention of their leader Lord Mandelson condemning May's plan
for Brexit as unworkable. has certainly muddied the waters. Will May be
defeated? Her fate is in the hands of the Hard Brexiters and the Labour
Party Blairites.

It is very much a question "Watch this space"/

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] WHY THE UNFOLDING MASS RADICALISATION AND POSSIBLE REVOLUTIONARY UPHEAVALS

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I think it is important  (note to myself largely) to get pass the inflated
rhetoric of Anthony Brain's approach. For him t he masses are always in
upheaval and it is only post hoc will he admit to working class despair. I
bet a pound to a brick for instance that if one had his posts from the
"despair" period they too would be full of predictions of imminent revolt.

But if Anthony represents one pole, then one of my favourite thinkers
Richard Seymour stands for the other. I recently sent a tweet to Richard
querying whether he was on constant alert to shoot down any sign of hope.
His reply was that hope was precious and had to be rationed. I work with
Aboriginal Australians and see all too much despair to believe that.

So we have Anthony on one side and Richard on the other. Bombastic hope
(Anthony) takes on wonderfully erudite despair (Richard). It is tempting to
divide this between heart (Anthony) and brain (Richard). But no, I think I
will resist this and say that in broad terms Anthony Brain is more correct
than Richard.  We are very close, I believe to massive change in the UK and
it cannot be confined to that group of islands.

I think Corbyn will become Prime Minister and I also believe that as a
consequence the Pinochet option will be on the table for the ruling class.
But we are in the downward part of the neoliberal cycle not at its
beginning as Pinochet was.  That means that any likely neoliberal putsch
will have to confront the fact that there is a section of capital that
actually wants government investment and redistribution.  Certainly here in
Australia the Governor of the Central Bank is calling for unions to rise up
and fight for better wage outcomes. Neoliberal austerity is crippling
capitalism.

I will try and find time to expand on the latest phase of the Corbyn
phenomenon

comradely

Gary

On Sun, Jun 24, 2018 at 9:48 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> https://anthonybrainapplyingtrotskyismfortodayandtommorw.
> wordpress.com/2018/06/23/why-the-unfolding-mass-
> radicalisation-and-possible-revolutionary-upheavals-
> within-britain-are-key-to-europe-and-world-in-salviging-
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Re: [Marxism] Buffalo Bill

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Thank you for these Lou.  I have always loved the e.e.cummings poem. Did
not know the Sandburg poem at all.  While I was in Nigeria 68-71 Sandburg
was being pushed as leading cultural figure by tthe US Aid folk.  So I read
a fair b it about him.  I thought that Robert Frost's comment on Sandburg's
politics was very bitchy but fair. Frost said "Carl has been a pacifist
between the wars"

comradely

Gary

On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 11:46 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Buffalo Bill's
> by E. E. Cummings
>
> Buffalo Bill's
> defunct
> who used to
> ride a watersmooth-silver
> stallion
> and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
> Jesus
>
> he was a handsome man
> and what i want to know is
> how do you like your blueeyed boy
> Mister Death
>
> ---
>
> Buffalo Bill
> by Carl Sandburg
>
> BOY heart of Johnny Jones-aching to-day?
> Aching, and Buffalo Bill in town?
> Buffalo Bill and ponies, cowboys, Indians?
>
> Some of us know
> All about it, Johnny Jones.
>
> Buffalo Bill is a slanting look of the eyes,
> A slanting look under a hat on a horse.
> He sits on a horse and a passing look is fixed
> On Johnny Jones, you and me, barelegged,
> A slanting, passing, careless look under a hat on a horse.
>
> Go clickety-clack, O pony hoofs along the street.
> Come on and slant your eyes again, O Buffalo Bill.
> Give us again the ache of our boy hearts.
> Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, lonely wagons,
> and the crack-crack of rifles sputtering flashes into an ambush.
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Re: [Marxism] Let Dying People End Their Suffering

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Lou wrote on the right to die:

(When you get to be a certain age--ahem--this question becomes more and
more urgent. It is the same fucking bastards who are trying to make
abortion illegal again organizing against the right-to-die. I don't know if
Barbara Ehrenreich gets into this in her new book, but I'll be damned if I
have to endure 6 months worth of torture when dealing with a terminal
illness.)

I support this totally and for the same reasons no doubt. BTW the pro-life
bastards who go on about the sacredness of human life are generally also
for every fucking war there ever was and are pro-captial punishment as well.

comradely

Gary

On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 1:36 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> (When you get to be a certain age--ahem--this question becomes more and
> more urgent. It is the same fucking bastards who are trying to make
> abortion illegal again organizing against the right-to-die. I don't know if
> Barbara Ehrenreich gets into this in her new book, but I'll be damned if I
> have to endure 6 months worth of torture when dealing with a terminal
> illness.)
>
> NY Times Op-Ed, June 8, 2018
> Let Dying People End Their Suffering
> By Diane Rehm
>
> It was an emotional moment for my friend and for me. As we sat in the
> living room of her home in California, she told me that the breast cancer
> that had been responding to treatment for several years had spread
> throughout her body. “It’s everywhere now,” she said, adding without a
> trace of self-pity: “I have less than six months to live. I’m so grateful
> that I won’t have to spend my last days or weeks in extreme agony.”
>
> She could tell me that because California’s End of Life Options Act —
> supported by 76 percent of her fellow Californians, passed by the State
> Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown — had gone into effect
> on June 9, 2016. The law made it legal for doctors to prescribe drugs to
> end the lives of terminally ill patients, and my friend found solace in
> knowing she would have this choice. Her husband and children, who had seen
> her bear years of chemotherapy and other treatments and supported her as
> her pain intensified, wouldn’t have to watch cancer torture her mercilessly
> as it took her life.
>
> California’s law was modeled after the one enacted in 1997 in Oregon, as
> were similar laws in Washington, Vermont, Colorado and, most recently, the
> District of Columbia and Hawaii; Montana also permits this end-of-life
> option as a result of a judicial decision rather than legislation.
>
> But this source of comfort was ripped away from my friend and her family
> last month when a judge in Riverside County overturned the law on a
> technicality. His reasoning? The measure was passed during a special
> legislative session dedicated to health care issues, and complainants
> argued that it wasn’t about health care.
>
> Try telling that to my friend or the many others whose lives were upended
> by the decision of the judge, Daniel Ottolia. As opponents of the law
> cheer, she and her loved ones prepare for the anguish to come.
>
> My children and I can empathize. In two weeks, we will mark the fourth
> anniversary of the death of John Rehm, my husband. He, too, had under six
> months to live and, he, too, was suffering to such a degree that he begged
> for medical aid in dying. But that option was not available in Maryland,
> where he was in an assisted living center. He ultimately chose to end his
> life by refusing to eat, drink and take medications. It took him 10 long
> and miserable days to die.
>
> As in my friend’s case, my husband was already going to die. He had
> Parkinson’s disease, which left him unable to feed himself or do anything
> else without assistance. He did not choose what some insist upon labeling
> “suicide.” Those who commit that act do not want to live. Most terminally
> ill patients like John would choose life if they could.
>
> So today my friend and many other Californians are staring death in the
> face, without the degree of control over it that the End of Life Options
> Act briefly granted them. Some people will say they should place their
> faith in treatments to ease their pain. But despite the compassionate work
> of hospice and palliative care personnel, those treatments have their
> 

Re: [Marxism] Real death toll from Puerto Rico last fall . . .

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Hi Mark

My abiding memory of the coverage of this disaster was of Trump pitching
paper towels into the crowd and him hoping to see them scramble for the
crumbs from the master's table. The crude, heartless, unthinking vulgarity
of the man is almost past comprehension - certainly to someone who lives
outside the USA.
One day comrade there will be an accounting

comradely

Gary

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 12:09 AM, Mark Lause via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> This surprises nobody who was paying attention when the U.S. government
> ignored the pressing need for immediate assistance at the time.  This
> indicates a death toll from Maria approaching 5,000 rather than the
> official "64."
>
> https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/puerto-rico-crisis/
> hurricane-maria-death-toll-puerto-rico-thousands-higher-
> official-count-n878186
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Re: [Marxism] Israel as an extreme case of the crisis of capitalism

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Comrade this was a very informative and interesting article.  I really do
not know much about Jabotinsky but the split between him and Ben Gurion is
worth exploring. Perry Anderson mentions that the State of Israel could
only be created through strong statist institutions. You would describe
that as the role of social democracy, would you not?  The inference is that
Jabotinsky's fascism could not build the state he postulated.

I myself am interested in the role of the kibbutzim. They, I think,
constituted the morally acceptable face of Zionism. At school one of my
teachers used to talk enthusiastically of the socialism of the kibbutzim.
When I was at uni there was a lot of cachet attached to having been in a
kibbutz for a time. Chomsky & Sanders both followed that path btw. I recall
how when Ben Gurion retired to a kibbutz that was seen as a splendid moral
gesture. Now the kibbutzim hire and exploit foreign workers. The Utopian
facade has long withered away.


But let us pose again the question implied in the heading of your post. In
what way does Israel represent the extreme expression of the crisis of
world capitalism? One possible answer is the Foucauldian one that the
biopolitics of neoliberalism now reign supreme in Israel. You put great
store, rightly, about the morally destructive impact of a permanent war
footing. Together these two tendencies have undermined the morally
acceptable face of Zionism. But without a moral imperative no state can
endure and we are witnessing that now in Israel in that every day it
becomes clearer that it is a scandal and a blight unto the nations.

But I think we also need to factor in the truth that Israel as a nation is
not economically viable. It only exists through the most massive
subsidisation by the USA. This has a primarily military front but it
extends to other aspects of the Israeli economy.  At the heart of this
failure is that Israel exists as an imperial force in the region and cannot
be integrated into the regional economy other than through conquest. Every
Zionist victory makes this failure to integrate even worse. It is also here
that the BDS movement can have the greatest purchase.

Before this post degenerates into a ramble, let me say that the
contradictions, including the economic,  of the  Zionist project are a
subset of the contradictions of the entire capitalist system. We will leave
it there for now.

Comradely
Gary







On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 5:34 AM, John Reimann via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> "On Monday, May 14, we were treated to the scenes of tear gas, massive
> smoke, thousands protesting… and massive violence by the Israeli army, as
> some 60 Gazans were killed and over 2500 wounded or treated for tear gas.
>
> Meanwhile, just 49 miles away, the “graceful” Ivanka Trump (as one
> newspaper referred to her) and Jared Kushner were living in a different
> world as they presided over the opening of the new US embassy in Jerusalem.
> The opening and closing benedictions (what happened to the separation of
> church and state?) were given by the fundamentalist preachers Robert
> Jeffress and John Hagee. The presence of Hagee, who has said that the
> Holocaust was part of god’s plan, was welcomed by Netanyahu and company.
> After all, these religious bigots and fanatics are Netanyahu’s closest
> allies in the United States.
>
> However, these twin events have set off tremors throughout the world,
> especially the Muslim world. Even Netanyahu’s ally Erdogan in Turkey felt
> forced to recall the Turkish ambassador to Israel in protest. This shows
> the enormous anger that must be felt by Muslim people the world over at
> what the racist, expansionist state of Israel is doing.
>
> How did we get to this point, where is it headed, and what is the socialist
> position on this? To answer that, we have to see the situation not as
> something unique to Israel. Rather, what is happening in Israel and the
> role Israeli capitalism is playing is the most extreme, the most
> concentrated expression of the crisis of world capitalism."
> Read entire article here:
> https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/05/24/israel-as-the-most-
> extreme-expression-of-the-crisis-of-world-capitalism/
>
> John Reimann
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Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Re: Against Economics, Against Rigour – Cold and dark stars

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Hi Modulus

It  depends does it not on what interpretation one puts on "cheap"?  I read
it as a gloss for "obvious"  or "not difficult" as in "Cheap shot".  To me
the option of kissing the ass of the bourgeoisie is always the cheap option
as it guarantees commercial success.

The 1% can afford the sycophants. In  fact they are probably amused by how
cheap as in not expensive the sychophants are.

comradely

Gary

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 3:44 PM, modulus via Marxism <
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>
> Isn't this rather contradictory?
>
>
>
>   Similarly, the same phenomenon probably emerges in some sector of
>> academia, given that rigour and opacity are a cheap way of signalling
>> expertise to institutions in order to justify large salaries.
>>
>
> On one hand, there's the claim that rigour and technicity limit access
> because it's very hard (expensive), and on the other hand that it's a cheap
> way to signal. Far be it from me to say that this notion might have
> benefited from some rigour.
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Against Economics, Against Rigour – Cold and dark stars

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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You are undoubtedly correct here. This is mandarin consciousness at work.
In Walter Ong's book on Orality he gives as a classic instance of this
phenomenon when the mandarins in Korea opposed the introduction of an
alphabetic system as they feared this would lead to the spread of literacy
and eat into their power. Interesting.

comradely

Gary

On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 9:37 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> The case of the arbitrary rigour of economics has interesting implications
> in academia at large.  An uncharitable person would say that the spurious
> mathematical rigour of economics is simply gate-keeping for a professional
> guild.  The extremely technical skills required to master mainstream
> economics  limit the supply of would-be economists, generating a manageable
> number of rent-seekers that can be paid handsomely.  But this probably
> extends to much of academia as well.   Academia is peppered with examples
> where “rigour” and “method” are elevated with no obvious epistemic
> justification. One has to wonder if appeals to rigour are more often than
> not guild building in order to justify large pay-checks by limiting the
> supply of the participants. The trope of “how many angels can dance on the
> tip of a pin” is a famous example of this spurious rigour.  Medieval
> theologians were accused of developing  beautiful, often rigorous and
> coherent systems, that deal with questions of no intellectual consequence.
>  Similarly, the same phenomenon probably emerges in some sector of
> academia, given that rigour and opacity are a cheap way of signalling
> expertise to institutions in order to justify large salaries.
>
>
> full: https://colddarkstars.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/against-
> economics-against-rigour/
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Re: [Marxism] Israel Genesis Prize Canceled; Natalie Portman Won’t Go – The Forward

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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This is really big is it not? I applaud her decision of course. Bit by bit
the edifice of Zionism is collapsing. As  Isaac Deutscher pointed out to
Ben Gurion, one can victory oneself to death

comradely

Gary

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> https://forward.com/fast-forward/399261/genesis-prize-cancel
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[Marxism] identity politics

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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 From Lou's post:* By showing that the white working class makes up a
larger proportion of the electorate than previously reported, the Pew
report — taken together with similar results in a study sponsored in
November 2017 by the liberal Center for American Progress — strengthens the
case made by Democratic strategists calling for a greater emphasis on
policies appealing to working class voters and a DE-emphasis on so-called
identity issues*

There is some talk of that here in Oz.  The problem is that with the rise
of neoliberalism we had a period of neoliberal radicalism with a cover of
identity politics. For example gays made gains during the terms of scumbags
like Blair.  The neoliberals used progressive politics as a cover.

But we must not throw progressive politics out with the neoliberal water.
I take it for granted that everyone on this list understands we need
socialist policies plus progressive "identity" policies.  Forgive me for
stating the obvious.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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 Lou Wrote: This thread on Corbyn et al is getting repetitious. I suggest
that comrades compose a final statement on it and then we move on.

I hear what you are saying Lou but it was good to see the list expand
beyond Trump and the ME. I had started something last night on the evil of
antisemitism but did not feel that I had much to offer beyond what was
canvassed in the thread.

I was interested in your comments (negative) about Corbyn's advisor Seamus
Milne.  He seems though to have a high reputation among the Novara Media
mob whom I follow.

What did interest me was that in the middle of all the fracas Corbyn pulled
off what was by all accounts his best parliamentary performance at PMQT.
Significantly he chose to attack the Tory Government around their treatment
of the mentally ill.

For me that indicates the central weakness of the Right in the Tory and in
the Labour Party at this juncture.  They have no good news to give.  Ditto
for Australia BTW. Accordingly, they can only offer the politics of
distraction. But the politics of distraction does not "put food on the
family" as George Bush might have said.  I suspect in terms of the UK that
outside the MSM and the Westminster Political caste no one gives much of a
damn about a mural -vile and all as it absolutely was.

If I am correct the local election on May 3rd will prove a watershed when
the Tories suffer a well deserved political thrashing.

What then will the Right of Labour do?  Apparently they call themselves the
"kamikazes".  Not the most hegemonic of nicknames I would have thought.
Will they split from the Party?  If they do so their careers will end in
inglorious ignominy. The SDP split in 1981 took place and was part of the
combative phase of neoliberalism.  While he was at the Treasury in 1970 the
Friedmanites in the Bank of England were already beginning to influence
Jenkins, the SDP leader.

The primary intent of the SDP split was to defeat Bennism and it succeeded
in that. But we are in a different phase now. Neoliberalism is no longer
normative and has instead entered a phase of irrational punitive doubling
down.  If the Blairites split now their fate would even be worse than that
of Roy Jenkins and co.

So the UK remains for me the fulcrum of my hopes for a better world. And
Corbyn seems to be still in the game

comradely

Garyn

On Fri, Mar 30, 2018 at 3:58 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> This thread on Corbyn et al is getting repetitious. I suggest that
> comrades compose a final statement on it and then we move on.
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[Marxism] Cricket, lovely cricket was at Newlands when I saw it...

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have been a fanatical cricket follower since 1957 - a long time and
though recently my fanaticism has waned and weakened somewhat, last night I
sat up to watch the test match between Australia and South Africa into the
early hours of the morning.  While I nodded nearly napping suddenly I
noticed the camera focus on the pocket and crotch of one of the Aussie
teams - young Cameron Bancroft.

In brief he was trying to scratch the ball on one side while keeping the
other side smooth.  This is the recipe for what is called reverse swing -
the balll moves and the batsmen can be beaten. The action is illegal and is
regarded as cheating.

Everything Bancroft did was captured on the big screen.  We all saw him
loosen his belt and put the offending object used to roughen up the ball in
his under pants.  It was as if a naughty school boy was trapped smoking and
put the joint in his undies.

Well I thought to myself as I went to bed 'Will this be a bgi thing or a
trivial thing?'

My last post was about how we in Australia may be drawn into nucear
conflict beause of the looming USA-China conflict. Given the coverage in
the news, one would think that is a minor matter.  But sport is of another
dimension for Australians.  It is the source of Utopian dreams and
compensation for the shitty lives we lead.

Australians take their sporting dreams more seriously than political
reality. Transgressions are not easily forgiven and it looks like we have a
major incident. The Australian Board of Control meets later on today and
they will be forced, I think, to take action against the Captain, Steve
Smith, who sanctioned the cheating.

Money has flooded into cricket and it has destroyed what used to be known
as the spirit of cricket - its ethos or ethics. Australia has led the way
in the persoanal abuse of opponents and it would seem that generally
Australian players are unloved outside of Australia. I keep thinking of
Marx's great lines *'All* that is solid melts into air, *all that is holy
is profaned*, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.'

My comment on this has always been that we kick against the pricks and
refuse to face with sober senses that our dreams are compensations and that
capitalism ruins everything - even cricket, lovely cricket.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Australia accused of delaying Chinese students' visas - The World - ABC News

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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This goes to the heart of a serious contradiction in Australian politics.
Economically Australia is dependent on China. Militarily it is linked to
Washington. That military link is designed to protect Australia from the
ancient fear of the Yellow Peril (historically China but also Japan in
WW2). But the entry of the UK into then Common Market (later ERU) forced an
economic turn to China that was strongest during the normative phase of
neoliberal globalization (1989-2008). Somehow Australia was able to manage
the contradiction of military loyalty to the USA and ever growing economic
dependence on China.

But we are going now thorugh what Koselleck called a "saddle time" when the
structure and content of the post neoliberal paradigm is being determined.

Fate has deigned to decree that during this period of struggle and
uncertainty the most militarily powerful nation in the world is led by a
dangerous unpredictable moron. It is unclear, to me at least, what the
Trump project actually means. Bannon appeared to want a war with China and
it may be that in Washington the Trump forces may be able to provoke a
conflict with China. The tariffs that Trump is imposing would seem to point
in that direction.

What will Australia do?  Will we follow the flag and join the fake "freedom
of navigation" struggle and send a warship to confront the Chinese?  In
part we are a white colonial settler nation still that has exchanged the
USA as mother country for the UK. And the logic of that relationship is
that we join the drift to war. Certainly Australia has fought in all of the
USA's wars since WW2.

But Chinese money, trade and investment count.  Well let's hope they do and
that the desperadoes who want war will be marginalised. But I have to say
that with the appointment of John Bolton things are not looking good.


comradely

Gary


On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 11:37 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> My friend David Brophy comments on Sinophobia.
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/the-world/2018-03-23/aus
> tralia-accused-of-delaying-chinese-students/9582872
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[Marxism] On being busy

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I am currently reincarnated as a historian. 

It is demanding but very very interesting work.  I will when it is all over put 
down some thoughts about performing the role of historian.

But for the moment I would just like to say something more extended than the 
tweet format persists.

I am talking myself into the excitement I felt before the Arab Spring was 
unleashed. My focus is the UK though something could happen somewhere else that 
would put Corbynism in the shade.  But for the moment my attention is with 
Momentum and Novara Media & Paul Mason and Liam Young and the Artist Taxi 
Driver.  

I have latched unto the idea of crisis and critique and the mutuality of the 
relationship and the notion of a saddle time.  These concepts all come from the 
philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck, though I could not honestly describe 
myself as a thorough student of his work.

But what I see at the moment in the UK is the hapless Tory Party drowning in a 
flood of critique. They are being battered into submission and self 
destruction.  The collapse of the Giant PFI company Carillion just adds another 
wave to the flood.

What has me muttering like a fool is the realisation that Keynesians such as 
the Guardian Editor Larry Elliott is worried that we will turn our backs 
totally on the notion of a role for private finance and end up nationalising 
everything.

When Keynesians are panicking I feel that real change is in the air. Bring it 
on I say.  We will emerge from this saddle time different.  I know it. 
Socialism now!  And everywhere.

Comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Manufacturing dissent

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The piece by George Lakoff on Trump’s twitter wars that is circulating at 
present has brought back to me debates that were held in Qld in the 70s & 80s 
when we activists were accused of playing into the hands of the far right state 
Premier Bjelke-Petersen. The latter banned street marches and when we held the 
marches and were arrested in our thousands, liberals told us we had walked into 
a trap.  Meanwhile they who were infinitely more intelligent than us did not 
protest at all.

Similarly Matt Zarb-Cousin (whom I admire) has tweeted that the appointment of 
the execrable Toby Young to the post of Universities Overseer is a “dead cat”.  
That is, it is designed to distract us from the troubles that the Tory 
Government is experiencing over the Brexit negotiations and the crisis in the 
National Health System.

I describe the arguments here as the manufacturing of dissent. Basically Lakoff 
maintains that reacting to Trump’s twitter feed is playing Trump’s game.  In 
this analysis Trump emerges as some master manipulator and we are the 
pathetically manipulated that allow him to get away with his true program.

I much prefer to see Trump’s tweets not as the work of a political genius but 
as provocations or probes from the enemy that test out our strength. As such if 
we do not respond then the enemy becomes emboldened.

Thr frantic restless quality of Trump’s presidency is due at least in part to 
the fact that he has been elected in what Reinhart Koselleck called a “saddle 
time”, that is a time when a new consensus is being forged in struggle. The old 
neoliberal centre is in terminal decline and it is very unclear at present what 
will replace it. So for me there is no master plan to trap and distract us, 
just a multitude of attacks which we ignore at our peril.

Comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Retro thoughts

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I don’t go in much for the seasonal thing but did really thrive through it all 
and actually had a very good time with the family.  

It is as hot as hell here at present. But we will get by on chilled red wine.

My political interests at the moment are firstly in following the Novara Media 
cabal in London.  I have great hopes for Ash Sarkar, James Butler, Michael 
Walker and Aaron Bastani.  

It seems to me that they and the Artist Taxi Driver, Owen Jones, Richard 
Seymour & Paul Mason and others are producing a profoundly moral critique of 
Neoliberal power.  As I have been reading Reinhart Kosselleck I have compared 
the work of Novara Media et al to the critiques of Absolutism fashioned in the 
Enlightenment Clubs and theatres. Those critics brought down the Absolute 
Monarchs.  The critiques of Novara Media et al may well bring down the UK’s 
neoliberal establishment.

The moral impulse behind the critiques is also given added edge by  Novara 
Media’s constant exposure of the mind boggling incompetence  & meanness of the 
Tory Govt that Theresa May leads.

So something good is happening in the UK.  It is also possible that the Trump 
visit could be the catalyst for a major confrontation with the Tory state. That 
makes up in part for my deep grief at the crushing of the Arab Spring.

I have also been genuinely intrigued at the re-emergence of what my old Year 11 
history text book used to call the “Irish Problem”.  We Irish of course thought 
of it as the English Problem. Briefly, Brexit poses an insolvable problem for 
the UK state.  Peace prevails In Ireland because of the absence of a hard 
border between the North and the South of Ireland.  But if the UK leaves the EU 
there will have to be a hard border somewhere. It will either be in Ireland or 
in the Irish Sea.  The Unionists in Ulster have gone hysterical over the latter 
possibility and to pacify them there has been an enormous amount of fudging 
taking place. But sooner or later there will have to be some very hard 
decisions taken.

To add a deal of delight to proceedings state papers released in Ireland have 
shown that MI5 conspired with the Protestant Terrorist gang the UVF to murder 
members of the Miami Show Band.  As well MI5 tried to persuade the UVF to 
assassinate the then Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey!   How’s that for a 
Deep State manoeuvre comrades?  There has been total silence from the British 
Government on the matter.

My other cause that is close to my heart is the struggle of the Palestinians.  
I have spent a good deal of time on Twitter in support of the courageous Ahed 
Tamimi.   She is 16 and a total inspiration for her people.  Everyone talks 
about how much the Israelis fear her courage and example.   That is of course 
true.  But in my tweets I have constantly pointed out that Zionist colonialism 
would not be possible without the complicity of Arab leaders especially in 
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. It is the very same leaders who most fear what 
Ahed represents.

Some thing must be said about Australian Politics.  I do live here after all! I 
am tempted to think we are in something like a Groundhog Day scenario.  The 
miserable wretched racist Tory Government continues in office.  The opposition 
Labour Party remains wedded to neoliberalism, seemingly of the Lite Variety. So 
their opposition is within definite limits. Yet we did have the Marriage 
Equality Survey and that showed Australia to  be socially progressive and 
marriage reality is not a fact. 

Well done!

So prediction time: foolish but fun. Some where (Europe?) there will be a major 
rupture to the Left that will threaten to destroy  the decayng neoliberal 
centre. Remember this post! I 

Comradely

Gary 



 
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[Marxism] greetings to all on list

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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It is late on Xmas eve here in Brisbane and I, in the immortal words of
Private Eye, am tired and emotional.  This is just to wish all comrades on
the list the very best for the post winter solstice period.

I remain convinced that something wonderful will happen soon, somewhere.
Go Old Mole, Go!

The present madness of punitive neoliberalism cannot be sustained.  We are
in a "saddle time" and out of the conflicts all around us will come a
better world. 50 years from now, when I am long dead, historians may well
date the new order of peace and universal love from the publication of the
British Labor Party Manifesto-  *For the Many not the Few*..

But we old revolutionaries may yet see a push beyond reformism.  I will
leave you with what is one of my favorite pieces of Marxist thought.

"My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it
is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it
wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the
bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above
the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future
generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it
to the full."

comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Thoughts on twitter

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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.

I have to confess to AlmightygodsohelpmeMaryevervirgin (and the List) that
for some time I have been immersing myself in the world of twitter.  I keep
imagining Lou, my political superego, shaking his head in disapproval, but
there is something oddly compulsive about the immediacy of twitter.

And it is at times a strange experience, but I have been impressed by these
two articles
,
one of which Lou posted.  It is not so much the style of writing or the
content that made an impression on me.  They are quite light but the truth
that lies behind them seems to me to be very important indeed.  It may be
that I am channeling Paul Mason

and his Post capitalism and the famous machine
 fragment from Grundrisse here,
but I am convinced that we are definitely in a new era.

I think this because I remember the First Intifada in 1987 when Prime
Minister Rabin was reported here in Australia as saying something about
breaking the bones
 of
the protestors.  I thought he was being metaphorical until 10 years later I
saw a Swedish film crew's footage of Israeli soldiers holding down a man
and breaking his legs with rocks.  Apart from the brutality, what struck me
about that was the time lapse between the atrocity and when I was permitted
to see it.

But in the last few days I have become a witness to the murder of Ibrahim

Abu Thuraya, the arrest of  the young and brave 16 year old Ahed Tamimi
,
and the arrest of 16 year old Fawzi al-Junaidi. The photograph

of Fawzi has gone viral it seems.  I myself counted 18 heavily armed
soldiers in the frame surrounding the boy.



It is not that I was unaware of the nature of Israeli colonial occupation.  I
have read enough and spoken enough about it.  But twitter has brought home
to me with great immediacy the haecceitas or the “thisness” of the
brutality. I have, as it were, become part of the “general intellect’ that
Marx spoke of.  I think here that all structures of exploitation and
domination rest upon a layer of dirty business (spying, assassination,
torture, felon setting etc) such as the IDF carry out on a daily basis.  In
the Information Age light is being shone on the dirty business in a way
that the Press Barons, such as Rupert Murdoch, can no longer prevent.

The result for me personally that thanks, perhaps, to the twitter
experience I have acquired, again perhaps, something of the kind of
knowledge  that
Cardinal Newman wrote of



Moreover, such knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage,
which is ours today and another's tomorrow, which may be got up from a
book, and easily forgotten again, which we can command or communicate at
our pleasure, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our
hand, and take into the market; it is an acquired illumination, it is a
habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment.


comradely


Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Volume 2 John Percy's History of the Australian Socialist Workers Party

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I wonder if there is any reference to the internal document that described
me as "an ultra left lunatic'? I remember being very proud of that.

comradely

Gary

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 1:30 PM, David Fagan  wrote:

> Hi Gary,
>
> I have just noticed that sneaky ole Gwynnyth gets more than one mention in
> the index:  several as G. Farr and then as Evans.  Strangely even though I
> am indexed you are not, despite our appearance in the same paragraph -- go
> figure!
>
> D
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Gary MacLennan [mailto:gary.maclenn...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2017 11:36
> To: David Fagan ; Activists and scholars in Marxist
> tradition 
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Volume 2 John Percy's History of the Australian
> Socialist Workers Party
>
> Hi David
>
> That is a blast from the past. The fusion! It was of course a cynical
> takeover but that is so long ago now.
>
> Am hoping for great things from the UK when the Tory government finally
> falls.
>
> As ever
>
> Gary
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On 19 Dec 2017, at 8:23 am, David Fagan via Marxism
>  wrote:
> >
> >   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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> > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
> > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
> > *
> >
> > Hi Gary,
> >
> >
> >
> > I have only just managed to get a copy of this volume.  We are both
> > mentioned in the same para as opposing the Socialist Workers
> > League/Communist League fusion, along with Gwynnyth.  Percy (or
> > Meyers) misspelled Gwynnyth's first name though I am sure that are
> > guilty of many more serious crimes than that in their quest to "build
> > the revolutionary party."  No pictures unfortunately.
> >
> > Dave Fagan
> >
> > _
> > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your
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>
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Re: [Marxism] Volume 2 John Percy's History of the Australian Socialist Workers Party

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Hi David 

That is a blast from the past. The fusion! It was of course a cynical takeover 
but that is so long ago now.

Am hoping for great things from the UK when the Tory government finally falls.

As ever

Gary





Sent from my iPad

> On 19 Dec 2017, at 8:23 am, David Fagan via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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> 
> Hi Gary,
> 
> 
> 
> I have only just managed to get a copy of this volume.  We are both
> mentioned in the same para as opposing the Socialist Workers
> League/Communist League fusion, along with Gwynnyth.  Percy (or Meyers)
> misspelled Gwynnyth's first name though I am sure that are guilty of many
> more serious crimes than that in their quest to "build the revolutionary
> party."  No pictures unfortunately.
> 
> Dave Fagan
> 
> _
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The economics of Luther or Munzer? | Michael Roberts Blog

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For a Keynesian account of the even go to

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/17/heretics-welcome-economics-needs-a-new-reformation

comradely

Gary

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 11:40 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> Our protestors follow Luther, not Munzer.  They want to replace Catholic
> economics with Protestant economics, but they do not want to do away with
> the religion of capitalist economics.  They wish to correct a ‘capitalism
> distorted by finance’, not replace the mode of production and social
> relations.  Indeed, this has been the dominant position of Rethinking
> Economics as it seeks to reverse the dominance of neoclassical theory in
> the universities.
>
> The result is that there will be no revolution in economics by following
> Luther.  Indeed, our Lutheran economists have gone little further than the
> revisions to ‘neoliberal economics’ that mainstream ‘Catholic’ gurus are
> considering too.  Martin Sandbu in the FT pointed out that “economists are
> debating intensively how to upgrade their understanding of the economy in
> order to prepare better for future disruptions and provide better guides
> for good policy”.  Nobody could be more mainstream and Keynesian than
> former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard and former US Treasury
> secretary Larry Summers (who is related to Paul Samuelson, the pope of
> mainstream ‘neoliberal’ economics in the 1970s, according to Chick).  They
> too want to ‘rethink economics’.  Indeed, all the things advocated in the
> 33 theses are being considered by the great and good of academic economics.
>
> full: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/the-econom
> ics-of-luther-or-munzer/
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[Marxism] the EU and the Theresa May agreement

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have been reading widely on this. I am struck by how the agreement May
signed can mean so many things to so many different people. I am reminded
first of all of this exchange

*When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it
means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' *

*'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many
different things.' *
* 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's
all.e*

The Ulster DUP tried to reassure its followers that it had won, but  did
admit that they asked May not to sign.  Their enemy, Ireland's Taoiseach,
said the agreement was 'bullet proof.' That was an unfortunate choice of
metaphors IMHO.

Initially the right in the UK hailed the agreement but now seem to be
reading the fine print and sidling away from May.

So what happened?  My guess and it is just that a guess, is  that some
section of capital went to May and told her to get an agreement at whatever
cost.  No agreement would have been catastrophic for the British economy
probably.  But the day of reckoning has just  been postponed that is all.

May gets to keep her wretched coalition alive and her job with it. Corbyn
is kept at bay.  So all this is short term bullshit that does not construct
hegemony. around Brexit. All in all 'the signs of decomposition' that Marx
talked about become ever clearer.

No wonder the Rapture Hysterics wanted Jerusalem.  They may be weird and
crazy but they can sense  "End Times", comrades, "End Times".

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Jacobin, leading neo-Kautskyite magazine, whitewashes SPD, erasing murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht | Ben Norton

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> 
> ... mutating into Adolfo Olaechea.

Jeezuss, Lou, the very mention of that name sends s shudder through my memory 
banks.  What ever happened to Adolfo?

Comradely

Gary


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Re: [Marxism] Death of Christine Keeler (1942-2017)

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Very interesting read.  I was shocked to be reminded that Christine Keeler and 
I were the same age.  

The details of the rationing that I grew up under were quite shocking to me. 
But I do remember going down to the local shop with a Three penny piece and a 
little rationing docket to get my allowance of sweets for the week.  I also 
recall that there was no butter only a dark yellow margarine which was terrible 
to taste.  I was to re-encounter that margarine in my late 20s when I went to 
teach in Nigeria during their civil war.

I am inclined to think that we are living through in political terms the same 
feeling that the Tories are not capable of governing.

But I do not think that Corbyn is another Harold Wilson!

Are

Gary



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[Marxism] UK politics -long post sorry

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It would seem that things are coming to a head in the UK.  The negotiations 
over leaving the EU are at a delicate stage.  Yet the ruling Tory government 
would appear to be making a thorough hash of the negotiations.

There has been bluster and wild rhetoric from the Tories about “No deal is 
better than a bad deal”, but the reality is that life outside the European 
Union will be very tough, especially for the many millions who voted to leave.

That is not to say that remaining within the EU was an easy option. The EU had 
been given a ruthless neoliberal character and there definitely was a left case 
for leaving. Just look at what they did to Greece for instance. And of course 
there was the disastrous situation where there was monetary but no fiscal union.

However, the UK did have its own currency and in many ways had the best deal 
available because of that.

But this is not the sole focus of my post.  As everyone knows the Tories cling 
to power thanks to the support of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern 
Ireland.  Richard Seymour has a brilliant post on Patreon about that party and 
I can add nothing to that.  But I will say that I was astonished that the 
Tories agreed to a deal that would have seen Northern Ireland remain in the 
union in terms of customs so that there would be no hard border between the 
Norther and the South of Ireland.

That deal makes sense, of course. But the politics of the DUP are not based on 
sense - not at all.  They are fuelled by a religious, colonial and racist 
hatred of what they perceive as the Indigenous population of Northern  and 
Southern Ireland - the Irish. 

Always in the DUP imaginary, they are a besieged minority - the last outpost of 
the British Empire who could get over run at any moment by the natives. That is 
why every week end they stand outside the Belfast City Hall waving the Union 
Jack and the flag of Israel.

It is also why they said “no” to the deal May had worked out and it is why they 
enforced her public humiliation.  The Unionist slogans “This we will maintain, 
Not an inch, No surrender and Ulster says No” are part of the cultural DNA of 
the Ulster Loyalist community. How could the Tories not know that a DUP veto 
was coming?  Have they stopped teaching history at Eton and Rugby?

We are at a juncture now when quite clearly the Tory Party cannot satisfy the 
needs of British capitalism nor the needs of the UK state, never mind the needs 
of the people of the UK.  So we have  a massive crisis of legitimation on the 
political and economic fronts.

Murdoch and the other Press Barons refuse to acknowledge this crisis of course. 
They are like the Bourbons learning and forgetting nothing. But their monopoly 
over communication has been challenged by the growth of the social media and 
that is an essential part of why they cannot command when they feel most 
threatened.

In the mean time it is just now being recognised that Corbyn has manoeuvred 
most skilfully around the whole leaving the EU affair. He ran a low key 
campaign during the EU referendum and avoided appearing on platforms with 
Tories or with the execrable Tony Blair.  He was challenged for the leadership 
because of this.  But he had kept his political base intact and saw off the 
challenge from the racist United Kingdom  Independence Party. 

He avoided talking of Brexit during the election and concentrated instead on 
breaking from the neoliberal consensus that Blair has signed the Labour Party 
up to.   As a consequence, he got 3 million lost voters to return to Labour, 
and he is now the only political leader who is in a position to deliver a deal 
on Brexit that will not destroy the British economy.

Caste consciousness is very strong in the UK still and when people hear the 
accent of Eton, Rugby etc many feel still that they are listening to their 
betters. But Theresa May has assembled such a pack of clowns and incompetents 
that even caste consciousness may not be able to save her government.

 My favourite quote from Marx  has never seemed more relevant to me.  Writing 
to Lasalle in 1858 he said

“All in all the present period is pleasant. History is evidently bracing itself 
to take a new start, and the signs of decomposition everywhere are delightful 
for every mind not bent upon the conservation of things as they are.” 

Comradely 

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: At a Navajo veterans' event, Trump makes 'Pocahontas' crack - CNNPolitics

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I saw this.  Embarrassing does not cover it. What an awful excuse for a human 
being, is our Donald.

How could Clinton not beat him? She lost the unlovable election

Comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Heart of Darkness

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This was a set book for my postgraduate teacher training year.  But I had
been destroyed as a reader of serious fiction after studying literature at
university. So I never read Heart of Darkness until some 50 years later.

It struck me that this was a novel about Kurtz the slave who was the master
of other slaves, but who was himself betrayed by the true master. I think
of the Aussie film Breaker Morant, which is about the Australian assassin
Breaker Morant (1864-1902) who was executed for extra judicial killings
during the Boer War. He was doing the dirty work of empire and paid a
price.  The Australian film about him Breaker Morant (1980) is worth a
watch.

Lyndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety would be a more contemporary version
of the same phenomenon.

What strikes me is that these slaves who are masters of other slaves never
complain about slavery.  They only complain about the lack of gratitude of
the master.

So one can construct an anti-imperialism from *Heart of Darkness*, but I
doubt if that was the book's intention.

comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Zimbabwe’s New Leader Stirs Fears That He Resembles the Old One

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Who would have thunk it?

Seriously, there is a critical dearth of decent bourgeois thinkers. Most of
the commentariat are an amalgam of ideology and idiocy. If I can find time
I will do a long piece on some of the cretinism that is being articulated
around Australia's "defence options" - America or China?

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] British Labour

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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As always thanks for posting this, Lou. What immediately strikes me about
it, now, is that none of this apples to the Democratic Party in the
States.  By that I mean that if I lived in the UK I would be in Momentum.
That would be a decision taken without illusions. But I would never, not
ever, join the Democratic Party.


Will post more on this.

comradely

Gary



On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 7:13 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> It is the internal dynamic of this socialism which constitutes the second
> basic problem of the Labourist movement. We have already seen the elements
> found within it, and their relationship. In the Labour Party, Fabianism
> became the dominant, right-wing leadership tradition, the source of the
> ideas governing most of the action of the party. Its leaders were all to be
> either avowed Fabians (Attlee, Gaitskell) or implicit Fabians, whatever
> their apparent background and orientation (Macdonald, Henderson, Lansbury).
> The Independent Labour Party became the Labour left wing, in chronic
> instinctive protest against the leadership but intellectually subordinated
> to it and incapable of effectively replacing it. Labourism, therefore,
> acquired from the beginning a peculiarly weak left. This is, in a sense,
> the intimate tragedy of Labourism—for the left has always expressed the
> most vital working-class elements, the most active and genuine socialist
> forces potentially able to develop their own hegemony over party and State.
> But expressing them in the fashion and under the conditions indicated, the
> Labour left has really completely frustrated these forces, putting them at
> the disposition of the right-wing reformists. It has been unable even to
> seriously influence the leadership, except under rare circumstances and
> momentarily. Hence, the Fabian-inspired leadership tradition, permanently
> supported by the trade unions, could acquire a great stability and
> continuity—a kind of dynasty, in fact, with its own characteristic internal
> procedures of recruitment and co-ordination, almost independent of the
> party in general. And this permanent, organic power in its turn of course
> obstructed any farther real evolution of the left wing—it is as if the
> Independent Labour Party tradition, which was apparently the beginning of a
> real British mass socialist party, was paralysed by entry into the matrix
> of Labourism and the conditions it found therein. Hardie and the other ILP
> leaders anticipated that they would be able to rapidly convert the Labour
> Party to socialism, their socialism. Instead, the conditions of Labourism,
> and their own weakness, transformed them into a mere permanent opposition,
> always urging the Labour Party to move left and always unable to make it
> move, only half conscious of their own position and its true meaning,
> unable to act within Labourism but unable to see any alternative to
> Labourism, oppressed by Fabian triviality and timidity but with no workable
> alternative to offer—such was the result of the ‘short cut’ to socialism
> which Labourism had seemed to represent. Such was the paradox of
> Labourism—the distinctive form of socialism which arose out of British
> conditions, and in effect prevented any farther socialist evolution from
> taking place.
>
> Tom Nairn, "The Nature of the British Labour Party part 1", NLR Sept.-Oct.
> 1964
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[Marxism] On Australian Politics again

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I keep thinking of the comment on Marx & Engels that they never mentioned
Methodism - one of the most significant makers of working class
consciousness in the Britain of their time.  So amidst all the writing I do
on Bhaskar and Hegel, and Traverso and Berardi etc, I feel I should say
something at least occasionally about what is happening politically in my
back yard - Australia.

There is a state election tomorrow that is noted for two things.  A slowly,
slowly right wing Labor government is in charge. (BTW There is a good
argument for saying that "Right Wing Labor" is the natural form of
government in Australia).  Secondly they will survive because the right
wing populist push, being led by Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, is
largely confined to the rural regions. I am inclined to think that
Methodist discipline and respectability is a very strong force in
Australian Labor in particular and in society generally - despite all the
public persona of the drunken Aussie larrikin. That respectability and
discipline works against One Nation.

But what this post is meant to be about is the Federal Political scene.
Specifically I want to ask "What is the significance of the imminent
political demise of the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull?"  To answer that I
have to ask what did the PM stand for?  The answer I think is that he
combined two strands of politics - social progressiveness and a commitment
to neoliberalism (of a lite nature).  Thus he believed in global warming.
He wanted Australia to become a Republic. He wanted refugees to be treated
more humanely and he favored gay marriage. But he compromised on all the
progressiveness to become Prime Minister. He leads a right wing party that
despises him. Now that he has slipped in the polls, they intend to get rid
of him.

That dominance of the Right within the governing party effectively left
Turnbull without a cover for his neoliberalism. Neoliberal conservatives
concentrate on stoking up fears of the Despised Other while neoliberal
progressivists rely on the warm inner glow we get for instance as in the
marriage equality debate when we see "love winning". The crucial point to
understand is that they all need a cover for neoliberal policies.

My conclusion here is that the political moment of neoliberal
progressivists is over. We will either have a turn to some variation of
Keynesianism or to a  barbaric authoritarianism designed to prop up the
prevailing economic stage of capitalism.

For what it is worth I would put my money on Keynesianism, especially here
in Australia.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Duncan Hallas on the "reformists"

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As someone who was driven out of the ISO because of a tendency to reformism, I 
am inclined to think that this is a very important topic, Lou.  It is also 
coming to the head now with the almost sure and certain resurrection of the 
British Labour Party under Corbyn.

In a talk that I gave to the DSP before the British Election, I argued that if 
we were all in the UK then we would all be or all should be inside Momentum,  
but not as entryists.

I was asked how should we should then be inside the Labour Party, the party of 
reformism.

I don’t think I answered that question very well.  But I do have a horror on 
entryism as a force to split and wreck and I am obsessed with a certainty that 
no good comes from that tactic.

I think I compounded my poor handling of the question of reformism versus 
entryism by forecasting that Corbyn would do very badly in the UK elections and 
that in all likelihood the forces he represented would be smashed.

DUH!

In my defence this talk was before the release of the Labour Party manifesto.

Comradely

Gary




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[Marxism] thoughts on Australian politics

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have been remiss in that I have not spent much time posting about events in 
Oz.  There is a state election in Queensland, happening in two weeks and it is 
hard to pick it.  

The conservative Liberal National Party (LNP) are in opposition and governing 
in a minority government is the Labor Party.  It is best described as cautious 
and tending to cling to the vanishing neoliberal centre.  The Premier Anastasia 
Palaszczuk is, or deserves to be, famous for her “I won’t be rushed” mantra.

The Murdoch press (Curses be on it) is concentrating on the activities of 
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.  Hanson is not running.  She is a federal 
Senator.  But the media hangs upon her every word. Her party could be described 
as right wing populist.  She is racist and angry and stupid. But she definitely 
has some disadvantages as well.

For instance, there is a total absence of discipline in her “party”.  This 
could be best described as a flocking together of the “deplorables”  - all 
drawn like flies to the excremental that is Hansonism.  But Hanson  lacks a 
Steve Bannon, who could articulate a Strasserism, that would move her into 
serious disidentification territory rather than the terrain of 
counter-identification that the One Nation Party & their supporters now occupy. 
(Reference to Michel Pecheux’s work there, comrades).

As well, Hanson herself is a Tory wannabe.  She just wants to be accepted by 
her betters. Thus, she votes with the Federal conservative government to cut 
penalty rates. She supports the use of cheap overseas labour on Australian 
boats. She raves against the unions and never conceives of the possibility of 
winning the membership over. When the government is in trouble, she moves to 
prop them up.

So this is the kind of right wing populism you have when you don’t have a real 
right wing populism.   I hesitate to say this, but Hansonism is not fascism. 
Having said that, it could mutate, and I am not at inferring that the One 
Nation Party and the cult of Hanson are something we should not worry about.

So what will happen in the State election? For me the overwhelming factor is 
that the main Conservative Party, the LNP, is a spent force in ideological 
terms. The steady collapse of the neoliberal centre, the return of Keynesian 
thinking, have all deprived the LNP of a clear focus.  They do not have any 
solution to the myriad of problems that have sprung up in the 21st century 
since the GFC of 2008. When the LNP were in government (2012-2015), they 
indulged in an orgy of late unset Thatcherism, sacking thousands of public 
servants and plunging the state into a shortfall in  demand that led the state 
into a recession. 

Like the Conservatives in England conservative parties in Australia are one 
trick ponies.  They cling to the tenets of austerity and if that does not work, 
they are bereft.  
Whether they would admit, or even know it, or not, the State and Federal 
Liberals are basically waiting for the  Labor Party to come up with a solution 
which they will then attempt to own.

Whether the Labor Party which gave Australia neoliberalism under Paul Keating, 
can now construct a Keynesian type Centre is what is bubbling under the 
political surface here.

Comradely

Gary


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[Marxism] The times that are in it

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I always hesitate to talk about US politics because of the fact that I have
only been there once and I live so far away.  But I am interested of course
in what is happening there as it affects all of us so much.  The topic of
interest is now the recent election results which have shown a rejection of
the Republican Party and the (re)-emergence of the discourse of hope in the
Democratic Party. Specifically have in mind the thesis by Aaron Bastani of
Novara Media, London, that "Political parties can now act as hosts for
historically ‘third party’ candidates: Sanders, Trump, Corbyn"


My reading of the British situation is that Corbyn will form a government
possibly within a year. I do not expect the Tory party to survive its full
term. He will form a crisis government with three quarters of his party in
Parliament hostile to the idea of a socialist Britain. Good luck with that
one I say.

Now what of the Democrats?  Can they parallel the British Labour Party and
become the host of a third Party leftist push?  After all Sanders did make
quite a splash.

My answer to that is No, absolutely Never, not ever. Why am I so adamant?
For a start, the Democrats have never been a social democratic party. As
was pointed out to me Obama never betrayed anyone.  He just did the
Democratic thing. Sure he advanced a few empty slogans -Yes we can - and
the naive filled in the blanks with their hopes and dreams. Moreover since
their defeat in the Presidential election there is not sign what soever
that the Democrats will take the social democratic path. Their recent good
results make the social democratic option even more unlikely.

Bastani labels Trump as a traditional Third Party candidate.  Wit respect I
disagree.  The whole Republican establishment swung behind Trump and that
is one of the reasons he won.  Moreover Trump and the Republicans are not
such an unusual or strange mix. I know we all groan over every Trump tweet,
but as an oldie I recall Reagan clearly.  In his own way he was just as
bizarre, though his acting ability tended to disguise that. For example,
think about how long after Reagan's death we discovered that he had told
Yitzhak Shamir  and Wiesenthal about how he, Reagan, had filmed the
liberation of Auschwitz.  He was never anywhere near the war.

So I welcome every advance of the DSA (Allez les rouges!). Of course I
welcome the defeats of Republicans but you will have to forgive me if I sit
out the celebrations of the Democratic Party's victories.

comradely

Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: A Profile of John Grierson, Godfather of DocCinema | Videomaker.com

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Sent from my iPad
Interesting man no doubt.  Grierson had studied Hegel and I think he was very 
influenced by the Philosophy of Right in terms of his commitment to nation 
building.

But he was a social democrat with a penchant for pretending to be much more 
left wing than he was.  Thus he publicly screened Battleship Potemkin along 
with his own film Drifters (1929). He also claimed to have been there at the 
the release from prison in 1918 of the great Scottish radical John MacLean 
(1879-1923), but that is doubted.  In  the 60s he put Trotsky’s Literature and 
Revolution on his reading list.  I think that was partly in an effort to 
outflank the radical 60s generation.

He claimed to have put the working class up on the screen, but it was very much 
the working class who were loyal and hard working, and not at all threatening 
to the powers that be during the Great Depression.

Comradely

Gary


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Re: [Marxism] American public opinion polling on first strike with nuclear weapons

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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May god help us. At times I think we are not going to make it. And when
Trump farts out his mouth that tendency to despair becomes very strong. But
it has to be resisted.

ae

Gary

On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 12:58 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism <
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>
> "The data reveal that around one in five Americans have just about always
> been in favor of at least the idea of using nuclear weapons as something
> other than retaliation for having them used against us, and at the height
> of the Cold War these numbers went as high as four in ten."
>
> https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-using-nuclear-weapons/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: What Democrats Must Do

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Build Soviets!   You are getting soft in your old age Comrade Proyect.  It
is obvious the correct demand is for the Democrats need to arm the workers.

Comradely

Gary



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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Popular Front Didn’t Work

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Very informative Lou, and I agree with the basic line. I have to confess,
though, to a kind of nostalgia for the Popular Front period and all that
mass influence. I know.  I know.  But trekking through the embittering
isolation of the neo-liberal era 1973-2008, has been tough.

comradely

Gary

On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 6:25 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/popular-front-communist-party-democrats
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[Marxism] Thoughts on UK Toryism

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The spectacle of the Tory PM, Theresa May, gasping for air while a
prankster handed her a form sacking her amidst a set that began to fall
apart was as Novara Media would say “delicious”.  Richard Seymour has a
piece behind a paywall about Tory Trauma, and certainly that looked like to
be a very accurate way of describing what has happened.

I think, though, that what is going on in the UK needs to be understood as
a crisis of caste as much as a crisis of class relations.  The tradition
British Ruling Caste nurtured at their private schools and at Cambridge and
Oxford are just not up to the task at the moment.  They have two star
leaders - Johnson and Rees-Mogg.  Both of them sound like something from my
collection of Boy’s Own annuals from the 1920s. They get up and talk about
Crecy and Agincourt, for Jayzuss’ sake.

I sit and think how could you get so much shit into a head? I do not know
what they do at Eton, but that school  must provide one of the worst
educations available anywhere. How could such idiots be let loose on the
British public?

But loose they are and at a time when British Capitalism needs rescuing
from the Capitalists. There is nothing, however, in the make up of caste
consciousness which would enable the Upper Caste to act effectively to
achieve such a breakthrough. And so we have an absolute crisis of hegemony,
where neoliberal imperatives have also weakened the forces of tradition.

How long can they keep on keeping on?  Of course it is impossible to answer
that question, but I cannot see the Tories eeking out another 4 years.

There is too the big issue of Brexit, the Tiger’s back, astride which
squats the Tory PM gasping and coughing and spluttering in fear. She is
terrified to go on and equally frightened of getting off.

All in all the times are delightful..

Comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] O tempora O mores

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The horrific scene in Las Vegas and the brutality of the Spanish state in
Barcelona  and the devastation in Puerto Rico are of course not related
politically but they add to the general feeling that things are falling
apart.

The Las Vegas slaughter has nothing of course to do with the insane gun
laws of the USA. It was a white man who carried out the slaughter, so it is
business as usual.

The thuggery of the Guardia Civil has been described as "serene" by the
Spanish Prime Minister. Meanwhile people my age are tottering around with
bloodied heads.

The absolute greatest fuckwit of our time, Donald Trump, parades around a
Golf course and insults the mayor in Puerto Rico who is trying to help her
people.  But she lives on an island and that is surrounded by water so
there is nothing Trump can do to help.  Of course if there was a Communist
takeover in the island then that would be another matter, but people dying?
starving?  Where's the problem?

Where to from here?  We so desperately need a break through to a rational
decent alternative to what the Capitalist class has to offer. There is hope
though.  as I write this thousands of brave young people are marching
through Barcelona for decency.

comradely

Gary







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Re: [Marxism] The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Alan

You are alive!!! (And as pedantic as ever)  How are things with you
politically?

Comradely

Gary

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 7:13 AM, Alan Bradley via Marxism <
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>
>  Nick Fredman wrote:
> > Very much related to campaigns against monuments to Cook and others is
> what> is probably the highest profile current battle against reactionary
> > tradition, the battle to de-recognise as "Australia Day" the date of
> Cook's
> > landing, January 26.
>
> January 26 marks the arrival of the First Fleet, not Cook, of course.
> When fighting over history we need to be careful to get the history right.
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Re: [Marxism] The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Mark wrote:

'Meanwhile, they were putting up statues to the idols of the master class
that tried to destroy a nation when they couldn't rule it anywhere.

It puts a whole new light on what "Reconstruction" meant and never meant.'

Well said, Mark. Here in Oz, there is a campaign against the statues and
monuments of some of the worst of the colonists.  There is a special focus
on the statue of Captain Cook and the claim that he "discovered"
Australia.  That is as claim which is deeply offensive to the First Nations
people who have been here for around 60k years.

There are other statues that are controversial as well.  My good friend the
Indigenous activist and scholar Professor Gracelyn Smallwood, who is from
Townsville, has written about the role of the man the city was named after
Robert Towns  (1794-1873).  He was part of the slave trade in South Sea
Islanders, where Islanders were kidnapped to work in the Queensland sugar
cane fields.

There are other villains of course, who have been honored similarly.

comradely

Gary

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:32 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism <
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>
> One of the most frustratingly neglected chapters of the Second American
> Revolution was the story of the Richmond Underground, the hundreds of
> active Unionists in the Confederate capital, black and white, who did
> everything they could to sabotage the war effort.  Before and after
> Fredericksburg, Lee's army was badly nobbled by not getting supplies on
> schedule.  The railroad operators and suppliers regularly misdirected that
> kind of freight.  Elizabeth Van Lew organized a circle of informants that
> reached into the War Department and Mary Bowser, a former slave in her
> parents household--all manumitted years before--came back to take a
> position working for Jefferson Davis in the Confederate White House.  She
> smuggled information out through the baker who made daily deliveries,
> Thomas McNiven.
>
> What's particularly significant about these people is that they were on the
> winning side and we know so little about them.  After the war, the
> government brought Van Lew (and surely others) to Washington to remove the
> documentation on their activities from the records, because of fear of
> reprisals.
>
> Meanwhile, they were putting up statues to the idols of the master class
> that tried to destroy a nation when they couldn't rule it anywhere.
>
> It puts a whole new light on what "Reconstruction" meant and never meant.
>
> ML
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Re: [Marxism] "Why George Bernard Shaw Had a Crush on Stalin"

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Someone once said (was it Malcolm Muggeridge?) that Shaw was more
intelligent than wise. How apt.

Comradely

Gary


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On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 10:22 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism <
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>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/why-george-
> bernard-shaw-had-a-crush-on-stalin.html
>
> The analysis doesn't go very deep, but IMO we should use this op-ed to
> lobby the publisher of Paul's book on the subject to put it back in print.
>
> Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union
> 1929-1941
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[Marxism] The point

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The point is it not that the 'social-fascist' line one was one of the
factors in producing the great disaster that was the Nazi regime.?

comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] on the Centre

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Aaron Bastani of Novara Media London has a link on his twitter feed to a
blog on Scottish politics <
https://petermccoll.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/history-is-back/>.


There Peter McColl cobbles together Fukuyama's End of History thesis with
the notion that elections could only be won from the Centre. The now
retired leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Kezia Dugdale, was a centrist
and she was apparently astonished when in the last British election,
Corbyn's break with the centrist politics proved electorally popular.
McColl concludes that centrist politics are dead and that history is back.


McColl's article suffers from the weakness of a non-processual view of
reality. That leads one to think that concepts such as a Centre are fixed
and unchanging.


It is vital to reject such a view and to grasp that the Centre is an
abstract, geo-historical, relational concept.  Basically it is a cluster of
common sense ideas as to what is politically possible. It is formed in the
struggle between the social classes. It changes over time and space.



What is happening is that a new Centre is coming into being.


I am old enough to recall when the Centre was Keynesian.  That changed in
the 70s & 80s to the neo-liberal Centre. That change came out of brutal
struggles such as the Chilean Coup & the miners' strike in the UK.


In Australia we had our own very Aussie type of  Coup with the sacking of a
Keynesian treasurer, Jim Cairns on the 2nd July 1975 and then with the
dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government on the 11th of November 1975. As
is the way with things, the history of the struggles was lost or
misunderstood or misinterpreted by the victors. The  truth is that the new
neo-liberal Centre came *into the world dripping* from head to foot,
from *every
pore*, with *blood and dirt*.  But alas the loss of history meant that the
new Centre was treated as if it fell from heaven upon the place beneath.


For those of us who are into conspiracy theories, Milton Friedman visited
Australia in April 1975.



Now we are seeing a swing back to something like a Keynesian Centre.  When
it takes root, if it does, a new common sense will take hold and once more
elections will be won from the Centre.


comradely


Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Hurricane Harvey and the dialectics of nature | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Well done, Lou. This is a fine contribution to the understanding of what is
a very deep crisis, as the disasters triggered by Harvey in Houston show
all too plainly.  Here in Australia I recall Drew Hutton, one of the
founding leaders of the Green Party, saying at a meeting that he did not
like using the word "capitalism". It is only when the Greens do the hard
work of understanding the link between capitalism and the current
ecological crisis that we will progress.

comradely

Gary

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> COUNTERPUNCH, SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
>
> Between 1872 and 1882, Frederick Engels worked on a book titled “The
> Dialectics of Nature” that sought to apply Marxist dialectics to the
> natural world. Although it was never completed and is filled with dated
> ideas about science, it is a work that has earned the respect of some of
> the most important scientists on the left such as Stephen Jay Gould who
> praised its best known chapter that was issued separately as a pamphlet—The
> Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. Long before people
> such as Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson were laying the groundwork for the
> eco-socialism of today, Engels anticipated the kind of contradictions that
> have led to three disastrous hurricanes: Katrina, Sandy and now Harvey.
> Engels wrote:
>
> Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our
> human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge
> on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the
> results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite
> different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The
> people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the
> forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along
> with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they
> were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.
>
> If you understand that the prairies surrounding Houston, the wetlands to
> the south of New Orleans and the brush that grew across the coastline
> around greater New York were closely related to the forests of the earliest
> class societies that Engels refers to, you will realize that “each victory”
> will bring us closer to the ultimate defeat of civilization itself. Just
> consider the words that follow those above:
>
> When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the
> southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no
> inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy
> industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were
> thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of
> the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious
> torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.
>
> Furious torrents. Are there any words better matched to the pictures of
> Houston seen on television every night?
>
> full: https://louisproyect.org/2017/09/01/hurricane-harvey-and-the
> -dialectics-of-nature/
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Re: [Marxism] Exaggerating the threat posed by fascist groups

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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In Australia, the "threat" of the far right as represented by Pauline
Hanson's One Nation performs, I would argue, the function of the Bad Cop to
the Good Cop.  We are meant to soil our pants at the thought of a
groundswell to One Nation and so we miss, for instance, the clear and
present danger that both political parties are committed to neoliberal
economics (though Labor are showing small signs of movement here).

During the term of the Federal Labor government (1983-1996), the bad cop
was the so-called New Right which we were all supposed to be terrified of
while the Federal Labor Party put in place the key elements of the
neoliberal program. The Trade Union movement went along with the Labor
government and not surprisingly has gone into precipitous decline.

comradely

Gary

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 10:49 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> One last thing: I am not downplaying the threat of right-wing politics and
> racism in America. Donald Trump is the president, after all. But I tend to
> think that the biggest threats from the right come from the Republican
> Party, not the Klan and the Dominionists and the neo-Nazis and whatever
> Richard Spencer’s thing is called. (Even Spencer’s hometown hates him.) And
> when we fixate on the outright fascists, the people who have “organized
> street forces,” we are missing the more significant threat, which comes
> from the halls of state capitol buildings. You can (and should) care about
> both threats, of course, but it’s important to keep them in proportion, to
> weight each in accordance with its power and consequences. And it’s not
> that Berlet and Wilson are necessarily wrong that the white supremacists
> are rising, it’s that they are not trustworthy guides, because they don’t
> respond to the tough questions or show an instinct for self-criticism. And
> that’s why I think it’s perfectly fair for us to say that the state of the
> far right is unknowable. It’s unknowable because those who study it don’t
> seem committed to evaluating it cautiously.
>
> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/08/why-we-dont-like-hyst
> erical-journalists
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