Re: [Marxism] For all 'Sanderistas' out there: Bernie campaign inspires radical movement.

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sat, Mar 7, 2020 at 1:02 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> I think that you and your comrades have extrapolated from the rottenness
> of the Australian Labour Party the rationale that since it is rotten and
> since the Democratic Party in the USA is rotten, why not a "tactical"
> vote for another rotten party when the candidate is so breathtakingly
> wonderful like Bernie Sanders.
>

Yeah not really. What you seem to be referring to is my responses to an
argument of yours: That, you seemed to me to say, there's absolute class
difference between the US Democrats and "labor/social democratic parties" ,
which means any vote or involvement in the former is impermissable under
any circumstances, while either might be acceptable in some circumstances
regarding the latter. I think that's far too abstract to be of any
practical use. As is any unqualified described of labor/soc dem parties as
"workers parties", or the former DSP's view of the ALP as "liberal
bourgeois".

The social nature of the voting base, activist base, leadership,
organisational forms, and which class or class fraction the formal
positions and actions of the party serves, and how all these aspects change
over time, are all relevant to tactics towards nass parties. The ALP as an
example had from the 1890s liberal bourgeois, pro-capitalist politics (at
that time tariffs, public infrastructure building, industrial arbitration,
extreme racism), and was tightly controlled by middle class lawyers and
preachers as well as union leaders. At a few different times, with the
influence of the Russian revolution or the 60s-70s radicalisation, there's
been militant, avowedly socialist currents form that arguably at least
Marxists should relate to if not join.

The Australia SWP was partly entryist towards the ALP in the 70s and early
80s, a few years before my joining. Once I looked through the paper
associated with this work, Labor Militant, and was a bit surprised to see a
debate over several issues between the editorial board and Australia.s
foremost Marxist academic RW Connell, over tactics in the ALP. I've no idea
if this activity was really worthwhile but it seemed as least as arguably
as involvement in the UK Bennite movement at the same time. Things were
very different in both parties just a few years later in the mid-80s.

The Democratic Party compared to "labor social democratic parties" is under
more direct bourgeois control, in funding and leading personnel,  while
having a similar working class and urban middle class voter base and
substantively similar in formally somewhat different ties to union and
other "social movement" bureacracies. While it's then even less likely to
house any sort of class struggle social democratic-type current than the
ALP, but this isn't impossible in very specific circumstances. Maybe only
twice ever — Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign in the 30s and the Sanders
since 2015, more debatably to some extent in the Jackson movement.

One thing clear in all these examples is they were time-limited windows.

 I have often considered the possibility of spending a month or so

> studying the Australian Labour Party in order to give you and your
> comrades a proper answer but I've learned that you are here mainly to
> intervene.


Well study or not as you will, but the US and Australia are hardly mutually
equivalent interests, with the US economy being 25 times that of Australia
and still just about globally dominated. A lot of us have also ties to the
US, with my father being a lecturer in US history, doing his PhD at
Stanford (where he met Kerensky) and working for a while at NYU while I was
a baby and toddler. And I've raised a lot of things here that are of no
particular "line" thank you very much.


> It would be a waste of time for me to get up to speed on
> Australian politics when the other side of a debate is so into
> groupthink. Viva Rojova. Viva Sanders. Bleh-bleh.
>

My point was about Green Left's coverage of the Sanders movement. Which
over the last three years or so has mainly consisted of the views of US
activists, including several articles by Barry Sheppard and Kshama Sawant a
couple of years ago critical of involvement in the Sanders campaign, and
coverage of debates between different currents at recent DSA conferences.
Perhaps the balance could be different but I don't think it's a bad
approach for a socialist paper on foreign struggles. Red Flag in that time
has had 3 or 4 articles all written by in-house experts of the same views
from the same office in Melbourne Trades Hall. They may even be right but
they're hardly less groupthinky.

Re: [Marxism] For all 'Sanderistas' out there: Bernie campaign inspires radical movement.

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Green Left's coverage:

Louis has expressed disdain at  Australians having an opinion on the
Sanders movement, but inconsistently as he prefers the opinion of a
Socialist Alternative staffer who I don't know has ever been active outside
Melbourne, to those of US Marxists covered recently in Green Left: Vince
Emanuele <
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/hope-and-hate-us-electoral-race>;
Boots Riley <
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/boots-riley-why-i-am-voting-bernie-sanders>
and Isaac Silver <
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/united-states-sanders-campaign-invigorating-and-unifying-left>.
To describe as cheerleading these views, based on what's happening on the
ground rather than high principles applied from afar (not to mention the
regular Sanders-scepticism expressed in Green Left by Barry Sheppard) is
rather churlish. Silver in particular was very clear about limitations and
potential pitfalls, and Emmanuele has a very clear summary of revolutionary
united front approach to the campaign:

"Never in my life have I poured this much time, effort, sweat, emotions and
resources into an electoral campaign. Generally, I avoid electoral politics
like the plague, but this campaign is different in every way, from its
vision and connection to social movements to its ability to bring out poor
and working-class Americans who have given up on the system and everything
in between.

"Any serious left-wing organiser in the US should view the Sanders campaign
as a strategic opportunity to not only potentially have an ally in the
White House, but to use the campaign as a way to bolster existing social
movement efforts and build independent left-wing organisations that outlast
the 2020 campaign and go beyond Sanders’ vision."

This seems much the same view as those of Kshama Sawant and the US
Socialist Alternative, the half of Solidarity that apparently voted to be
part of the campaign, much of the former ISO, and may voices within the
DSA. To suggest there's principled defenders of political independence on
one side and a bunch of demoralised sheeple blindly following in
Harrington's footsteps on the other is a caricature and block to real
discussion. And an unfortunate habit of the Australian Socialist
Alternative who despite their good work tend to draw exaggerated lines
between themselves and the rest of the far left, as a show of being the
only real revolutionaries.



On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 4:10 PM Ratbag Media via Marxism <
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> https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/green-left-issue-1256
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Re: [Marxism] Gallup Survey shows majority denounces Assad and YPG deal with the regime

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Well nice skirting of the actual point that there’s been decades of
institutional Arab chauvinism in Syria that might just affect how Arab
people think. But in any case do you have a reference for any change in
language suppression, particularly in schools, after 2011? I’ve never seen
anything about that, outside Administration areas, which the regime had no
say over.

On Thu, 14 Nov 2019 at 11:57 am, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 11/13/19 6:26 PM, Nick Fredman wrote:
> > No, I’m not kidding, as it’s very obviously true. Whatever specific
> > favors Alawites are granted, and despite Syria’s multi-ethnic and
> > multi-lingual reality, Arabic is the only official language in Syria,
> > and the only language allowed in schools, big issues for many oppressed
> > peoples around the world.
>
> Interesting that this suppression of language rights was suspended after
> 2011. Just goes to show you how calculating Assad was. And the Kurds
> took the bait, hook, line and sinker.
>
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Re: [Marxism] Gallup Survey shows majority denounces Assad and YPG deal with the regime

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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No, I’m not kidding, as it’s very obviously true. Whatever specific favors
Alawites are granted, and despite Syria’s multi-ethnic and multi-lingual
reality, Arabic is the only official language in Syria, and the only
language allowed in schools, big issues for many oppressed peoples around
the world. On a more symbolic but related note, Assad has repeatedly
refused suggestions that the name of the state be changed from the Syrian
Arab Republic or the army from the Syrian Arab Army. This is very literal,
institutional chauvinism, likely to affect the beliefs of ordinary Arabs
grown up in a context where only one language and ethnicity is deemed truly
of the nation, and no doubt explains the opposition to all community
languages being used in schools in Rojava.

On Thu, 14 Nov 2019 at 9:15 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *****
>
> On 11/13/19 4:50 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
> > This is concerning but not unexpected given the Arab
> > chauvinism propagated by the regime and many rebel groups and the
> > anti-Kurdish racism propagated by Turkey.
>
> Assad? Arab chauvinism? Are you kidding? The only chauvinism he ever
> displayed was on behalf of the Alawite minority that aligned with the
> Sunni elite to keep the nation as his personal dungeon. Oh, except for
> the liberated territory the PYD ruled as part of their non-aggression
> pact with the bloodiest dictatorship of the 21st century.
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Re: [Marxism] Gallup Survey shows majority denounces Assad and YPG deal with the regime

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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If you read the actual article, you find that the survey is not of people
“living in North East Syria” but of people in Raqqa and Hasakah governates
(about half the area of the liberated administration), except those in
areas in which fighting is occurring. And the results are not generalized
but highly split by ethnicity and, at least as they report, among Kurds, by
political background.

Whatever the precise validity of the results, it likely reflects a large
proportion of Arab people, in these areas, opposing the revolutionary
administration. This is concerning but not unexpected given the Arab
chauvinism propagated by the regime and many rebel groups and the
anti-Kurdish racism propagated by Turkey. We don’t know if those with
Turkish bombs falling on them are less enamored of the intervention, as
they weren’t asked. We don’t know variation by class or political views
(except the not very precise suggestions about the small minority of Kurds
opposing the administration), which would tell us more about the support
base of the administration.

As for validity, as quantitative social researcher by trade I’m dubious
about claims of representativeness via weighting. To do that, you’d have to
accurately know population levels of factors likely to be associated with
responses, which might be class, gender and political affiliation as well
as ethnicity, which is unlikely in a period of war and large-scale
population movement. The sampling methods (land-line, mobile, door-to-door)
aren’t specified so we also don’t know if there’s any systematic bias
introduced there.

On Wed, 13 Nov 2019 at 7:50 pm, RKOB via Marxism <
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>
> A highly interesting Gallup survey of people living in the North-East of
> Syria. Clearly people hate the Assad regime and even prefer ISIS to it.
> They also denounce the YPG deal with the regime. The "Rojava paradies"
> has been not too impressive!
>
> https://t.co/1mzVoLswDC?amp=1
>
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Re: [Marxism] 44 percent of workers in Brandenburg voted AfD yesterday

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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I agree with the substantive point that working class support for the far
right is real and a big concern, and also that for Marxists class is a
socio-political process rather than a static sociological category. On the
latter however, if we’re going to take any notice of voting (or voter or
social attitude survey) data at all, as at least surface-level empirical
indicators of underlying class processes, we might as well try to have the
best possible indicators.

There’s a lot of confusion in leftist commentary on voting and attitudes
around the fact that mainstream commentary often uses an
occupational/educational definitions of class rather than a Marxist
definition, notwithstanding the limitations of any fixed categories for
Marxist analysis. Self-employed or even employing tradespeople are often
categorized as “working class”, while non-managerial white-collar workers
who have zero autonomy at work and are union members can be categorized as
“middle class”.

The categories in the tweet in question seem to be, if google is
translating accurately for me, respectively “manual workers”, “white collar
employees”, “self-employed” and pensioners”, and the employer/employee
relationship at least doesn’t seem mixed up. Knowing the “class”
composition of each party (rather than as here the voting composition of
each “class”), and any change over time, would both be good to know.

With aggregate data like this we’re stuck with the categories given, and
should be particularly wary of reifying them as indicating class as such.
But if we’re able to get person-level survey data we might have some
control over categorising respondents in a more Marxist framework. In my
view the best way to do that within the limitations of most social
attitudes or voter surveys is use categories of non-managerial workers (of
whatever collar-colour), salaried managers, and business owners.

For those interested in these issues I published an article in Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism in 2012 relaying this class categorisation to attitudes
and voting in the Australian Election Study, as part of an analysis of the
Australian Greens (non-paywall and extended version here
http://links.org.au/node/3180).

More recently I’ve been noodling with the openly available 2016 Australian
Election Study and have posted some notes and plots on the class
composition of voting blocs here
https://m.facebook.com/story/graphql_permalink/?graphql_id=UzpfSTU5NDQyMzM3NDoxMDE1Njc0MDY3OTMyODM3NQ%3D%3D
and scored on an attitude to immigration scale by party vote here
https://m.facebook.com/story/graphql_permalink/?graphql_id=UzpfSTU5NDQyMzM3NDoxMDE1Njc2NDE3NzQ0MzM3NQ%3D%3D

The latter are steps towards regression modeling of the probability of
voting for different parties, in which I expect class to have an effects on
voting that’s partly direct, and partly indirect, mediated by attitudes to
unions, business and immigrants (and maybe activity as participation in
strikes and protests are asked about in this survey).


On Tue, 3 Sep 2019 at 10:13 am, ioannis aposperites via Marxism <
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>
> > Interesting breakdown by social class:
> > https://twitter.com/formelfriedrich/status/1168402855880994816
> > In confronting the rise of authoritarian far-right populism, Marxists
> should really re-think the old Trotskyist shibboleths about fascism being a
> primarily petit-bourgeois or "Bonapartist" phenomenon.  It's pretty clear
> that the new far-right has a substantial proletarian base.
> >
> >
> >Well, I think fascism is a movement not a "authoritarian far-right
> populist" party and certainly not just some pieces of paper in a ballot
> box in Brandenburg.
> Marxian social class is not a sociological category:  "the proletariat"
> is not just 'the workers" who as individuals are not immune to fascism,
> let alone to "authoritarian far-right populism".
>
> JA
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Re: [Marxism] Amber A’Lee Frost and Anna Khachiyan: the two dingbats who bonded with Spiked Online | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 4:38 AM A.R. G via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> *
> Granted I'm not sure that CTH people (like Amber) are among those who are
> witch-hunting for anti-Semitism but it seems to be a running theme. People
> who complain about "snowflakes" are often the biggest ones.
>

Whatever else you think of them, they definitely don't do that, making
great sport of people like Bari Weiss and Meghan McCain for doing so, and
having guests from the UK Labour left talking about the smears against
Corbyn etc.

In general as I've noted here before if you've listened to the show to some
extent for some time it's obvious they've moved more towards interviews
with left activists and commentators and not coincidently moved away from
puerile irony/edginess. I certainly don't agree with all they say and note
a definite tendency to economism/workerism which seems to be a trend within
DSA.

This economism it seems is a partly understand reaction to, as black
feminist and now Sanders media chief Briahna Gray (and former CTH guest)
put it a couple of years ago, while being a lot more nuanced than the
subjects of this thread, "how identity became a weapon against the left"
wielded by powerful liberals,
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/how-identity-became-a-weapon-against-the-left.
Amber seems more economistic than the others, though usually far less
crassly than comes across in this article. The main problem seems to me to
be no differentiation between rich and powerful hardened liberals like
Clintons and Pelosi who *are* exactly like these "dingbats" say, and
millions of ordinary people with mixed consciousness. Perhaps they were
misrepresented to some extent though if so you've got to wonder what they
expected.

Anyway I find CTH entertaining and one interesting take on politics and
culture in the US (and elsewhere: e.g. I've never heard the reclusive and
eccentric graphic novel genius Alan Moore speak until his recent interview
on the show). I tried listening to Red Scare once and did find it tedious
edginess-for-the-sake-of-it.

Something else I find interesting about the comments about "hipster
Brooklyn" podcasts is that one important inspiration for them is a
long-running show by a pair of non-college educated, blue collar stoner
dads from Columbus, Ohio, called Street Fight Radio. CTH quite directly,
having "met" as online guests on this show. More specifically of interest
was a recent discussion they had with Patton Oswalt one focus of which was
more irony and edginess had become overused and was now often poisonous for
the left
https://soundcloud.com/streetfightwcrs/street-fight-with-patton-oswalt.

Also of relevance and of a bit more weight than these largely
comedy-oriented podcasts was this discussion with Doug Henwood about his
experiences in DSA, including criticism of economist tendencies such as
those influenced by Aldolph Reed, whom Henwood seems a lot more critical of
now https://www.blubrry.com/jacobin/44236868/the-dig-doug-henwood-on-dsa/
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Re: [Marxism] From Exile to Dirtbag: Edgelord geopolitics and the rise of “National Bolshevism” in the U.S.

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The eXile seems like it was quite gross but Ames has disavowed it. What
evidence is there that CTH has “cultivated” a “red-brown politics”? Their
guests have been people like DSA organisers, striking teachers, immigrant
rights activists, a YPG internationalist, Liza Featherstone, Libby Watson,
 Naomi Klein and China Mieville rather than Richard Spencer. Their “off”
language and jokes have been considerably toned down no doubt through
interaction with the activist left, and never anyway equated to
Strasserism. They seem in tune with a range of other US podcasters and
writers with an ironic, humorous schtick, politics broadly aligned with the
more radical end of the DSA, along with maybe a tendency to a liberal
“geopolitical” anti-imperialism WRT the Middle East which isn’t perfect but
isn’t fascism on the march. This silly writer seems to want to amalgamate
everything he doesn’t like to Nazism.

On Tue, 22 Jan 2019 at 6:07 am, MM via Marxism 
wrote:

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>
> > On Jan 21, 2019, at 12:16 PM, A.R. G via Marxism <
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
> >
> > ARR is claiming Matt Taibbi and Chapo Trap House are part of
> > a Nazi infiltration?
>
> ARR may sometimes overstate things a bit, but in the same way that this
> from ARG is an overstatement. It would be more accurate to say that ARR is
> claiming that eXile and CTH have helped cultivate the ground within which
> red-brown politics has found roots. And that claim seems quite plausible.
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Re: [Marxism] YPG seeks alliance with Assad

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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A minor but not insignificant point is that Rudaw is *not* a “pro-YPG”
source. It’s a media company based in the Iraqi KRG and close to the KDP
leadership, bitterly hostile to the Rojava revolution. On that basis Rudaw
has had some problems operating in Rojava. While this report may be
accurate Rudaw won’t necessarily give any objective accounts of the balance
of opinion.

In any case some compromise with the regime appears inevitable. As it is
for the remnant rebel forces. Comrades seem to forget this is how virtually
all struggles end up this side of world socialism, the balance of forces
determining how good or bad each compromise is, and how well each side is
equipped for the next stage. Even the left taking power in one area means
ongoing compromises with capitalist forces, claims of an Apoist goal of
instant (and presumably autarkic) anarcho-communism notwithstanding.

On Sun, 6 Jan 2019 at 9:37 pm, RKOB via Marxism 
wrote:

>
> *Deal with Syria regime ‘inevitable’: Kurdish commander *
>
> By AFP 2019-01-05
> http://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/05012019
>
> This is from a pro-YPG source. Not surprisingly.
>
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Re: [Marxism] E. O. Wight

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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He's also one of the few well-known Marxists of recent times who's done
serious quantitative work on class and social structure (i.e. inferential,
multivariate analysis of person-level data). While his framework tends to
the structuralist and the confusion of socio-economic status with class,
the effort should be acknowledged and emulated a lot more, especially as
there's a lot more open source availability of software and data than in
his early days.

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 1:56 AM MM via Marxism 
wrote:

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> > On Dec 31, 2018, at 7:58 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On 12/30/18 9:36 PM, Jim Farmelant via Marxism wrote:
> >> The sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who is known for his research on
> social class, and for his contributions to Analytical Marxism, is seriously
> ill with leukemia. He has been keeping a blog with updates on the course of
> his illness.
> >>
> https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/erikolinwright/journal?fbclid=IwAR2bIey2Mx4vyPy3Ji4HL5FIVMx5uVFCpN1FdjwNMwpDnPrCcoAOy7dIHQo
> <
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> >
> >
> > I am very sorry to hear this. I have deep differences with Wright over
> his support for China being "socialist" but he has been willing to debate
> these issues when most acclaimed academics would just ignore a jerk like me.
>
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Re: [Marxism] US Removes YPG From Annual Terrorism Report

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The US has never designated the YPG as a terrorist organisation, including
well before any cooperation between the US state and the Rojava
revolutionaries.  This Turkish state mouthpiece article attempts to make
something of the extremely tenuous fact that buried in the detailed section
on Turkey in the previous State Department report it was mentioned that the
Turkish state considers the YPG terrorist. And this edition doesn’t. Fancy
that.

A real issue of course is the criminalization of support for the PKK in a
range of countries. A Kurdish-Australian journalism faced court on serious
terrorism charges for his political beliefs in 2016 as did recently several
protestors in the UK for holding PKK flags.



On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 at 3:23 pm, RKOB via Marxism <
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> https://www.qasioun-news.com/en/news/show/162170/US_Removes_YPG_From_Annual_Terrorism_Report
>
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Re: [Marxism] Syria: Assad threatens Idlib while Afrin resists Turkish occupation (Green Left Weekly)

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 12:43 pm, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> So what in hell's name is going on with you people? Don't you realize
> that you are morphing into an anarchist current? Why not go whole hog
> and find some Bakuninites to fuse with in Australia?


Well your problem apart from denial of any evidence you don’t like seems to
be some lingering symptoms of ortho-Trotskyism like thinking formal program
determines everything and an inability to understand solidarity and
collaboration that doesn’t involve ideological conformity.

Yes the Apoist in rejecting Stalinism have eclectically borrowed from
Bookchin as well as other sources, but their practice doesn’t seem very
different what what any socialist current could or should do in their
varied circumstances. Sure it’s justified and useful to make informed as
opposed to ignorant and dogmatic critiques of Apoism. I’ve mentioned Rahila
Gupta on their feminism before.

Whatever the justified critiques, we might, shocking as it might seem,
actually learn something from people leading millions in an anti-capitalist
movement, as well as by re-reading Lenin.

A number of Australian anarchists do have better poisitions and practice on
Syria, or on other issues, than a number of people with more impeccable
Leninist qualifications on paper. For example it was welcome that some
prominent Melbourne anarchists attended the recent large launch of the
Victorian Socialists. The large local Kurdish left are I understand also
supported of this electoral alliance, despite their opinions of Socialist
Alternative’s opinions on Syria. All a bit complicated maybe but that’s
life.



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Re: [Marxism] Syria: Assad threatens Idlib while Afrin resists Turkish occupation (Green Left Weekly)

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The Revolution in Rojava book including its account of the uprising is
based on over 150 interviews within Rojava. The account of the uprising is
also based on reports from a Vice News team which reported from Rojava a
week after the uprising. The accounts of a deal with Assad all seem to come
from keyboard warriors in the US and Europe with no direct evidence of any
deals. You can disagree with the analysis of the authors or the positions
of the Apoist movement, fine, but smart-arse sneers about Bookhin don’t
really justify continued casual slanders made with little to no evidence of
fellow socialists over being handed Rojava for free, deals with Assad,
being armed by Assad, “ethnic cleansing” and the rest.

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 11:43 am, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Extract from "Revolution in Rojava", p. 54:
>
> 'The Revolution begins in Kobani
>
> 'At 1 a.m. on the night of July 18-19, 2012, the YPG took control of the
> roads leading in and out of Kobani city.  Inside the city, the majority of
> the people, who supported the MGRK [Peoples Council of West Kurdistan],
> occupied the state institutions.  "We had marked which buildings we should
> take over", recalled Pelda Kobani, who participated that night, "which ones
> were useful for the people, even bakeries" The people then assembled at the
> regime army's strongpoint in Kobani, and a delegation informed the regime
> soldiers, "if you give up your weapons, your security will be guaranteed".
> The soldiers looked out over the mass of people, and seeing that they had
> no alternative, they agreed; some returned to their families in the Arab
> cities, while others preferred to remain in Kobani because they had lived
> there for forty years.
>
> 'The state had no substantial military force", said Hanife Hisen.  "We
> surrounded them...and they surrendered.  The regime could't send them any
> reinforcements.  We didn't turn a single soldier over to the regime - we
> just talked to them and called their families to come pick them up.  The
> ones who wanted to join the FSA, we let them go to Turkey".  Heval Amer
> points out that when the regime troops left, "we didn't let them take their
> weapons.  So they left behind many, even heavy weapons".  Because the
> liberation was bloodless, Hisen recalled, "people said the regime had
> turned the weapons over to us.  But it's a lie".'
>
>
> 
> From: Marxism  on behalf of Chris
> Slee via Marxism 
> Sent: Thursday, 13 September 2018 3:04:04 PM
> To: Chris Slee
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Syria: Assad threatens Idlib while Afrin resists
> Turkish occupation (Green Left Weekly)
>
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>
> My source is the book "Revolution in Rojava", by Michael Knapp, Anja Flack
> and Ercan Ayboga (Pluto Press 2016), p. 54-56.
>
>
> They based their report mainly on interviews with people who participated
> in these events.
>
>
> Chris Slee
>
>
> 
> From: Marxism  on behalf of Louis
> Proyect via Marxism 
> Sent: Thursday, 13 September 2018 10:37 AM
> To: Chris Slee
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Syria: Assad threatens Idlib while Afrin resists
> Turkish occupation (Green Left Weekly)
>
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> On 9/12/18 8:17 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:
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> >
> >
> 

Re: [Marxism] Syria: Towards the Final Battle in Idlib

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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As Chris has demonstrated Probsting’s article contains as much evidence of
SDF-Assad collaboration as badly photoshopped images of YPG and SAA flags
flying together in Aleppo, or the articles a few years ago in Syrian and
Turkish state media uncritically shared IIRC by Louis among others in which
Assad claimed to have armed the YPG. Assad didn’t get around to sharing the
documents he claimed to have on this, but whom amongst us hasn’t lost some
receipts down the back of the couch?

On Tue, 7 Aug 2018 at 11:06 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *****
>
> On 8/6/18 9:02 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
> >
> > Lucky RKOB wasn’t around to give heroic keyboard advice to Tito and Ho
> Chi
> > Minh about never collaborating with the US, or theremight still be a Nazi
> > occupation of Yugoslavia and a Japanese imperial occupation of Vietnam.
>
> I think the analogy might be more like Bandera collaborating with the
> Nazis.
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Re: [Marxism] Syria: Towards the Final Battle in Idlib

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Lucky RKOB wasn’t around to give heroic keyboard advice to Tito and Ho Chi
Minh about never collaborating with the US, or theremight still be a Nazi
occupation of Yugoslavia and a Japanese imperial occupation of Vietnam.

But RKOB is right that it would be silly to equate the misogynist racist
reactionaries of HTS with the multiethnic feminist leftists of the SDF.


On Tue, 7 Aug 2018 at 3:31 am, RKOB via Marxism 
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> This seems to me a particularly clumsy attempt to whitewash the role of
> the YPG/SDF as foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism. As it is widely known,
> the YPG/SDF leadership and the U.S. military have closely worked
> together during numerous military operations. The U.S. Air Force has
> given support to the YPG troops. The U.S. has armed the YPG, and so on.
> (See on this e.g.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Democratic_Forces#Support_by_the_United_States,_France_and_other_Western_nations
> )
>

...
> How silly for Chris Slee to equate the role of the YPG with that of the
> HTS!
>
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Re: [Marxism] Recycling: how corporate Australia played us for mugs | Jeff Sparrow | Environment | The Guardian

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The scam that is recycling for profit has shocked a lot of people here. But
I think there's more concrete and transitional campaigns to be taken up on
recycling per se, with very red-green community control and green jobs
angles, as well as Jeff Sparrow's correct call for the environment movement
to "agitate for fundamental economic change to end the production of
pollutants".

Recycling can and should be a democratic collective activity rather than a
consumerist, individualist diversion. Where I used to live in northern NSW
the Greens-influenced local council, after a public education campaign,
made the collection of food scraps mandatory and halved its collection of
landfill. Landfill was drastically reduced and the council got itself a
quite big municipal socialist worm-farm enterprise into the bargain. A lot
better than handing out subsidised household worm farms like my current
council.

Our Victorian Socialists' call for a local recycling plant hasn't actually
achieved anything yet but has got some good media at last:

In the Murdoch paper <
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/north/bold-vision-to-make-whittlesea-the-recycling-capital-of-victoria/news-story/bb00d92b11c31a1e50d22e67cdba62f8>
(paywalled for me after using free quota)

And the local paper:

Bold plan for recycling hub

Shapiro, Paul. Whittlesea Leader; 13 Mar 2018

SOUTH Morang could become home to Victoria’s main recycling plant under a
new proposal from the Victorian Socialists.

The party is making a run at the Victorian Upper House in the Northern
Metropolitan region and has earmarked Whittlesea as an area in dire need of
public services and infrastructure.

Yarra councillor Stephen Jolly, Moreland councillor Sue Bolton and asbestos
victims lawyer Colleen Bolger will all run at the November state election.

The Socialists are confident they can snare at least one upper house seat
with Mr Jolly, the lead candidate, most likely to be elected.

Mr Jolly said the Socialists had a number of ideas for Whittlesea,
including a major recycling plant which would serve the entire state.

“The recent China decision to cease taking Australia’s recycling has led to
chaos for councils,” Mr Jolly said. “The only long-term solution is for a
recycle facility to be built in Melbourne, which could also have benefit of
new jobs and apprenticeships.” Mr Jolly said he envisioned the plant could
be a hub for apprentices and South Morang would be “an ideal location”.

“The plant will bring hundreds of jobs as well as provide recycling relief
for Victorian households,” Mr Jolly said. “I plan to work with politicians
and experts on specifics such as size, cost and location.” Whittlesea
Council city transport and presentation director Nick Mann said the council
“would work with future governments on this proposal”.

“We would support any proposal that would increase opportunities for the
community to recycle waste,” he said. “(The council) identified that 15 per
cent of garbage could be reprocessed and valuable materials recovered for
re-use rather than sent to landfill.”The Socialists also have a plan to
boost public transport through a fast bus network.

https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/recycling_hub

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 10:25 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2018/jul/19/its-not-recycling-its-collecting-how-australians-were-sucked-into-the-crisis
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Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sat, 30 Jun 2018 at 9:34 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> The key difference between a reformist Labor Party and the Democratic
> Party is based on class. For example, socialists have had a tactical
> orientation to the NDP in Canada for decades now but none have oriented
> to the Liberal Party. Unless we can distinguish between a bourgeois
> party and a reformist social democratic or labor party, we are missing
> the class criterion.


But it seems to me that it’s the exactly the absence of an NDP or Labor
Party that has meant the US Democrats have absorbed the functions that such
parties play in other capitalist countries. In UK terms it’s like the right
and centre of Labour fused with the Lib Dems (a not inconceivable lineup).
That the majority of workers especially organised workers and activists
orient to the US Democrats in a very similar way to the way such layers
orient to the ALP (and some extent to the Greens who have captured a big
chunk of white collar section of the working class), people you presumably
want to get a hearing among, is the reason campaigns such as Ocasio-Cortez
are a consideration st all.

The concrete difference it seems to me is that in the US the structure and
function of the Democrats makes it possible for such campaigns to put
forward a clear pro-working class and activist platform, clearly opposed to
the leadership. Which is currently inconceivable via the ALP and very
limited via the Australian Greens (including by their explicit proscription
of organised socialists). The concrete national-historical difference
between UK Labour and the ALP is that in the former it’s been possible for
a class struggle current to seize the leadership and some of the
structures, win near majority support and involve new layers in activity:
this is even more inconceivable via the ALP. Reciting abstract categories
isn’t much help without looking at the actual dynamics in each different
national arena of the class struggle.



>
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Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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While I don’t want to judge electoral tactics for US socialists from the
outside, it is curious to read from Australia statements that Ocasio-Cortez
and others are absolutely tied to the Democrat machine and definitely bound
to be coopted, when the Democrats have nothing like the party discipline of
our Labor Party or even of the Greens. And though Labor is much more of a
proper membership organisation that the Democrats with formsl affiliation
of unions, the discipline strictly imposed on representatives and
candidates has only the most attenuated connection to the party and union
membership, and is directly controlled by privileged parliamentary and
union bureaucracies with close ties to corporate donors.

Not a single ALP representative at the federal and state level, or any
candidate in the internal party “pre-selection” votes has put forward in
recent memory anything like the clear working class platform of
Ocasio-Cortez, or anything remotely like the clear attack on the
pro-corporate leadership of the avowed progressive party (and the internal
pre-selections, mainly about dividing up jobs between factions rather than
policy, c.f. public primaries, are another big difference in context). Any
straying from the bipartisan policy of torturing asylum seekers in
concentration camps is now particularly stomped on.

The Greens have similar positions on paper and some Greens candidates
approach Ocasio-Cortez in emphasising a class position and the need for
mass action, but this is very inconsistent and not widely associated with
the Greens. The Greens leadership also has taken to imposing party
discipline on the left harder not least on any straying from the pathetic
official position on Israel-Palestine.

Just saying that whatever the potential of increasing illusions in some
that the Democrats as such are a vehicle of change, these “hostile
takeover” type campaigns by the DSA and otherd seem to have more potential
for promoting socialist politics and struggle than intervention in other
centre-left parties in other bourgeois electoral systems (the UK being
another story again, a Labour with more extant activist structures and
socialist tradition).

On Sat, 30 Jun 2018 at 6:34 am, A.R. G via Marxism <
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>
> I think the most likely direction if/when she clinches the Congressional
> seat will be similar to Ro Khanna. I doubt she will stray. The question is
> how much influence she will have.
>
> Amith R. Gupta
>
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 2:59 PM, Dennis Brasky via Marxism <
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Re: [Marxism] PKK’s message for May 1 and a “united struggle against fascism”

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Not only that the dirty anarcho-liberals don't mention even once Hassan
Rouhani of Iran, Fuad Masum of Iraq, Masoud Barzani of the KRG, Benjamin
Netanyahu of Israel, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, King
Salman of Saudi Arabia, Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar or even
Malcolm Turnball of Australia. Obviously uniting the Turkish left in mass
struggle against their own state is fake opportunist cover for their dirty
realpolitik alliance with all these forces.

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 9:30 PM, RKOB via Marxism <
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>
> Unsurprisingly, this PKK May Day statement talks about the Middle East but
> manages not to mention the U.S., Russia, Assad or imperialism even a single
> time! This reflects the PKK's leadership dirty realpolitik towards the
> imperialist Great Powers and the Assad regime.
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Survey on antisemitism in the UK shows its decrease in the labour base since Corbyn, not increased.

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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I can see the hot takes in the New Statesman and Guardian now: Corbyn has
been excusing antisemitism, it’s just that he’s really bad at it.

On Fri, 30 Mar 2018 at 8:35 pm, modulus via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> Interesting survey on antisemitism in the UK:
>
> https://evolvepolitics.com/yougov-polls-show-anti-semitism-in-labour-has-actually-reduced-dramatically-since-jeremy-corbyn-became-leader/
>
> Saying what a lot of people have been saying and that New Statesman
> article was disputing: that since Corbyn antisemitism has decreased in
> the Labour Party, and that it's a far worse problem in other parties
> except the libdems, which have comparable amounts of it.
>
> --Mod
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Re: [Marxism] Jaysh al Thuwar commander: Turkey turned ISIS, Al Nusra into FSA (ANF)

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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More recent comment from and details about Jaysh al Thuwar and associated
political formation the Syrian National Democratic Alliance which includes
the Revolutionary Left Current here
http://theregion.org/m/article/12757-whose-free-syrian-army-the-arab-opposition-resisting-turkey-039-s-afrin-attacks

On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 at 1:41 am, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Patrick Cockburn has reported that Turkey has been recruiting large
> numbers of former ISIS fighters to its version of the  "Free Syrian Army":
>
> www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/12/is-turkey-recruiting-ex-isis-fighters/
>
> Whether these people can still be considered as ISIS members may be
> debatable.  The point the Jaysh al Thuwar representatives are making is
> that they do not consider these (ex?) ISIS members as real representatives
> of the Free Syrian Army.
>
> Regarding HTS, Rod Nordland says in the February 4 New York Times:
>
> "Elements of that same group are among the Free Syrian Army militias, many
> of them Islamic extremists, who are allied to the Turks and fighting in
> Afrin, according to the group and analysts in the area".
>
> www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/world/middleeast/turkey-afrin-syria.html?
>
> Chris Slee
>
>
> 
> From: Marxism  on behalf of RKOB via
> Marxism 
> Sent: Tuesday, 13 February 2018 9:42:52 PM
> To: Chris Slee
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Jaysh al Thuwar commander: Turkey turned ISIS, Al
> Nusra into FSA (ANF)
>
>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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> *
>
> It might be useful to think first before forwarding such YPG nonsense!
>
> ISIS and HTS are attacking the Kurds in Afrin?
>
> ISIS and HTS are pretty busy on other fronts! Actually they are
> currently killing each other in South Idlib! Check their website, check
> other news, check the pro-Turkish news - everyone will confirm this.
>
> No serious source has ever claimed that ISIS and HTS are participating
> in the Turkish attack on Afrin.
>
> Why should they?
>
> To support the Turkish army? But Turkey has a) expelled ISIS via their
> Operation Euphrates Shield and b) has signed the Astana agreement which
> calls for the annihilation of HTS. So why on earth should they help
> Turkey?!
>
> As Trotsky once said: Even slander should have some logic!
>
> And, by the way, a group like the Jaysh al Thuwar which is - as part of
> the SDF - officially financed and supported by the US is not the most
> serious source.
>
>
> Am 13.02.2018 um 11:10 schrieb Chris Slee via Marxism:
> >   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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> > *
> >
> > Jaysh al Thuwar (Army of Revolutionaries) is a predominantly Arab force
> that is part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, along with the predominantly
> Kurdish YPG/YPJ and other groups.
> >
> > Jaysh al Thuwar was formed in 2015 by survivors of the Syrian
> Revolutionaries Front and other Free Syrian Army-aligned groups in northern
> Syria that were attacked by Jabhat al Nusra.
> >
> > Jaysh al Thuwar is helping to defend Afrin against the invasion by the
> Turkish army and some of its proxies that use the name "Free Syrian Army".
> Jaysh al Thuwar rejects the right of the Turkish-backed forces to use this
> name.
> >
> > Chris Slee
> >
> > ***
> >
> >
> https://anfenglish.com/rojava/jaysh-al-thuwar-commander-turkey-turned-isis-al-nusra-into-fsa-24891
> >
> >
> > "The forces gathered under the Jaysh Al Thuwar (“Army of
> Revolutionaries”) umbrella say they are the true FSA and they have come
> together for the Syrian revolution, while those who attack Afrin are ISIS,
> Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (formerly Al Nusra)..."
> >
> > “Turkey wanted to make us fight against Kurds. They formed the group
> called the 

[Marxism] Who are the Victorian Socialists?

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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A new electoral initiative here in Melbourne has a real chance of getting a
socialist elected to Victoria’s multi-member electorate upper house in
November. It's united Melbourne’s two socialist councillors, one of whom
being Australia’s he most electorally successful socialist in the last 60
or so years, and Australia's two largest socialist organisations. Since the
campaign was made public a couple of days ago one of the state's most
leftist unions, the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association, has
made a substantial donation, and others are likely to follow.

“Who are the Victorian Socialists?

“Our political system is broken. The Liberals rule for their corporate
mates. Labor is little better, tailing the political right and selling out
its working class supporters to big money and developers.

“It’s time for a genuine left alternative.

“In the November 2018 state election, left wingers are uniting as the
Victorian Socialists to get Yarra councillor Stephen Jolly elected to the
upper house for the Northern Metropolitan Region.

“We are for the poor against the rich, for workers against their bosses,
for the powerless against the powerful.

“The Victorian Socialists brings together socialist groups including
Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Alliance, and individual activists,
unionists and community organisers.

“While Stephen Jolly will head the campaign, the ticket will also include
Colleen Bolger from Socialist Alternative, and Socialist Alliance Moreland
councillor Sue Bolton”.

Full: https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/whoare/

Socialist Alliance view:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/why-you-should-support-victorian-socialists

Socialist Alternative view: https://redflag.org.au/node/6191
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Re: [Marxism] [Critical-Syria] Re: Fwd: In blow to Trump, Syrian Kurds call on al-Assad to Save them from Turkey | Informed Comment

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The veracity of this report, is a bit unclear. Note previous reports of
secret deals to hand over Manbij and Raqqa to the regime have proved to be
completely false.

‘Aldar Khalil, a member of the Movement for a Democratic Society (TEV-DEM),
an umbrella organization made up of six political parties and civil society
institutions, including the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the leading
Kurdish party in northern Syria, told reporters they will defend Afrin and
will never hand it to the Syrian regime.

‘“Russians told us we would be safe and far from the Turkish attacks if we
leave Afrin for the Syrian regime, but we totally refuse that, and we will
defend it,” he said.

‘Additionally, Bahjat Abdo, a senior commander in the Syrian Kurdish
People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Head of Defense Authority in Afrin,
said in an earlier exclusive interview with Kurdistan 24 that they would
never allow the Syrian regime to return to Afrin.

‘“We drove the Syrian regime out of Afrin five years ago, and it is
impossible to allow them back,” he said.’

Full <
http://www.kurdistan24.net/en/news/fbc1518b-a259-4b8d-9433-ebc0ed802ca4>



On Sat, 27 Jan 2018 at 1:02 am, mkaradjis . via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> "A blow to Trump"?? What has Juan been smoking? Trump has made clear
> he wants Assad to survive; and the US is allied to the SDF. So since
> the US didn't want to confront NATO member Turkey in Afrin, I'm sure
> Trump will be good with this.
>
> Of course, this is yet another reason the participation by some rebels
> in Turkey's attack on Afrin is a very bad thing. But then again, the
> regime is also extremely unlikely to actually heed the call, I think
> the regime is quite happy to see rebels and Kurds kill each other.
>
> As for the PYD calling for Assad to "protect Syrian sovereignty", yes
> it's a laugh, but at least we can say they are doing it under
> pressure. I wonder what excuse for Noam Chomsky and a dozen or so
> other left celebrities calling on such famous non-violators of Syrian
> sovereignty as ... Iran, Russia and the US ... to "protect Syria's
> sovereignty"!! One wonders why they didn't call on that other famous
> non-violator of Syrian sovereignty, Israel, to join in as well.
>
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 11:58 PM, Andrew Pollack 
> wrote:
> > I've seen this Ocalanite statement in various posts and tweets and was
> > waiting, before commenting, to be sure it's not a forgery.
> >
> > It's one thing to project a non-state, non-national, cross-border entity.
> > It's another to do so as an excuse to not fight for national
> > self-determination. And it's yet another thing for the leaders of such an
> > entity to call explicitly for Assad to protect Syrian national
> sovereignty
> > (the statement explicitly says Assad has a duty to do so!).
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 7:39 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism
> >  wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> "There's a sucker born every minute."
> >>
> >> P.T. Barnum
> >>
> >> https://www.juancole.com/2018/01/trump-syrian-turkey.html
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Critical Syria" group.
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> > email to critical-syria+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
> > To post to this group, send email to critical-sy...@googlegroups.com.
> > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/critical-syria.
> > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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[Marxism] Afrin invasion: Turkey attacks northern Syria’s democratic revolution — with Russian and US approval

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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TONY ILTIS

January 26, 2018

Three years after Kurdish-led forces liberated the northern Syrian city of
Kobane from ISIS — after a months-long siege that captured the world’s
imagination — the democratic, multi-ethnic and feminist revolution in
Syria’s north is facing a new assault.

This time, it is coming directly from the virulently anti-Kurdish Turkish
state, which had supported ISIS’s siege of Kobane.

With approval from both Russia and the United States, it has launched an
invasion of the Afrin Canton of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria
(DFNS), in its latest attempt to destroy the revolution it sees as a
profound threat.

Full <
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/afrin-invasion-turkey-northern-syria-democratic-revolution-russia-united-states
>
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Re: [Marxism] Northern Syria: Massive ethnic cleansing, humanitarian catastrophe, foreign intervention and betrayal

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Yes Mike, the “ethnic cleansing” charge that’s been rejected by the UN,
SOHR, and an SNC-sponsored  investigation, and not used in the relatively
fair criticisms of Human Rights Watch or even the more over the top and
unfounded Amnesty reports. But fine to blithely use by the laughable
conspiracy theorist Roy Gutman.
http://links.org.au/fake-news-rojava-revolution

And apparently by you. The most progressive force in the Middle East is
under existential threat and the solidarity you got is “whatever, they had
it coming”. That’s peace and out from me.

On Tue, 23 Jan 2018 at 1:30 am, mkaradjis . via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> Regarding Turkey’s attack on Kurdish Afrin, controlled by the
> Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its militia the Peoples Protection
> Units (YPG): two years ago I wrote this article condemning the YPG’s
> brutal conquest of the Arab-majority Tal Rifaat-Menagh region of
> northern Aleppo province from the democratic rebels (Free Syrian Army
> [FSA] and allies), in direct collaboration with the mass murdering
> Russian imperialist airforce, which had just recently begun its
> Nazi-style Blitzkrieg against Free Syria and thousands upon thousands
> of Syrian civilians.
>
> In that article, I noted in passing how bad what the YPG was doing was
> by posing it in reverse:
>
> “If Turkey were invading and bombing Kurdish Efrin and Syrian rebels
> were acting as ground troops and expelling the YPG from Kurdish areas,
> it should be vigorously condemned, yet this is not happening; the
> exact opposite of that is happening.”
>
> Full:
> https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/northern-syria-massive-ethnic-cleansing-humanitarian-catastrophe-foreign-intervention-and-betrayal/
>
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Re: [Marxism] Volume 2 John Percy's History of the Australian Socialist Workers Party

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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There’s an egregious error from the first volume of John’s memoir (from
2005), which I pointed out at some point but too late before printing (this
was released a bit before the DSP faction fight and split made rational
political discussion with John sadly impossible).

The incident was well before my time but related to one of my research
interest, Australian independent music. John mentions a curious appearance
of the SWP in popular culture was a recording, sometime in the 70s, of Sol
Solbe heartily crying out “Direct Action, twenty cents!” at the start of
the song “The boy who lost his jocks at Flinders St Station”. However, John
wrongly attributed the song to Weddings, Parties, Anything, when it was
actually by another seminal Melbourne band, Painters and Dockers, on their
1984 release Love Planet.

They were named after a fairly notorious union both due to their
tongue-in-cheek punk provocativeness but also a genuine leftism. They broke
into the top 40 for a while in the early 90s. I don’t know why they had a
recording of Sol’s sales pitch but presumably recording urban soundscapes
was the sort of thing young artsy punks did in the 70s.

Another curious affinity between this band and the SWP/DSP is that singer
Paul Stewart has had a special concern for East Timor liberation struggle
since his older brother along with four other Australian journalists was
executed by Indonesian troops there in 1975, and his later band the Dili
All Stars gets back together occasionally for benefits. So there you go.

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 at 4:25 pm, Gary MacLennan via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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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  
> > > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> > > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
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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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> > > options at:
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> >
> >
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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Is a Controversial Nuclear Plant to Blame for Soaring Thyroid Cancer Rates in New York? | Alternet,

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 at 11:31 am, DW via Marxism 
wrote:

> The bottom line is *not* whether a given means of making power is 100%
> without risks (implicit in all points made here by Louis, Nick, etc).  It's
> "Which means of making power that is otherwise desirable (economical,
> sustainable, low in CO2 production per unit electric power put out, low in
> impact on the environment... as is all obviously the case with nuclear
> power) entails *least* risk of harm to human health?"
>

Well I was just commenting on one aspect of the evidence that been used,
but I'll be more general. One big problem with David’s claim that his
figures on deaths attributable to forms of power shows that nuclear power
entails least risk to human health is that they're a static picture of the
current situation of nukes being a small proportion of global power usage
and don't tell us much about the real issue, the related technical and
political aspects of de-carbonising the current economy.

If he seriously wants leftists and environmentalists in a country like
Australia, with no nuclear power and a massive over-reliance on fossil
fuels, to somehow be convinced that 99% of them are wrong and that nukes
should be campaigned for, to the extent that they are successful in the
massive task of convincing the public that this is a good idea and the huge
investment already in solar, hydro and wind a less good idea, then there
would be a massive use in *fossil-fuel* derived energy to build the things,
and the resultant deaths and disease from that extra use of energy, and
while they're being built the 5-10+ years of the current massive use of
fossil fuels continuing, optimistically, before they helped in any way.
That's all in the unlikely event that they'd be a plausible political force
that would both build nuclear power and wind down fossil fuels, of which
there is now virtually zero.

On the other hand the alliance of activists, scientists and engineers
Beyond Zero Emissions http://bze.org.au/ have a feasible plan for a rapid
transition to renewables with ideas that have wide support among the left,
the Greens, Labor left, unions and the public, and with technology and
infrastructure that's being rolled out now. That this is political feasible
on a big scale with a stronger left and environmental movement is shown by
the recent victory by a broad front of campaigners including Socialist
Alliance members in pressuring the South Australian Labor government to
replace a coal fired plant with a big solar thermal plant, which will be
online in 3 years.

So no thanks David.



> In other words in ever study presented, gross increases "statistically
> significant" in Nick's phraseology, is not really that significant.
>

I'll comment on this as the technical use of "significant" often leads to
confusion and this stuff useful to understand for anyone wanting to be an
informed consumer of scientific studies. David is right that "statistical
significance" doesn't necessarily mean practical significance, but quite
wrong that it's my phraseology. It's a standard statistical term that
confusingly isn't *at all* a measure of how big an effect is, but is about
the probability that a result from a sample study, generally a difference
between two things, can be inferred to be real difference in the
population, rather than just being random sampling variation. "Significant"
refers to passing a probability threshold test, generally 95%.

The term appeared in my post because of the abstracts I quoted. I tend not
to use it at all unless I really have to, because it *is* confusing, and
because I'm a partisan of "the new statistics" pioneered in particular by
Australian psychologist Geoff Cumming https://thenewstatistics.com/itns/.
Geoff and his school are very critical of the standard, rather formal
logic, practice of presenting a yes/no statistical significance based on a
threshold. They say look more at "effect sizes", measures of the likely
extent of differences, and for uncertainty/probability, have a more
dialectical, continuous, not yes/no view, particularly by looking at the
"confidence interval" of a likely range of result values, often presented
in charts in the form of "error bars" that you've probably seen some kind
of. Studies in various fields report effect sizes and confidence intervals
more now, party as a result of these guys' agitation. They're also strong
supporters of "open science" and breaking down the pay walls of research.
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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Is a Controversial Nuclear Plant to Blame for Soaring Thyroid Cancer Rates in New York? | Alternet

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 8:24 AM, DW via Marxism 
wrote:

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> *
>
...We absolutely KNOW that cigarette smoking causes (or greatly increases
> the
> risk of) lung cancer, heart disease, and many many other lethal and/or
> serious medical disease. We KNOW that exposure to asbestos causes
> mesothelioma. We KNOW that high exposure to lead paint chips by children
> will cause lasting poisoning of their nerves and brains.
>
> What do these known and established facts have in common?   (1) The effect
> observed is HUGE, to is easy to see and study.   As opposed to a case of
> claiming that a given environmental exposure causes a few extra cases of a
> rare disease, which can be near impossible to prove:  Too big a study is
> needed, too long a study is needed, and it becomes near impossible to rule
> out the effects of random variation.  (2) Proper methods were employed.  We
> not only identified statistical associations... we were able to highly
> control for other issues that might be causing the diseases.  In the
> absolutely spectacularly brilliant original study of cigarette smoking, a
> population of British physicians served as the study group... a group that
> was very homogeneous in all other respects OTHER THAN the division into
> those who smoked cigarettes and those who did not.
>

Speaking as a quantitative researcher who's worked on a couple of
epidemiological projects, and whose work now is in the area of social
science most concerned with causation, social program evaluation, I'd say
that David's isn't quite correct on the relevant evidentiary and
statistical issues. Regarding tobacco and smoking, the tobacco
corporations, in their long struggle to discredit the evidence, were
formally correct in pointing to the limitations of observational results
such as from the classic British Doctors Study that David is alluding to.
When looking at the causal relationships between an exposure and an
outcome, an observational study is limited crucially because unlike a
randomised trial of a treatment, the "assignment" to the exposure isn't
random but caused by various things, *which might also affect the outcome*.
Taking out possibly confounding social factors by looking at just one
occupation might help (at the expense of losing any evidence of interaction
between social factors and exposure), but doesn't really help with this
crucial issue. So the tobacco corporations were able to be formally correct
is arguing that, who knows, more stressed out doctors might be more likely
to smoke because they take some relief with a soothing cigarette, but
unfortunately for them stress causes lung cancer.

The reason we can be pretty sure that this is spurious because David's
first point is the most relevant: the massive effect size in repeated
studies (of all sorts of social backgrounds), and the big proportions of
smokers who get lung cancer. Formally what you really want to do, as ethics
committees might frown on randomly assigning people to smoke or work with
asbestos, is a "quasi-experiment", what we do in quantitative evaluation
when random assignment to a program is impractical or unethical or invalid
(pretty much all the time for social programs despite a current mania in
this area for RCTs, IMO, but that's another issue): you separately model
"assignment to exposure" if you do happen to have data that affects such
assignment, e.g. stress levels of doctors before any of them started
smoking, and use some weighting or matching techniques to synthesise
randomisation to make the two exposure groups actually equivalent apart
from exposure. I don't know if anyone's done that with regard to smoking
but the massive, repeatedly-found associations make it probably a bit
redundant (as opposed to say the tricky issue of whether the slightly
higher incidence of serious mental health issues among cannabis smokers,
about 2% c.f. 1% for the general population, means the weed is causing the
problems of the problems are causing some self-medication).

Now this all seems relevant here because there does seem to some clear and
repeatedly found, if small, associations between cancers and living near a
nuclear plant, but at least in the case of thyroid cancer, no credible
confounding factor.

David does also allude to the fact that general observational studies are
limited 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Kurdish-led SDF will join Syrian army if federal state guaranteed: Rojava official

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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There sounds like some wilful confusion in the Kurdistan 24 report,
implying if not quite saying there's a deal to join the SAA ("the national
army") if a separatist deal is struck. This is a crony-capitalist Barzani
family-owned media outlet, i.e. allied to Turkey and bitterly hostile to
the Rojava revolution.

The following sounds a lot more consistent with the statements of the SDC,
the pro-Assadist media, in order to better defend Assad-led Arab-chauvinist
nationalism, actually now having more of an interest to being truthful
about the SDC's project of a democratic federal Syria (as opposed to the
pro-Turkish including KDP media, which have an interest in painting Assad
and the SDC in unholy alliance).

Darar told the Syrian opposition news outlet Enab Baladi that his words
were manipulated and that the SDF would only join the “new” Syrian Army
that could be formed if Syria becomes a federal country, not the SAA. Darar
went further and called the SAA the “regime army”.

“I didn’t mean that the regime army [SAA] is the Syrian Army, I meant the
Army of Syria after establishing the federalism,” Darar told Enab Baladi.

While some Arab and international news agencies promoted the manipulated
version of Darar’s statement as a positive development, the real statement
follows the general policy of the SDF, which is aimed at overthrowing not
only Damascus government, but also at changing the Syrian constitution.

The Damascus government, the Syrian opposition and regionals powers like
Turkey and Iran have stressed on many occasions that they will not accept a
federal system in Syria.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-democratic-forces-sdf-promise-to-join-the-syrian-army-if-syria-becomes-a-federal-state/5620214


On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 10:33 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: District Attorney: No Role For a Socialist

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Here he comes across as a decent guy determined to prosecute the rich and
powerful who deserve it and cut back on the punitive force of the justice
system used against the oppressed:

https://soundcloud.com/katie-halper/marc-fliedner-for-da-the-write-in-candidate-who-would-have-charged-harvey-weinstein

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> I am not sure I agree with this. I can understand objecting to a DSA
> member running for sheriff but is a DA in the same category? A leftist DA
> would have the power to instruct a jury to return a not guilty verdict. I
> have personal experience with a DA (not a leftist) who did exactly that.
> Furthermore, a DA might decide to go after Wall St. banksters with more
> zeal than is currently the case. Anyhow, it is not that simple. Or maybe I
> am just a Menshevik.
>
> http://leftvoice.org/District-Attorney-No-Role-For-a-Socialist
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Re: [Marxism] Fw: Arab women in YPJ

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Well that’s another evidence-free repetition of anti-Rojava revolution
talking points http://links.org.au/fake-news-rojava-revolution

The Assadists seem most enthusiastically taking them up recently BTW.


On Mon, 30 Oct 2017 at 6:49 pm, RKOB via Marxism <
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>
> The supporters of the pro-American SDF/YPG militias repeatedly point to
> the role of women unit. These supposedly progressive features should
> divert attention from the facts that
>
> * the SDF/YPG militias operate under US command so that Washington can
> advance its imperialist goals in Syria. It is certainly true that the
> PYD/YPG retains an element of flexibility as it is also willing to serve
> other interests: those of Assad until at least 2013 (or during the siege
> of Aleppo) or that of Russia imperialism (e.g. yesterday they handed
> over a military airport to the Russian Air Force in the Afrin province)
>
> * the (Kurdish-dominated) SDF/YPG militias operate under US command in
> largely Arab-populated areas and is received there as an occupation force.
>
> Leaving aside all this, one should not forget that women - like men -
> can also play a counter-revolutionary role in a war. Just remember the
> so-called "Women’s Battalions of Death" in Russia during World War I.
> They served as soldiers to the cause of Russian imperialism and were
> among the last defenders of the White Palace of the Kerensky government
> when the Bolshevik-led Red Guards took power in October 1917.
>
>
> A


>
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Re: [Marxism] Fw: Arab women in YPJ

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Also more recently around Deir ez-Zor:

SDF creates female Arab battalion in eastern Syria to fight patriarchy and
ISIS
July 11, 2017

"The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Monday the creation of an
Arab women battalion under the name Battalion of Martyr Amara for Arab
women, which aims to fight ISIS and protect women’s rights."

http://aranews.net/2017/07/sdf-creates-female-arab-battalion-eastern-syria-fight-patriarchy-isis/



On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 4:59 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism <
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>
> Eight months old, but still worth noting.  The numbers have undoubtedly
> increase since then.
>
> Chris Slee
> 
>
>
> https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/afp/2017/02/syria-
> conflict-women-jihadists-conflict-women-conflict-women.html
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Re: [Marxism] State Capitalist State

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Mon, 30 Oct 2017 at 12:34 am, mkaradjis . via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> But I thought calling China neither a capitalist nor a workers state
> but instead a “state capitalist state” was going well beyond
> describing a different variety of “capitalist political regime”, but
> rather a distinct kind of class state (apologies if I was mistaken
> about that).


The classic analysis of early Ba’athism as “state capitalism” is I think
Isam al-Khafaji’s The State and Capitalist Development in Iraq 1968-1973.
From a summary article:

‘The Iraqi state has been able to create capitalists out of its "barefoot"
citizens, but this has not been sufficient to create capitalism. State
capitalism has been a necessary transitional phase, ensuring the rise and
expansion of this new mode of production’.

http://www.merip.org/mer/mer142/state-incubation-iraqi-capitalism

The use of the state by plebeian elements in a transitional phase to
“incubate” a new private capitalist class *and* the structures for it to
rule is I think the useful sense to the term “state capitalism”. That may
have began in China in the late 70s but we’re way past that now.



>
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Carry on up the Kremlin: how The Death of Stalin plays Russian roulette with the truth | Film | The Guardian

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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This isn't actually the first film to deal with Stalin's death as farce or
satire. That would be the odd and not very good 1996 Australian film
Children of the Revolution. In this the proximate cause of the death of
Stalin's (F. Muuay Abrahams) was impregnating a visiting Australian
Communist (Judy Davis). Their son as a police union official went on to
take after the old man in 90s Australia. As well as Davis it starred other
Australian A-listers like Sam Neil, Geoffrey Rush and Rachel Griffiths. I
don't think anyone knew what to make of it including the distributors, who
gave the left organisations lots of freebies to the premiere, despite it
being clearly anti-socialist. From that came my negative review
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/laughs-wrong-places. The short version
is that the absurdist, satirical portrayal of the Kremlin is effective, but
that of recent history and the Australian far left is complete rubbish. The
writer-director Peter Duncan went on to make four seasons of the quite good
TV legal comedy-drama Rake. As a former lawyer he obviously knows the
corrupt and incestuous Sydney legal and political worlds a lot better than
he knew the far left (maybe he was an embittered red diaper baby, as I
otherwise couldn't understand the point of the movie at all).

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> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/18/death-of-stalin
> -russian-roulette-with-truth-armando-iannucci
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Re: [Marxism] The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Tue, 19 Sep 2017 at 7:22 am, Alan Bradley via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>
Oops yes we should take care. Lucky I didn't go to the demo outdide the
council meeting to support the motion or I might have put my foot in it
where it mattered.
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Re: [Marxism] The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 1:10 PM, 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.
>


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. Four local councils have now done something about
this, including not coincidentally the three where socialists have a seat <
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/moreland-council-drop-references-january-26-australia-day>.
The other council happens to be where I live. They've also pleasingly
agreed to rename a park named after the utter bastard John Batman, involved
in mass dispossession in Victoria and genocide in Tasmania:
<
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/north/batman-park-in-northcote-to-be-renamed-gumbri-park/news-story/5c8c6617e18cb26b97238246b8ed44ec
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The demise of Arab-Kurdish solidarity in Syria

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 at 10:24 am, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> I disagree with Mrie's interpretation of what happened in July 2012.  In
> fact there was a largely peaceful uprising in Kurdish areas.  People
> surrounded military posts and called on the soldiers to surrender, which in
> most cases they did.  (See Revolution in Rojava, by Michael Knapp, Anja
> Flach and Ercan Ayboga, Pluto Press, 2016, p. 54-56)


I've seen the existence of the "agreement" for Assad to happily hand over a
big chunk of his territory and population asserted a number of times,
though without ever an atom of evidence (I don't count Roy Gutman's fevered
account from an anonymous source in his silly Nation articles of a fiendish
Iranian SPECTER agent brokering this deal as evidence). Note Knapp, Flach
and Ayboga's account of the uprising is based on the reports of a Vice News
team which went to Rojava a week after the uprising, as well as the 150
interviews they conducted themselves there in 2014 and 2016, which included
numerous participants in the events (which did include some fighting and
casualties). It's Alex Jones style conspiracy therorising to assert that
all these accounts are fake news.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Chapo Dilemma | Souciant

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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I've been introduced to them recently and find the show quite funny,
sometimes insightful and even sometimes informative: recently Christman did
a show by himself and without jokes relayed the story of the Milwaukee SP
mayors and congressman from the 20s until the last SP mayor resigned in
1960, which I knew little about. I couldn't fault his conclusion that this
height of US socialist electoral success was more negative cooption than
positive reform because it wasn't grounded in revolutionary politics.
They've also had China Mieville and other interesting and serious guests.

But yeah while vulgarity and a certain level of obnoxiousness can be funny
and cathartic, this juvenile use of 'austistic' and 'retard' as insults is
highly grating (I say juvenile particularly as I recently busted our
eldest, 12-year-old child calling a virtual player who hadn't performed
adequately on FIFA17 'autistic' to the laughter of his visiting friend, and
I suspect it's a vogue slur among kids as 'gay' was a few years ago). As is
their casual use of 'bitch' and 'ironic' gender-based putdowns, including
by Amber Frost.

Autism as part of a spectrum of traits or maybe more accurately a
multi-dimensional map of neural typicality and atypicality is something
affecting increasing numbers of people. Partly that might be just
recognition from broader diagnoses but there might be factors leading to an
actual increase like the trend towards later parental age. Anyway a stupid
thing to joke about if your purported aim is to build a left that's both
radical and broad.

I've also from association with this lot listened to some of Katie Halper
recently, and her schtick seems along the same lines as a funny yet tough
hard leftist around the DSA, who represents numerous young and youngish
people currently radicalising, but maybe less obnoxious.


On Fri, 21 Jul 2017 at 9:50 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
>
>
> http://souciant.com/2017/07/the-chapo-dilemma/
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Why the Assad regime attacks the SDF

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Maybe you should move on from sound bites from dated Saleh Muslim
interviews, and look at detailed and credible reports at what they're
doing, such the Revolution in Rojava book. You might even learn something.

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> On 6/22/17 8:33 PM, Chris Slee wrote:
>
>>
>> The reference to two million deaths was exaggerated, but Muslim was
>> trying to highlight the danger of a massacre in the event of a military
>> victory by the rebels.
>>
>
> Yeah, yeah. And so how would you spin this?
>
>
> "Syrian Regime has chemical weapons but Assad is not that stupid to use
> them while UN’s experts of chemical weapons are just 5 km away from
> Damascus. Assad considers himself as the part who won the internal war.
> That is why I have concerns about the claims that he used chemical
> weapons", Muslim said and remarked that the attack was aimed at framing
> Assad and provoking an international reaction.
>
> http://ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2013/8/syriakurd878.htm
>
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Re: [Marxism] Why the Assad regime attacks the SDF

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Yeah if only they'd listened more to revolutionaries in Manhattan with
experience of  oraganising a society of 4 million people half of whom are
recent refugees and of guerilla war, then they'd actually know Assad and
imperialists couldn't be trusted, because they had absolutely no idea
before  (I mean, they might have said it a million or so times, but that's
easy to ignore). Then they could make a pristine revolution with no
compromises and agreements with anyone, just like the Bolsheviks.

Justified sarcasm aside, one can only seriously say this with considerable
ignorance of the actual nature of the hostile if sometimes truce-like
nature of the relationship between Assad and the Rojava revolution, and
general ignorance of the nature of irregular civil war in failed states.
"Oooh, Assad still pays the teachers in Rojava", a number of people have
excitedly exclaimed. Yeah he does, just like he always did in a number of
rebel-held areas.


On Fri, 23 Jun 2017 at 7:42 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> On 6/22/17 5:15 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:
> >
> > The regime wants to eventually regain control of the whole country.
> Having recaptured eastern Aleppo, it wants to expand its territory
> further.  But the growing strength of the SDF makes it an obstacle.  If the
> SDF succeeds in liberating Raqqa, it will become even stronger, and more of
> an obstacle to Assad's plans.
>
> All this was predictable. The Kurds tend to make unprincipled
> combinations that bite them in the ass in the long run.
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On Fri, 23 Jun 2017 at 7:42 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> On 6/22/17 5:15 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:
> >
> > The regime wants to eventually regain control of the whole country.
> Having recaptured eastern Aleppo, it wants to expand its territory
> further.  But the growing strength of the SDF makes it an obstacle.  If the
> SDF succeeds in liberating Raqqa, it will become even stronger, and more of
> an obstacle to Assad's plans.
>
> All this was predictable. The Kurds tend to make unprincipled
> combinations that bite them in the ass in the long run.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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As for the difficulties alleged by Gutman in reporting on those affected by
the fighting on the approach to Raqqa, Times journalist Anthony Lloyd
reports no such difficulties and paints a rather different pictures of the
response of Arab villagers to the SDF:

Few of the women waste any time hurling away their dark clothes as soon
they reach the first positions of the SDF, the American-backed units now
approaching Raqqa from three sides.

“The niqab came to symbolise the suffocating feeling we had of life under
the Daesh,” Um Lamis, 33, a mother from Raqqa, said as she sat in the shade
of a tree discussing her flight across the lines two days earlier.

“The veil removed me from my sense of engagement with the outside world. It
is something Raqqa women grew to hate more than anything else. So I ripped
it off as soon as I reached the SDF frontline.” She ululated with delight.
“It was like breathing again!”

The accounts of the Raqqa women escaping one of the most stifling
environments on Earth ­illuminate a system whereby ­Islamic State not only
repressed women but delighted in the ­cruelty of its repression.

“I was forced to watch more ­beheadings than I care to remember,” Um Lamis
said, cradling her three-year-old daughter. “You don’t ever expect — not as
a man nor woman — to see anything like that. Yet we were repeatedly forced
to watch it.”

She described seeing one man, accused of collaboration with the coalition,
crucified.

“I was ordered out of the back of my husband’s car to watch the man tied to
a cross. He was begging for forgiveness but an emir stabbed a knife into
his chest and then shot him in the head. He was left on the cross for three
days as an example. The image was burned into my brain. I thought I would
never sleep again.”

Um Ali, 60, who had fled across the frontline a week before, was forced to
watch her son beat her daughter in a village south of Raqqa. The incident
began when a patrol of Islamic State religious police, Hisbah, noticed the
daughter had taken off her niqab. They rounded up the family, ensured the
daughter was wearing the niqab and marched them to their headquarters in
the village.

“First they beat my 20-year-old son with 70 lashes across his back with a
cane as punishment for ­allowing his sister to sin,” said Um Ali. “Then
they sat my daughter in a chair, a guard either side, and ­ordered my son
to beat her outstretched hands with the same cane used to beat him.”

At first, she said, her son, his own back thick with weals, tried to avoid
hurting his sister. “So the Hisbah told him, ‘Beat her strongly or we will
punish you again.’ He gave her 50 strikes. My daughter flinched with every
blow. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not as the niqab covered her
face.”

The codes Raqqa women had to abide by under Islamic State rule were similar
to those of the Afghan Taliban. No woman could go out unaccompanied. The
chaperone had to be a direct male family member — father, brother, son.

Even sunlight was restricted, as windows were ordered shrouded so that
passers-by could not see women inside their houses. Clothing transgressions
were punished with 15-day re-education courses or beatings, depending on
the scale of the offence and whim of the Hisbah, the local government.

The women regarded the ­female branch of Hisbah, the al-Khansaa brigade,
with particular fear. Their numbers included wives of foreign fighters,
radicalised local women, and impoverished recruits who joined because they
had little choice. “They were cruel, and stole from our homes during
searches,” Um Lamis said. “And they seemed to enjoy issuing beatings.”

Yet there was a realistic acceptance of Islamic State widows who had
escaped among them. Um Lamis said many had no choice in their husband’s
decisions, or that their dead husbands joined ISIS as an alternative to
poverty.

Compounding the shock of their flight from Raqqa and sudden freedom, many
women said the first fighters they had seen across no man’s land had been
Kurdish women from the YPJ, the all-female units fighting as part of the
SDF.

“One minute I lived in Raqqa, a city ruled by men,” said Um Lamis, “where
women had not even the power to show our faces. The next I am greeted by
armed Kurdish women, faces bare and their hair uncovered, guns in hands,
fighting the Daesh.

“They welcomed me as a sister! I bow to their courage!”

Contact with the YPJ cadres, each versed in the rights of women as a
central part of their own ideology, has left an indelible ­impression on
many Raqqa women.

The emerging system of local governance is remarkable for its difference,
too. Typically, the Rojava territory is governed by local 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Gutman's unreliable hackery isn't just indicated by the Turkish state's
sponsorship of him, and his breezy use of the term "ethnic cleansing" and
general distortion of the recent UN report that Chris mentions. After his
Nation smear jobs earlier this year, two of his sources complained that he
distorted their views. He also ludicrously distorted the battles of Shinjar
and Kobane to paint the PKK-led current as collaborators with ISIS bent on
regional domination at the expense of the innocent defenseless parties
Turkey and the KRG. See
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-a-response-to-neocon-hit-man-roy-gutman/
(not that I agree with everything this guy says on Syria but he dies nail
Gutman's distortion) and my article
http://links.org.au/fake-news-rojava-revolution

On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 at 10:35 am, Chris Slee via Marxism <
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> Roy Gutman was in northern Syria as a guest of the Turkish government.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Over 100 British Muslim Leaders Refuse Funeral Prayers For London, Manchester Attackers | HuffPost

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Actually I don't think it's your job to tell English Muslims how to show
solidarity with their fellow citizens murdered by reactionary arseholes.

On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 at 9:36 am, A.R. G via Marxism <
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> Have they ever done this before for other murderers and criminals? For
> soldiers and security personnel who commit brutality against others? I find
> this kind of grandstanding wholly pathetic. It is not the job of Muslims to
> prove that they aren't terrorist to a racist UK society.
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Re: [Marxism] The British Election

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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This is my recent comment on Facebook regarding YouGov's seat-based
modelling https://yougov.co.uk/uk-general-election-2017/. Sinn Fein
staffer Duroyan Fertl replied "not going to happen, especially not in those
circumstances" to my last suggestion.

This is getting *very* interesting. In YouGov's new seat-based model the
Tory overall lead over Labour is down to 3 points (their latest
conventional poll gives the same), and their seat estimate gives the Tories
a minority (311, a majority being 326), while Labour+SNP+Greens+Plaid+Lib
Dems would be a (bare) majority, as probably would a much better combo of
Labour+SNP+Greens+Plaid+Sinn Fein (assuming the latter win at least 6 out
of 18 Irish seats, as the survey doesn't included occupied Ireland, and the
big assumption that they might give up their abstentionism to join a
relatively left UK government).


On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 11:51 AM, Gary MacLennan via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> It is foolish to believe the polls too much in a first past the post
> context such as the UK, but as the gap between the Labour Party and the
> Tories seems to narrow dramatically it is hard to resist the delirium.
>
> My sources are Aaron Bastani on twitter as listers would know and the group
> that he is linked to George Galloway, Richard Seymour, James Butler, & Owen
> Jones.  My absolute joy though is to tune into the Artist Taxi Driver
> youtube channel (Chunky Mark) and listen to his latest rant.
>
> The accent is strongly London and that might cause difficulties but stay
> with him and just go with the passion. The link is athttps://
> www.youtube.com/user/chunkymark.
>
> The big question now is can Corbyn do it?  Can he win?  Personally I doubt
> it but i am very aware that just a few weeks ago the question was "Can
> Corbyn prevent a Tory landslide that would wipe out Labour?"
>
> The Tories have campaigned badly, like really badly.  They also have a deep
> structural problem, that has been partly obscured by the Brexit from the
> EU. The Tory project is in trouble. "Neoliberalism is dying in the night.
> ring out wild bells and let it die" I say and millions are beginning to say
> the same thing.
>
> Also in trouble are the Labour Moderates - those 200 odd ass wipes who
> opposed Corbyn with maximum treachery.  They allowed Corbyn to have a left
> wing manifesto in order, I think, to exorcise finally the "poison" of
> leftism. *BUT* the manifesto proved popular.  And now there seems no way
> back to Blairism and New Labour.
>
> Delightful times
>
> comradely
>
> Gary
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Re: [Marxism] Who’s Afraid of the White Working Class?: On Joan C. Williams’s “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America” - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Mon, 22 May 2017 at 3:32 am, Richard Sprout via Marxism <
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>
> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-afraid-of-the-white-working-class-on-joan-c-williamss-white-working-class-overcoming-class-cluelessness-in-america/


This is a pretty good response to the simple-minded anecdotal assertions of
the right-wing "white-working class vs educated elite" crowd, who cause so
much confusion about Brexit, current polls in the UK, voting patterns in
Australia for both the Greens and One Nation, etc. But it's got a few
inadequacies.

David Roediger, here anyway, doesn't add a lot of clarity about what class
is and how class can be used in empirical analysis of politics. He alludes
briefly to a Marxist definition but then seems to take up an income
definition after criticising Williams for the same. But in Australia and I
assume the US skilled members of the most militant unions — builders,
electricians and miners — can easily earn over $100K, while many
shop-keepers, farmers and contractors struggle on much less (and lower to
middle managers no more).

He rightly criticises an education definition, a definition which made a
bit more sense 50 years ago (at least in terms of association rather than
causation) but is totally outdated now with the capitalists' demand to get
more and more education - improved labour power - into workers, at no
expense to them. I.e. the "credentialism" affecting many jobs, like e.g. my
partner's occupation of midwifery, which once required a 2-year diploma but
now has an entry level of a 4 year degree, or commonly a nursing degree
plus a post-grad diploma, and to get very far required extra post-grad
courses and very commonly a masters through a career. But David seems to
see education as inadequate in explaining class in terms of the
low-to-median sort of income of the higher-educated. That's relevant but
more so is the much decreased control over work and lack of ownership of
any means of production of the higher-educated: they're much more like any
other proles than they were 50 years ago (it's absurd that some people
still use 50-year-old terms like "new middle class" as if the processes are
"new" or haven't changed, like describing the 1965 class structure as if it
were the same as in 1915).

It's also unfortunately symptomatic of the lack of understanding of how
class can be studied empirically that David suggests it's hard to do any
better relating class to voting with the available data. It is hard if you
rely on immediate and easily available aggregate poll data or district
election results. But there's the American National Election Studies, which
has plenty of data to categorise a representative sample of individuals by
whether they own a business and employ people or not, and whether they have
any managerial control at work or not, and to what extent, as well as
income, education, ethnic background, attitudes to various questions,
political participation and voting patterns, including a longitudinal
panel. This would allow a pretty good approximation to a Marxist
categorisation — differentiating people by ownership and control over the
means of production, i.e. workers as non-managerial employees, small and
medium business people and managers — and how this structure affects
attitudes and voting along with other factors (it'd lack the dynamism of
complexity of actual class relations but would be a lot better than
Williams et al.). I don't know if the US individual-level data is a bit
complicated to get like the Australian Election Study or freely available
like the British Election Study, and to use it would require some skill in
stats and a stats package, but an academic studying these areas should at
least know about it and studies using it.

An overall problem for social science seems to be than those doing serious
quantitative work mostly aren't Marxists and Marxists as a whole aren't
very good or very interested in serious quantitative work, Erik Wright
being a bit of an eclectic exception (personally I missed the
fast-disappearing tenure boat for working on what I'm actually interested
in and have ended up, apart from a couple of articles, mainly being a stats
prole on other peoples' projects on changing patterns in education and
evaluating an NGO's social programs — the drastically 

Re: [Marxism] The Chávez Hypothesis: Vicissitudes of a Strategic Project (Chris Gilbert)

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sat, 20 May 2017 at 3:48 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote

>
> Not sure I want to reply to Gilbert but I find the notion of communes in
> Venezuela troubling. Were they supposed to be an expression of dual
> power? When the government in power has created them, it sounds much
> more like a single power. I haven't been paying close attention to
> Venezuela since Maduro took over. To some extent that has to do with
> Chavismo support for Assad that makes the notions of 21st century
> socialism sound hollow.


The best general way to understand and assess the Latin American left
governments and attempts to set up communes and workers control isn't in
terms of dual power but in terms of the Comintern's 1920s discussion of
workers governments, i.e. possible left governments within a capitalist
state and economy that could, particularly if pushed by revolutionaries,
intervene in the class struggle on the side of working people. Clearly a
situation that's only possible in particular contexts and clearly a
contradictory situation that can't last for ever one way or another, but
that's no reason to not use a possible weapon. If the Venezuelan example is
having big problems possibly due to a combination of their errors and a
very difficult objective situation, in Bolivia things seem to be going
better, in terms of the government still being an effective weapon in the
class struggle:

Bolivia: New law could allow workers to take over closed companies

Friday, May 19, 2017

The Bolivian government has proposed a bill that would allow workers to
take over the private companies they work at if they go bankrupt, and
convert them into “social companies” to stimulate production and address
unemployment, Pagina Siete reported on May 16.

The government justified the measure as part of the state's duty to protect
labour rights and generate job opportunities while improving the productive
apparatus of the country.

The Creation of Social Companies Bill was handed to the Bolivian National
Assembly for debate.

The measure applies in the cases of bankruptcy, but also liquidation or
unjustified abandonment, in accordance with the Commercial Code, but only
if the company is part of the private sector.

In that case, workers who are still active employees and willing to take it
over can present their request to a judge. They may be required to invest
in the company's social capital to keep it going.

If the company's debts exceed its available capital, then it will be paid
with the employer's personal resources, in accordance with Article 1335 of
the Civil Code.

Historically one of South America's poorest and most unstable countries,
Bolivia has enjoyed economic growth and political stability under President
Evo Morales, the country’s first Indigenous leader.

Its economy has tripled in size, while investment in social and productive
projects has doubled in the 11 years since Morales was first elected
president.

[Reprinted from TeleSUR English.]


https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/bolivia-new-law-could-allow-workers-take-over-closed-companies

Also I think it's wrong to make Syria an acid test anywhere, but it's
particularly incongruous to bring up now with regard to the Venezuelan
leadership, which for a long time has had a bad line on a number of
international issues including the genocidal treatment of the Sri Lankan
government towards the Tamil people.


- RSS 

>
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Re: [Marxism] YPG Homes In on Raqqa With Assent of U.S. and Assad Alike

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The funny thing is the one thing the Turkish state, its Syrian clients, the
Russian state and the Assad regime all have a common interest in is to to
exaggerate the limited agreements between the Assad and the Rojava
revolution, and also to claim a separatist if not chauvinist character to
the latter. Because these interests pump out plenty of propaganda some of
which is taken up by some western media it's not hard to find sources or
articles "proving" this point of view, if you're not too fussy about
journalistic standards. If I recall correctly some time ago Louis posted
one of a range of articles that had Assad and other regime representatives
claim — from a story that originated in the Assad regime media — that the
regime was arming the YPG (like this one
http://aa.com.tr/en/todays-headlines/syrias-assad-admits-sending-weapons-to-pyd/487871),
and Louis cited this as "proof" of collaboration. Somehow the "documents"
that regime representatives claimed they have about all this have never
turned up. Michael posted the ridiculous Gutman articles from The Nation,
with their falsification of those sources that presumably didn't tell him
what he wanted to hear without some doctoring, their ludicrous
interpretation of battle tactics and their lurid tales of Iranian SPECTRE
agents. This WSJ article, while not as egregious a frame-up, is still
pretty journalistically dodgy. Under a veneer of an objective news article
with a range of sources it's completely unbalanced. It cites the views of
the Turkish state, unnamed Syrian rebels, unnamed "western diplomats", US
and Russian officials, but not a single word of the views of the *actual
subject* of the article, representatives and statements from whom aren't
really hard to find.

Michael helpfully foregrounds the opinions of unnamed "western diplomats"
to presumably bolster claims the Rojava revolution is a franchise of
Assadism. But you have to read the whole of the article, which appears to
unquestionably accept the view of the world of the Turkish state and its
Syrian clients, to see what the reasons (or rather assumptions) are behind
the diplomats' opinion. One is the claim that the aim of the revolution is
apparently a chauvinist-nationalist Kurdish statelet, perhaps along the
lines of the Iraq KRG. Despite the "citizen journalist" of unknown
provenance from Manbiq whose article Louis recently posted, as I indicated
in response to that there's a lot of evidence that the aim of the Rojava
revolution is just what it says it is: a non-sectarian, democratic *Syria*.
I suppose it's possible that repeatedly denouncing a regime, announcing
one's intention to replace it and fooling numerous visitors and journalists
could just be the cunning chauvinist-Stalinist way to both support Assad
and set up a nationalist statelet, (though Assad doesn't support any kind
of independence or autonomy for Rojava any more than he does a democratic
Syria), but I think I'll keep taking the Ockham's razor approach to this
question, thanks.

The article also claims as a fact that "towns" around Manbiq have been
handed over the regime. While there's been claims from Turkish, regime or
rebel sources that the whole of Manbiq or chunks around it had been or were
to be being handed over, from what I can see the former is clearly false
and the latter at the least exaggerated. This February article details a
range of towns claimed to be handed over the the regime were still under
SDF control http://aranews.net/2017/02/kurds-deny-handover-
of-sdf-held-areas-to-syrian-regime/. In this March article
http://aranews.net/2017/03/manbij-military-council-
denies-handing-areas-assad/ (with some unclear translation) article the
Manbij Military Council denies handing anything substantial to the regime,
but concedes an agreement with Russian that in return for Manbij receiving
aid regime troops would be allowed to occupy a frontline between SDF/MMC
forces and Turkish and client rebel forces. ARA might have its own slant
but I see no reason to believe a unsourced, at best second-hand, throwaway
comment in an WSJ article over these on-the-ground reports.

Some obviously see any sort of agreement with the regime as a total
sell-out. In the context of what never much seems like a grinding civil war
with no military victory over Assad in sight, I don't agree, and don't see
any immediate battlefield or local agreement or in the longer-term
negotiated settlements in principle any different from what liberation
forces in occupied Ireland and southern Africa found themselves obliged to
do by the early 90s. If you think Assad is uniquely more early than the
regimes in these examples, well the 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Arms Kurds Who Are ISIS Enemies, Turkey Enemies, Assad Friends

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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This is disturbing, if much of it is true - and the author's interpretation
of particular incidents and processes if they are happening are true. But
we don't know who this guy is, and to what extent his report is coloured by
political/sect affiliation or disgruntlement at probable loss of male and
Arab and sect privilege. One thing I'm particularly sceptical about is the
claim that religious-based dress is banned: I'm seen a number of reports
including recent Facebook posts from Kobane-based Hawzhin Azeez that
indicate a range of such dress being unremarkable throughout  liberated
Rojava. Azeez also related a recent trip to Manbiq where she met young
women who were very happy to dress *freely* and work for the first time.

Generally, There's plenty of reports very contradictory yo this one, and
lack of context to some things that might be true in this report. In my
article 'Fake news about the Rojava revolution'
http://links.org.au/fake-news-rojava-revolution various sources who can't
remotely be dismissed as apologists, like HRW, SOHR and an SNC-appointed
investigation team, who I cited regarding the "ethnic cleansing"
slander, didn't
mention anything like systematic ethnic or religious discrimination in
Rojava. None of the 150 people interviewed for the book Revolution in
Rojava
https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Rojava-Democratic-Liberation-Kurdistan/dp/0745336590
mentioned anything but tolerance and cultural freedom for Arabs, Armenians
and Syriacs, and all brands of Christians and Muslims in Rojava.

Regarding the "friendliness" to Assad and the regime moving in etc.: it's
no secret there was a post-uprising agreement for the regime to continue to
pay teachers and some public servants salaries. But as I've argued here
before, in a fractured failed state it's not surprising for all sorts of
pragmatic and ad hoc agreements between factions not exactly in harmony to
continue or be set up. I've cited the observation in Jonathan Littell's
Syrian Notebooks that a pharmacy in the heart of FSA-held Homs in 2012
still received its regular deliveries from the Ministry of Health.

And the whole thing is quite a bit at odds with this recent report — by
someone we can identify — from the outskirts of Raqqa about the reception
Arabs are giving to SDF advances and the commune-democratisation of
liberated areas (maybe the view of women are to some extent different):

'Compounding the shock of their flight from Raqqa and sudden freedom, many
women said the first fighters they had seen across no man’s land had been
Kurdish women from the YPJ, the all-female units fighting as part of the
SDF.

'“One minute I lived in Raqqa, a city ruled by men,” said Um Lamis, “where
women had not even the power to show our faces. The next I am greeted by
armed Kurdish women, faces bare and their hair uncovered, guns in hands,
fighting the Daesh.

'“They welcomed me as a sister! I bow to their courage!”

'Contact with the YPJ cadres, each versed in the rights of women as a
central part of their own ideology, has left an indelible ­impression on
many Raqqa women.

'The emerging system of local governance is remarkable for its difference,
too. Typically, the Rojava territory is governed by local assemblies and
communes, all chaired by women.

'“At first some of the men in my village had a problem when I was elected
co-chairwoman to my local assembly,” said Amina al-Hassan, 30, a Sunni Arab
woman, who had lived for three years under Islamic State rule until her
village was liberated by the SDF.

“'They said it wasn’t my place as a woman,” she said. “So I said to them,
to their faces: ‘You didn’t dare say a word when the Daesh were in charge.
Now they have gone you want to deprive women again of their rights?’ The
men hung their heads.”

'Whatever the future of Raqqa’s women, and however male-dominated the
society to which they return after the defeat of Islamic State in Raqqa,
each woman I spoke to from the city said the ­experience of life there, and
their escape into a more egalitarian society, had irreversibly altered
their perceptions.'

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/niqabs-thrown-down-in-the-sand-as-women-flee-raqqa/news-story/04173c9a8acc056b27d02daf90e369bd


On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 10:24 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
>
> 

Re: [Marxism] Oh to be in England now that April's there...

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sun, 23 Apr 2017 at 11:25 am, Gary MacLennan via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
>
> Then the reality of the polls struck.  There has been a large swing to the
> Tories.  Alas, alas for Hamlin...


Richard Seymour is his very useful Corbyn book from last year points out
that the polls in predicting the next election are likely biased - in the
technical statistical sense of not accurately reflecting the population
from which the sample us drawn. This is because the published figures
weight against young and poor respondents, on the assumption that these
groups will abstain the same high proportions as the last few elections,
whereas hopefully the Corbinistas will rally the young and poor in higher
proportions. That seems likely but even if Corbin new tack of more directly
naming and attacking the ruling class strikes a chord, it's hard too see a
20 percentage point deficit being made up.

Some Facebook friends are also hoping for a Melanchon trajectory: Bur it's
also hard to see this happening in a big way, as the UK is very different
from France where far left candidates are treated seriously and the far
left has much more institutional weight, e.g. the Communist Party's more
than 500 elected officials.

But the only thing for socialists in the UK to do is surely to throw
themselves into building the Corbyn movement as much as possible, even if
it turns out to be a limited and temporary cohering of the radicalisation
of the past decade, as Seymour suspects. Only the small Socialist
Resistance group, and individuals, seem to be doing that.





>
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Re: [Marxism] PYD: US bombing of airbase good, but it should bomb rebels too

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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It's not very clear how accurately these quotes that Rudaw.net presents
from Salih Muslim from an apparent interview with Voice of America - no
such interview seems to be on the VOA website - represents his views. It is
from a news source based in an authoritarian statelet run by billionaire
gangsters intensely hostile to Rojava. It's even less clear from the two
almost identical summaries of the Rudaw article on other sites that Michael
seems to think supports the veracity of the report. All they show is how
anyone can select quotes and take out qualifications, which is what they
do.

It doesn't seem likely likely that Rudaw just made this up or that it's as
egregious a distortion as their previous total stitch-up of Muslim as
supporting ethnic cleansing, which Chris referred to, as Muslim has made
comments before seemingly supportive of US intervention. But it's also not
clear to what extent these are genuine illusions in US imperialism on his
part, and what extent they are diplomatic noises, a bit like Fidel saying
to US audiences he was for "Jeffersonian democracy" in the 50s.

Anyway I think the following from an article published today might be more
representative of the views of PYD cadres:

> "Berxwedan ashes his cigarette and recalls the final days of the battle
that saw the so-called Islamic State expelled from this Kurdish city of
resistance. He is visibly upset by my question about the so-called
‘international community’ (i.e United States) wanting to claim the glory in
this struggle, saying ‘The international powers ignored what was taking
place here until only a tiny section of the city was still left in our
control. Then they intervened at last – not for us in the YPG and YPJ, but
for both their geostrategic interests and because they themselves perhaps
finally saw the danger to Daesh could pose even to them. But we know they
didn’t give us air support because they actually support our struggle. They
certainly don’t support us politically. That hasn’t changed more than two
years later.’

"Newroz chimes in, talking about how the western powers ignoring the battle
of Kobane provoked ‘a lot of anger’. She also insists, ‘how dare they try
to take the credit for the liberation of Kobane when they have contributed
nothing to the rebuilding of the city?’"

http://kurdishquestion.com/article/3888-the-epic-resistance-of-kobane-21st-century-stalingrad-rises-from-the-rubble
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Re: [Marxism] Question about IZA-Institute of Labor Economics

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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I've used technical aspects of their papers for my recent work, which is in
quantitative social program evaluation, a field which basically comes from
econometrics. The education stuff I've seen seems on the progressive side
of education economics, such as a paper I've just looked at for technical
reasons but which was about showing the benefits of universal public
pre-school programs. I had the impression they were along the lines of the
Melbourne Institute, which Australians might know as generally housing more
social democratic economists and often examining education, welfare and
social programs. The latter isn't a private institute but a Melbourne
University department. Sure private institutes often have more of a agenda:
as Gary might know the Grattan Institute here has a definite neo-liberal
agenda on education and other areas. IZA seems massive and across many
areas so might be less consistent, and definitely more intellectually sound
than pseudo-academic hard-right propaganda outfits like the Institute of
Public Affairs here. It seems a pretty tenuous link between the labour
market views of a chair and a study on ethnic interactions in the
classroom. From a quick look it seems sound enough and nothing at all to do
with privatising school or attacking education unions. I'd take it on face
value.

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 11:02 AM, Gary MacLennan via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> No information to give Manuel, but I am very interested in the possible
> relevance of this study for Indigenous teaching in Australia. Thank you for
> posting it
>
> comradely
>
> Gary
>
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 3:33 AM, Manuel Barrera via Marxism <
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
>
> >   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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> > *
> >
> > Hello, I wonder if any on this list can provide information on a
> > German-based foundation, IZA-Institute of Labor Economics. Here is the
> > website: https://www.iza.org/en/about
> >
> > They just published an interesting (sounding) study on the role of "Same
> > race" teachers and educational outcomes, specifically among Black U.S.
> > students (cf. http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/
> us/study-black-students-from-
> > poor-families-are-more-likely-to-graduate-high-school-if-
> > they-have-at-least-one-black-teacher/ar-BBzBuQy?li=BBnbcA1). However, in
> > their description they tout their interests as "building a bridge between
> > science and society. We want to facilitate the communication of existing
> > knowledge while at the same time stimulating research to close knowledge
> > gaps. We see this approach as complementary to purely academic research.
> > The transfer of scientific knowledge is an important task which has often
> > been undervalued in traditional research and requires extra efforts."
> They
> > also say they are seeking "to achieve a fair balance between individual
> > wealth and societal wealth. In light of rapidly developing technological
> > innovations and changing social policy needs, the search for effective
> > solutions will remain a continuous challenge."
> >
> >
> > My  interest here is to find on-the-ground background knowledge about
> > their credibility regarding their findings and their intents regarding
> the
> > study I mentioned before about Black students benefiting from Black
> > teachers. I'm sure some of you may simply think the issue is too much
> > "identity politics". If so, just ignore the post and go about your
> > business. Those of you who may some information, I would greatly
> appreciate
> > it.
> >
> > MB
> >
> > [http://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBzBuQu.img]<
> > http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/study-black-students-from-
> > poor-families-are-more-likely-to-graduate-high-school-if-
> > they-have-at-least-one-black-teacher/ar-BBzBuQy?li=BBnbcA1>
> >
> > Study: Black students from poor families are more likely to graduate high
> > school if they have at least one black teacher > us/news/us/study-black-students-from-poor-families-
> > 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: "The Assad Regime is a Moral Disgrace": Noam Chomsky on Ongoing Syrian War | Democracy Now!

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On the contrary I reckon he's just saying here what he's said for several
years, whether you've agreed or disagreed with some or all of it. A search
such as
https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant=1=2=UTF-8#q=noam+chomsky+assad=20&*
shows apart from his recent comments, comments from the last several years
that include plenty of descriptors of Assad like "monstrous", "criminal"
etc. — along with his scepticism of a US/NATO conspiracy or consistent
policy of regime change, being critical of some rebels as reactionary
jihadists, recognising there's some democratic elements left among the
rebels, being guardedly supportive of the PYD-led movement, recognising
Assad has to go by some process. I can't say I've followed him in any
detail or would agree with everything he's said but on the face of it
these I think positions pretty sensible, consistently progressive and in
tune with the facts as far as we can determine them.

On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
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>
> Somebody must have woke him up.
>
> https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/5/the_assad_regime_is_a_moral
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Re: [Marxism] UN Syria Commission clears YPG/J and SDF of ethnic cleansing charges

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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I started this thread specifically to point to the UN commission's
conclusion here
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/SY/A_HRC_34_CRP.3_E.docx that
there was no evidence that the PYD-led movement had engaged in ethnic
cleansing. This conclusion reinforces the rebuttals made by a Syrian
National Coalition investigation team and the Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights in 2015 that I've previously cited. Countering this charge isn't an
irrelevant strawperson argument: The charge was widely spread by mainstream
media and some leftists, with the clear intention to represent the movement
as having the same sectarian and chauvinist politics as the regime and more
reactionary rebels.

Human rights might not be the main issue, and irregular forces simply can't
operate the way regular forces are meant to by international law. But the
extent to which political and military forces respect human rights within
the constraints placed on them — and not just possibly unintended killing
of civilians but also political repression and arbitrary arrest, torture,
execution etc — are one indication of how progressive they are and would be
if they held more power.

The idea that the abuses documented in this report by the PYD-led movement
and the rebels are comparable is laughable. The former is accused by not
looking after everyone properly it moves for military reasons, of
conscription — without mentioning the YPG/J are volunteer forces and
conscripts are strictly adults who only serve in the civil defence HXP —
and the abuse of one young man who refused conscription. Rebels — with the
worst being Jabhat Fatah al-Sham but others implicated as well — are
accused of widespread indiscriminate attacks on civilians, of conscription
of child soldiers, of widespread summary execution of prisoners, and both
JFS and Jund al-Sham are accused of setting up sharia courts in Idlib that
regularly dispense arbitrary imprisonment, torture and execution. E.g. in
the period of this report, Liwa al-Aqsa executed 128 prisoners in one
brutal job lot, and JFS stoned to death a women for adultery in Heish
village in Idlib, and shot the man allegedly involved. Let's let the
stoning to death of a woman and the shooting of a man for adultery sink in
for a minute. Some revolution.

It's true regarding chlorine weapons I misread this report while
concurrently reading an earlier Amnesty report on Sheikh Masqod, and this
report makes clear they found chlorine in the period under review only used
by the regime (as Chris notes this Amnesty report had more serious evidence
of chlorine use by rebels that Mike claims).

Louis claims relations with the regime are a more fundamental question. But
there's also a clear pattern by some of exaggerating and distorting the
PYD-led movement's limited, ad hoc and frequently broken arrangements,
accompanied by frequent assertions by both sides of their incompatibility
of aims and regular fighting (Hawzhin Azeez  says on Facebook fighting
between the regime and SDF forces is happening in Efrin right now). Louis
for example once asserted that Assad's claim to have "documents" to prove
his arming of and overall alliance with the PYD-movement, was proof of this
alliance. A strange person to place such trust in and such documents have
of course never appeared.

I for one now have a hectic weekend of domestic labour and family
activities, so it's over and out from me.

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 11:18 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *********
>
> On 3/15/17 11:01 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
>
>> I've criticised Roy Gutman and
>> called his Nation articles rubbish not just because he seems to be a
>> cruise
>> missile liberal who's a shill for Erdogan, but also because at least two
>> of
>> his sources have complained about his distortion of their words, because
>> this has also happened in his previous work, because he leaves crucial
>> facts out, because claims made by his anonymous sources are often absurd
>> and/or completely contradicted by other evidence, etc.
>>
>
> Frankly, human rights abuses are not uppermost on my mind in a situation
> where violence has become so generalized. There were human rights abuses by
>

Re: [Marxism] UN Syria Commission clears YPG/J and SDF of ethnic cleansing charges

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Mike is quite wrong in claiming that the not guilty verdict from the UN
commission only covers last 8 months. The narrative throughout the report
ranges over the past several years, and it explicitly states,

"Though allegations of 'ethnic cleansing' continued to be received during
the period under review, the Commission found no evidence to substantiate
claims that YPG or SDF forces *ever* targeted Arab communities on the basis
of ethnicity, nor that YPG cantonal authorities systematically sought to
change the demographic composition of territories under their control
through the commission of violations directed against any particular ethnic
group" (p. 21, emphasis added).

Regarding abuses by the YPG/J and SDF, the report details allegations
property damage and forced movement of people. The latter is impossible to
avoid in irregular war and report is clear that much if not all of it is
necessitated by landmine clearing and other military contingencies. The
context of a militia in a poor, blockaded statelet should be taken into
account when all displaced people and their property aren't looked after
properly or allowed to return when they'd prefer. Mike seems keen to imply
this is of a piece with the abuses by other forces. But the report presents
one single allegation of torture, c.f. the numerous instances of torture,
summary execution, bombing of civilians including with chlorine and cluster
bombs etc, by both the regime and some rebels. Proportionality and context
isn't the same thing as Mike's unnamed caricatures who allegedly think the
PYD-led movement is perfect and all rebels are head-choppers.

Mike isn't sure many people made the ethnic cleansing claim. After the
poorly substantiated claims in the 2015 Amnesty report, the charges were
uncritically all over the mainstream media, and on the left that I recall
were uncritically cited by Mick Armstrong at
https://redflag.org.au/node/5116, an article priased by Mike, and more
explicitly made by Socialist Alternative members on Facebook. And of course
luridly made if completely unsubstantiated by the Roy Gutman articles in
the apparently leftist Nation which Mike has approvingly cited.

Gutman's previous form as a cruise missile leftist (regarding Serbia) may
not be relevant to his current hackery for the Turkish state. But
completely irrelevant is Mike aspersions about the PYD-led movement's
tactical alliance with the US. What's relevant to the topic at hand is that
Gutman's has demonstrably lied about his sources and presented fantastical
and demonstrably false accounts of the innocence of the Turkish state and
its crony capitalist clients in Iraqi Kurdistan, of the 2012 insurrection
in Rojava and of the battle of Kobane and the 2014 battle for Sinjar. His
second article is particularly disgusting in presenting the heroic rescue
of 50,000 Yazidis in Sinjar in the most perfunctory way possible, and the
really about some sort of unjustified imperialistic incursion by the PKK.

"Turkey is not the only US ally at odds with the YPG. Iraq’s Kurdistan
Regional Government in late December threatened to use force if the PKK
didn’t withdraw from Sinjar in northern Iraq, which the KRG insists is in
its security sphere. (The PKK had moved into Sinjar in 2014 to fight off an
ISIS attack against the Yazidi population there.)"

https://www.thenation.com/article/americas-favorite-syrian-militia-rules-with-an-iron-fist/

If Mike this creep is a credible source, he's welcome to him.

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 3:38 PM, Michael Karadjis 
wrote:

> The report says there is no evidence of a systematic policy of ethnic
> cleansing. I'm not too sure many people made that claim. The various
> reports, from a variety of sources (eg the anti-ISIS group 'Raqqa is Being
> Slaughtered Silently'), that show the YPG uprooted people, destroyed
> property, prevented return etc, are too many to be false, and in any case
> this report gives plenty of dirt on YPG actions (as it does on all
> players). Nick wants to show that it doesn't show the worst, which is true,
> but it does show that the YPG is not perfect, which should be considered by
> those who have romanticised this current to the point that they are the
> only "true revolutionaries", any allegation against them is just Turkish or
> ISUS slander, whereas every allegation against other rebels are undoubtedly
> true and proof that they are little more than a jihadist jungle.
>
> In addition, let's not forget that the report is only for the second half
> of 2016 and early 2017, whereas most of the worst allegations against YPG
> crimes were from 2014 through early 2016.
>
> Nick writes, in 

Re: [Marxism] UN Syria Commission clears YPG/J and SDF of ethnic cleansing charges

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Well too bad. I don't much stock at all in instant dismissal of evidence
because of the apparent predilections of the messenger, especially with
regard to Syria, about which it seems to be a particularly widespread
mechanism that allows people to stay in their comfortable bubble and not
even look at anything they know they won't like. It's fair enough that some
people's agenda make one suspicious about how objective their evidence is,
but it's a pretty weak argument to stop at that. You don't seem to be even
starting at that, unless you think of some agenda a particular UN official
has in ordering her minions to doctor the evidence about alleged YPG and
SDF war crimes. And that the SNC and SOHR, who've also rebutted the "ethnic
cleansing" claims, also have such an agenda. I've criticised Roy Gutman and
called his Nation articles rubbish not just because he seems to be a cruise
missile liberal who's a shill for Erdogan, but also because at least two of
his sources have complained about his distortion of their words, because
this has also happened in his previous work, because he leaves crucial
facts out, because claims made by his anonymous sources are often absurd
and/or completely contradicted by other evidence, etc.

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 10:32 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 3/15/17 7:18 PM, Nick Fredman wrote:
>
>> rather than something the boss of the agency apparently said 4 years ago
>> about something else.
>>
>
>
> Yeah, well. I just don't trust someone like Carla del Ponte to oversee any
> report about Syria in the same way I wouldn't rely on the word of
> Islamophobe Max Abrahms, whose poll found that Syrian refugees blamed the
> rebels just as much as they blamed Assad (cited by Rania Khalek in an
> Alternet article).
>
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Re: [Marxism] UN Syria Commission clears YPG/J and SDF of ethnic cleansing charges

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Look at the current report. It has plenty of details of bombing of
civilians, and chemical weapon and cluster bomb use by by the regime as
well as abuses by rebels. If you can cast doubts with concrete evidence on
its conclusions regarding the slurs against the YPG and SDF of ethnic
cleansing cast freely about by some leftists, including by people on this
list, that'd have relevance to this thread, rather than something the boss
of the agency apparently said 4 years ago about something else.


On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 9:52 AM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> On 3/15/17 6:36 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
>
>> The report, covering the miserable situation accross Syria generally,
>> describes any displacement by YPG/J and SDF as due to military necessity,
>> particularly the mass clearance of IS' indiscriminately laid land mines.
>> It
>> notes some abuses that are very minor in the context of Syria but
>> explicitly rejects ethnic cleansing. By my reckoning these charges have
>> now
>> been rebutted by a Syria National Coalition team, the Syria Observatory
>> for
>> Human Rights and now the UN Commission for Syria. The UN report is
>> available as the latest report
>> http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/IICISyria/Pages/Indepen
>> dentInternationalCommission.aspx
>>
>>
> http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/IICISyria/Pages/CarlaDelPonte.aspx
>
> Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
>
> Carla Del Ponte (Switzerland)
>
> Ms. Del Ponte is a Swiss and international Prosecutor and diplomat. Within
> the United Nations System, she is a former Chief Prosecutor of two United
> Nations international criminal tribunals.
>
>
> ---
>
> Contrary to subsequent insinuations that she did not know what she was
> talking about, Del Ponte had chosen her words carefully. She had said that
> witness testimony made it appear that “some chemical weapons were used, in
> particular nerve gas.” And it appeared to have been used by the “opponents,
> by the rebels.” There is “no indication at all that the Syria government …
> used chemical weapons.”
>
> --Deepak Tripathi, Counterpunch May 13, 2013
>
> full: https://louisproyect.org/2013/08/31/carla-del-ponte-and-the-
> anti-imperialist-left-an-unprincipled-combination/
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[Marxism] UN Syria Commission clears YPG/J and SDF of ethnic cleansing charges

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The report, covering the miserable situation accross Syria generally,
describes any displacement by YPG/J and SDF as due to military necessity,
particularly the mass clearance of IS' indiscriminately laid land mines. It
notes some abuses that are very minor in the context of Syria but
explicitly rejects ethnic cleansing. By my reckoning these charges have now
been rebutted by a Syria National Coalition team, the Syria Observatory for
Human Rights and now the UN Commission for Syria. The UN report is
available as the latest report
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/IICISyria/Pages/IndependentInternationalCommission.aspx

As Kobane-based Kurdish-Australian Hawzhin Azeez activist noted on Facebook:

Hawzhin Azeez added 3 new photos.
March 14 at 7:53pm ·
The UN Commission for Syria has just released an official statement
absolving the YPG and the SDF of systematic and forced displacement and
cleansing of Arab villages and communities in the Rojava region. This
statement unequivocally dispels allegations made by certain "Human Rights"
organisations such as Amnesty International which produced a widely
publicized and disseminated report in 2015 accusing the YPG of ethnic
discrimination, razing, cleansing and displacement of Arab communities. At
the time of the release of the report to date many Leftest organisations
and associations accepted the report as unequivocally correct and the YPG,
a force which has overwhelmingly fought for the protection of all ethnic
and religious groups, particularly ensuring the safety and well being of
Arab communities was marked as another violent, oppressive and
'imperialist/colonizing' force- rather than the revolutionary, inclusive
and democratic body it has always aimed and aspired to be. Amnesty's false
report contributed to ongoing propaganda against Rojava, the Kurds and the
YPG and was deeply damaging, furthering the agendas and interests of
certain groups and parties, particularly Turkey.

If you stand in solidarity with the YPG-YPJ-SDF this report and statement
by the UN needs to be circulated widely. Please spread the statement far
and wide as this is a rare moment when the truth is spoken, a privilege
that we know is not an afforded to us very often.
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Re: [Marxism] US Arab Spring policy? Third party counter-revolution

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 7:22 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> To put this in context, since 2012 there has been a 3-way conflict in
> Aleppo between the Assad regime, Turkish backed rebel groups and the
> YPG/YPJ - the latter being based in the predominantly Kurdish district of
> Sheikh Maqsoud.  There is a long history of attacks by reactionary rebel
> groups on Sheikh Maqsoud.  According to the Kurdish Question website, such
> attacks began in 2012 and have continued intermittently since then:
> http://kurdishquestion.com/article/3132-138-civilians-
> killed-912-wounded-in-sheikh-maqsoud-attacks
>
> Amnesty International has condemned the rebel attacks on Sheikh Maqsoud:
> https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/syria-
> armed-opposition-groups-committing-war-crimes-in-aleppo-city/
>
> I am not familiar with all the details of the battle for Aleppo.  But if
> the YPG's efforts to break the siege of Sheikh Maqsoud had the side effect
> of helping the Assad regime defeat the rebels in eastern Aleppo, a large
> part of the responsibility lies with reactionary elements of the rebel
> movement.
>
> Chris Slee
>

The Amnesty report, citing evidence of a starvation siege-like operation by
rebel groups against Sheikh Maqsod and indiscriminate rocket attacks on
civilians including use of chorine gas, is strong evidence of the defensive
nature of the YPG/J and allies operations in Aleppo. Of course we need to
be critical of all the claims about abuses in Syria, but this report,
unlike the previous Amnesty report claiming "ethnic cleansing" by the YPG
uncritically cited by Michael among others, uses eyewitness accounts and
video evidence more than satellite photos and has not been rejected by an
investigation team from the SNC and by the Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights.

There seems to be a pattern among those supportive of the Syrian rebels who
have become cool towards or never warmed to the PYD-led movement, to
justify rebel opposition to this movement by grasping at any evidence,
however dubious, of its nefarious, chauvinist, sectarian, pro-Assad and/or
Stalinist nature.

There have been the claims circulating for a couple of years, made by Assad
and various cronies, that they had been arming the YPG/J, and had
"documents" to "prove" it. These claims as reported in the crony Syrian
regime media were happily taken up by the crony Turkish regime media
http://aa.com.tr/en/todays-headlines/syrias-assad-admits-sending-weapons-to-pyd/487871
and were repeated on this list, by Louis if I recall correctly, and no
doubt elsewhere, as "proof" of Assad arming the PYD-led movement. Somehow
the "documents" have never surfaced. I guess running a dictatorship at war
is a busy job and Assad and colleagues might just keep forgetting to click
the "attach" icon on their media release emails, but perhaps we should
entertain the possibility that Assad is capable of lying to suit his ends
and the state media of the increasingly militarist and authoritarian
Turkish state is capable of spreading fake news?

Then there was the smudgy photos and brief smudgy videos on Assadist and
Russian sites claiming to show YPG and regime flags together in the battle
for Aleppo. Possibly these are legitimate; possibly they're the result of a
few minutes work with Photoshop and After Effects. The fact that in this
key example
https://southfront.org/syrian-army-kurdish-ypg-wave-flags-alongside-each-other-in-aleppo-city-continue-joint-actions-photo/
the image of flags together is long shot and smudgily ow res, while there's
also a number of hi-res close-ups of SAA troops, *alone*, suggests the
latter possibility is the correct one. The dubious nature of all this
didn't stop Assadists and pro-rebels alike spreading this "news" across
social media, in a number of cases I saw without apparently bothering to
even look at the "evidence".

Then there are the claims that the deal is in and there's a secret pay-off
for autonomy in Rojava in return for services rendered. If the PYD
leadership was in fact anything like the billionaire gangsters running the
Kurdish statelet in northern Iraq this would be credible, and probably not
at all hard for the PYD to arrange. This narrative was recetly retold by
Joseph Daher
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/eastern-aleppo-syria-assad-war-russia-us-ypg-fsa/
with
the totally illogical claim that the dropping of the Kurdish word Rojava
from the Domocratic Federation of Northern Syria was some kind of proof of
this deal. Of course what's happened since flatly contradicts the
narrative. The regime has continued to reject any idea of autonomy or of
changing the 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Participatory Democracy and Micropolitics in Manbij

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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With regard to Chris last point about the role of women in liberated
Manbij, there were some very interesting comments on Facebook by
Syrian-Kurdish-Australian scholar and activist Hawzhin Azeez, now working
for the movement in Kobane, following a visit by her there in January. It
reminded me of passages in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia:

"Today I visited Manbij city with a few friends. Manbij consists of about
80% Arabs in northern Syria, and is a surprisingly bustling and industrious
city considering it has only been about 4 months that it was liberated by
the Syrian Democratic Forces from ISIS. Unlike Kobane it did not suffer
significant damage to its infrastructure and the city has managed to retain
its equilibrium since liberation. The city is a hub of noise, honking cars,
speeding motor cycles, street sellers, kebab and fresh fruits and
vegetables...

"Manbij had been under ISIS control for over two years and the people of
the city had suffered horrendously during that period. Most specifically,
women were most in danger because ISIS thugs were known for forcibly taking
young girls, women and wives and marrying them off or worse. Regular
beheading, public floggings and other terrible crimes were daily
occurrences in the city.

"In my previous visits to the city I had only seen women wearing the full
Burka, with an additional cloth covering even the women's eyes; I must
admit that there was a certain degree of culture shock as women across
Rojava wear various degrees of the hijab but never had I seen the Burka nor
to that degree. The problem was not the Burka itself but the degree and
consistency of the Burka with the only distinction being that some women's
eyes could be seen, or they were not wearing gloves.

"This time however, I witnessed something wonderful. During lunch time we
visited a restaurant where a young girl by the name of Dinah was serving
us. I couldn't help beaming with pride as soon as I saw her. She was full
of energy and obviously took great pride in her job. During lunch we
communicated with each other with broken Kurdish on her part and broken
Arabic on my part- and with the help of our friends who translated. She
spoke of her happiness to not only be able to work but the fact that she
could leave the house freely with only a scarf rather than clad all in
black...

"...It is difficult to determine what exactly is the future, and where
Dinah will be in a year or two. Will she still be working in the
restaurant? or will the changing tide of politics force her back into her
home and her burka, or across oceans as a refugee? instead I hope that all
the women in Manbij and across Syria gain a sense of control and autonomy
over their lives and bodies and live liberated from terrorism and
authoritarianis . I hope they will be able to go to work and study and live
a life with dignity and freedom in a society that recognizes their worth. A
society that is democratic, a society that is striving towards change and
progress. A society that creates energy, motivation and hope in young women
rather than apathy, fear and death. I hope Dinah lives in such a Syria and
grows old having experienced the full wonderful spectrum of beauty, love,
happiness, and prosperity that a free life can offer".

Full https://www.facebook.com/hawzhin.azeez/posts/1365339890195570


On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 1:23 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> Yasser Munif's article is very interesting.
>
>
> But he is incorrect to say:  "In August 2016, the Kurdish Democratic Union
> Party drove out the Islamic State".  In reality, Manbij was liberated from
> the "Islamic State" by the multi-ethnic Manbij Military Council and Syrian
> Democratic Forces.
>
>
> Below is a link to an interview with the two co-presidents of the
> "Democratic and Civilian Administration of Manbij and its Surroundings",
> established after ISIS was driven from the city.
>
>
> One of the co-presidents is Ibrahim Kaftan.  According to the ANF
> newsagency, Kaftan was formerly the "president of the Sawra Council in
> Manbij affiliated to the Free Syrian Army."  I am not sure if this is the
> same as the Manbij Revolutionary Council that Munif describes.  In any
> case, it suggests that there is some continuity between what happened in
> Manbij in 2012-2014 and what is happening 

Re: [Marxism] Have the Syrian Kurds Committed War Crimes?

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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I've not got time to take up everything in this long article in detail but
considering:

* The uncritical relaying of a truther-like conspiracy theory peddled by a
former regime judge that the ISIS assault on Kobane was fake news;

* The uncritical relaying of a conspiracy theory peddled by a regime
security operative, albeit in more creative detail than other versions of
the theory, that self-government in Rojava was a cosy arrangement secretly
worked out in early 2011. This theory and those of close PYD-regime
collaboration is widespread in different versions among both Assadists and
among those supportive of the Syrian rebels, including in the latter case
otherwise relatively sensible people like Joseph Daher in his recent
Jacobin article. But such theories ignore the fact that self-government
clearly dates from the violent seizure of power by Kurdish forces in July
2012, taking advantage of the crisis precipitated by the Damascus bombing
of a number of regime figures, and that subsequent administrative
arrangements are post-hoc adaptations to the politico-military balance of
forces that can and do break down regularly due to the incompatibility of
the aims of each side, as discussed for example in the report on this
academic discussion on the Rojava experience available at
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2016/08/26/rojava-at-4-examining-the-experiment-in-western-kurdistan/.
BTW I think such arrangement haven't been unknown in rebel-held areas,
judging by a description in Jonathan Littell's Syrian notebooks of a
pharmacy in rebel-held Homs still receiving Health Ministry subsidised
medicine (I'm sure most health and other arrangements between the centre
and regions have collapsed or been denied in rebel held areas); also BTW
Daher's conspiracy theory of recent close collaboration that would lead to
a pay-off to the PYD-led movement was rather contradicted by the recent
complete rejection of any federalism by the regime (Daher was particularly
silly in seeing the dropping of the Kurdish word Rojava from the name of
the Northern Syrian Federation as proof of his theory, nonsensical given
that it was part of a stronger declaration of independence from the regime
and of a democratic alternative for all of Syria);

* The uncritical relaying of the views of the increasingly
military-authoritarian Turkish state and the billionaire ganster-run
northern Iraq quasi-state that they're innocent injured parties who've just
had to form a tight blockage around Rojava because the regime there is so
very bad;

* Regarding "ethnic cleansing" claims, the heavy use of satellite photos
which haven't been shown to prove anything except that buildings are
destroyed in war; the article claims that there's "lots and lots" of
example where the destruction post-dated fighting, but in the example it
gives, the dates between the photos includes periods of fighting; it should
be noted more often that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Rejected
these claims in 2015
http://www.voanews.com/a/suspicion-grows-between-syrian-rebels-and-kurds/2852276.html
as did a team from the Syrian National Coalition
http://aranews.net/2015/06/kurds-liberated-tel-abyad-no-displacement-against-arabs-syrian-opposition-figure/,
and that a Human Rights Watch report had some negative things to say about
the Rojava regime in 2014 which may or may not have some validity but
didn't mention ethnic cleansing
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/18/syria-abuses-kurdish-run-enclaves;

* On ethnic cleansing and other issues, the author claims PYD figures just
brushed him off; he doesn't mention the PYD's detailed rebuttal of the
Amnesty International report on this, which surely he was referred to and
which he should have studied and cited in any case (I reckon from the way
he discusses the satellite photo issue probably saw it but dubiously
declines to cite it);

* The highly dubious assumptions about the motivations and views of Kurdish
and other refugees from the region; people of varied views flee war, as
shown by the somewhat surprising result in the often cited survey of Syrian
refugees that 40% supported the Assad regime
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2016-09-14/what-syrians-want;
the claim that the main reason people are fleeing Rojava is conscription
and opposition to the system there is completely undercut by the
eye-witness reports of masses of people returning when fighting eases
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tens-thousands-return-home-destroyed-kobane-497530897
.

Considering that, while I wouldn't discount authoritarian tendencies or
abuses by the PYD movement, if there's credible evidence of such, but I'd
say this report 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | Jacobin

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Ok, I didn't check Links as well as GL, fair enough Tony has used the term
"bandits and warlords". Not to characterize the FSA as a whole as you first
claimed, but as the trajectory "often" followed by commanders. I think this
must be true in some cases such as the different FSA units who handed Theo
Padnos over to Nusra in 2012 and again later when he initially escaped (I
happened to read his account recently) but no I can't say how common this
is.

On Thursday, January 12, 2017, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 1/11/17 7:43 PM, Nick Fredman wrote:
>
>> Since GL site specific searches for "Tony Iltis" and "Syria" with either
>> "warlord" or "bandit" reveal that Tony has used these terms in relation
>> to Libya and Afghanistan but not Syria, I assumed you were exaggerating
>> for dramtic effect, rather than have a real if baseless complaint. My bad.
>>
>
>
> You didn't look hard enough:
>
> Diplomatically, the West supported the Syrian National Council, a
> government-in-exile with no influence inside the country. Officially the
> military forces of the SNC are the Free Syrian Army (FSA), formed by
> military officers defecting from Assad and local militias. However, in
> reality the FSA was never more than an uncoordinated network of independent
> brigades whose commanders often became little more than bandits and
> warlords.
>
> http://links.org.au/node/4018
>
> I guess you didn't understand that I have been through this bullshit with
> Tony and it left a deep scar.
>
> --
> Support Louis Proyect biography project
> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/publish-the-biography-of-
> socialist-louis-proyect#/
>
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | Jacobin

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Since GL site specific searches for "Tony Iltis" and "Syria" with either
"warlord" or "bandit" reveal that Tony has used these terms in relation to
Libya and Afghanistan but not Syria, I assumed you were exaggerating for
dramtic effect, rather than have a real if baseless complaint. My bad.

https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant=1=2=UTF-8#q=site:www.greenleft.org.au+tony+iltis+syria+warlord

https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant=1=2=UTF-8#q=site:www.greenleft.org.au+tony+iltis+syria+bandit

It doesn't look like anyone else in GL has either:

https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant=1=2=UTF-8#q=site:www.greenleft.org.au+syria+warlord

https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant=1=2=UTF-8#q=site:www.greenleft.org.au+syria+bandit



On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 9:52 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 1/11/17 5:08 PM, Nick Fredman wrote:
>
>> https://www.greenleft.org.au/glw-authors/tony-iltis. On my phone on the
>> tram to work it's true but I think what I say here is pretty
>> accurate. Up to the end of 2014 at least his articles included
>>
>
>
> Nice evasion of the "warlords and bandits" complaint I lodged. I was
> hoping that you might substantiate it. At least Tony took the trouble of
> citing journalists who despised the rebels.
>
>
>>
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | Jacobin

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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"Socialist Alliance leaders". You do pull out the thunderous old Trot
polemic lingo sometimes. Well I've just had a flick through the "Tony
Iltis" tag on the GL site
https://www.greenleft.org.au/glw-authors/tony-iltis. On my phone on the
tram to work it's true but I think what I say here is pretty accurate. Up
to the end of 2014 at least his articles included, as well as describing
the universally noted sectarianisation of the conflict, statements like,
"There are local revolutionary committees throughout Syria that reflect, to
varying degrees, the democratic values of the 2011 uprising. But these
committees are generally uncoordinated"
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/kurds-drive-back-amid-wests-shifting-alliances
.
From 2015 his articles note the range of ideological bases of armed groups
but put the more or less democratic local organizing in the past tense. I
think it's wrong not to acknowledge there's *something* left of this
aspect, at the least for the pedagogical purposes of relating what ordinary
people do in struggle.

But how little is left of the local committees and "civil society" or how
much of a national-democratic character to the armed struggle is left is
unclear to me. Noting the importance of the "increasing marginalisation" as
Leila Shami puts it of democratic and progressive aspects of the uprising,
or the decisive shift in balance between FSA and Islamist groups  — not
just those with an Islamic name, but with reactionary, far right-wing,
sectarian politics — in the armed struggle, is hardly unique to Tony Itlis.
It's what Jonathon Littel observed starting in 2012 in Homs and has
analysed since, it's what Theo Padnos found when purported FSA units and
supporters twice handed him over to al Nusra to be tortured between 2012
and 2014, it's what Syrian journalists writing in Tahrir-ICN relayed by
Tony have expressed. I note that the list of groups the Russian state
apparatus have decided are "moderate", that you seemed to think had some
significance, doesn't even include the FSA. We should be clear the war was
caused by a dictatorship that's in terminal crisis one way or another, and
is not a western conspiracy against a legitimate government, we should
demand direct humanitarian aid to people affected by the war and a massive
increase in Western refugee intake from Syria, we should support any
democratic and progressive alternatives to Assad, which to my mind includes
the effort at a multi-ethnic, non-sectarian, democratic zone run by working
people in the Northern Syrian Federation.

On Wednesday, January 11, 2017, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *********
>
> On 1/10/17 9:20 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
>
>> Louis is exaggerating and cherry picking, whether wilfully or not. Salih
>> Muslim whatever faults he may have (and the PKK current seems to have
>> clearer and more radical spokespeople than him), has never said "there can
>> be no solution to the conflict in Syria without Bashar al-Assad remaining
>> in power".
>>
>
>
> No, in fact it is the Socialist Alliance leaders that are cherry-picking.
> I have no idea what has happened with Tony Iltis since I haven't heard much
> from him lately along these lines lately but he set the tone for your group
> when he characterized the FSA in 2014 as bandits and warlords a couple of
> years ago. Shame on you.
>
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | Jacobin

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Louis is exaggerating and cherry picking, whether wilfully or not. Salih
Muslim whatever faults he may have (and the PKK current seems to have
clearer and more radical spokespeople than him), has never said "there can
be no solution to the conflict in Syria without Bashar al-Assad remaining
in power".

Louis might be misremembering this article
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2013/10/syria-kurds-assad-solution-salih-muslim.html,
from more than 3 years ago, in which he was briefly paraphrased as saying
there could be "no solution without Assad". That seems to be a call for a
negotiated solution. Whether or not you think this was utopian at that
point, it's not the same as insisting Assad had to stay in power.

In the two more recent articles Chris posted, he's paraphrased as being
"fully in favour of Mr Assad and his government being replaced by a more
acceptable alternative" in the first and quoted as saying "we are ready to
fight Assad under a secular, democratic and civilian umbrella...Assad is
falling no matter how long it takes, and the era of the Baath (Party) is
gone, never to return".

Louis might find Muslim's antipathy to extreme right Islamism disgusting,
but when for example he's seen Kurd and poor Arab civilians in the Sheikh
Masoud district of Aleppo attacked by chemical weapons by Islamist rebels
maybe we should cut the guy a little slack. If some spokespeople of the
PKK-current and their allies present too homogenous a picture of the
rebels, it's also deluded to deny the reactionary nature of some of them,
and also quite "Orientalist" to deny that a whole lot of people in Syria
and the region who oppose Assad don't want reactionary Islamism in power.

I'm currently reading Jonathon Littel's Syrian Notebooks, which is a moving
and sympathetic first-hand account account of the rebels in Homs in early
2012, but in which Littel is disturbed to notice a creeping
sectarianisation, which he's convinced in his more recent introduction and
epilogue to have marginalised the progressive aspect of the rebellion. He
puts the main blame on the regime but summarises the process as
"transforming a popular, broad-based proletarian and peasant uprising into
a sectarian civil war".


On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 12:40 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> Louis Proyect may be referring to this article:
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-
> civil-war-kurdish-leader-says-collapse-of-assad-regime-
> would-be-a-disaster-despite-its-10515922.html
>
>
>
> But see also this article:
>
> http://www.syrianobserver.com/EN/News/30898/Saleh_Muslim_We_
> Are_Ready_Fight_Assad_Regime_Establish_Secular_State
>
>
>
>
> 
> From: Louis Proyect 
> Sent: Wednesday, 11 January 2017 1:30 AM
> To: Chris Slee; Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | Jacobin
>
> On 1/10/17 8:19 PM, Chris Slee wrote:
> > The interview  with Yasser Munif is in some ways very good, but it is
> > spoiled by his hostile attitude towards the PYD.
>
> Maybe he took exception to the PYD leader Salih Muslim saying that there
> can be no solution to the conflict in Syria without Bashar al-Assad
> remaining in power. As someone who supports Kurdish self-determination,
> I found this utterance and others by this man utterly disgusting.
>
> --
> Support Louis Proyect biography project
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Re: [Marxism] Rojava or Northern Syria?

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Wednesday, 4 January 2017, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
>
>
> http://kurdishquestion.com/article/3759-rojava-or-northern-syria
>
>
> On 27 December in the town of Rmeilan (Rimelan), the Northern Syria
> Constituent Assembly voted to remove "Rojava," meaning "Western"
> (Kurdistan), from the name of the federal system; initially named the
> "Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria-Rojava" and now called the
> "Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria".
>
>
> The aim is to make it clear that the democratic federal system is not just
> for Kurds but for all Syria's ethnicities.
>
>
> Chris Slee
>

I posted this on Facebook with the following comment. Maybe I need to add
here that finding anything of positive value or interest in what the PKK
current and allies do doesn't mean uncritically endorsing everything they
do.

A multi-ethnic, non-sectarian effort within a Balkanising, disintegrating
 Syria. It also brings up complicated questions of national and cultural
 identity within a radical project. The strategy as Phil Hearse has pointed
out
http://links.org.au/kurdistan-workers-party-pkk-analysis-hearse-parker-de-jong
appears to
have more to do with the "cultural-national autonomy" ideas of Otto Bauer
and the Austro-Marxists than with communitarian anarchism of Murray
Bookchin that are cited as the basis of "democratic confederalism". I don't
think the point is whether these ideas as theories or strategy are in some
abstract or overall sense "better" than more orthodox Marxist ideas that
accept self-determination as a right for oppressed nations but are rather
negative about promoting cultural and national identity (for one thing John
Ridell has argued http://links.org.au/node/208 that the Bolsheviks in power
went a bit Austrian in practice). I think the point is these ideas might be
relevant to the concrete situation in the Middle East.
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Re: [Marxism] YPG leader on the fall of eastern Aleppo

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> On 12/17/16 10:08 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
>
>> This article includes a fairly detailed analysis
>>
>
> Yeah, even more profound than Leon Trotsky:
>
> "We need to remember that the revolutionaries mocked the people of Aleppo
> for not taking part in the revolution against the Baath regime; they failed
> to understand that Aleppo is the city of commerce and industry which needs
> safety, stability and open roads."
>
> Sad that Socialist Alliance people can not figure out this does not even
> pass the smell test right off the bat.
>

Well I'm sorry that not every word of what reads to me like a clunky
English translation meets your standards of Troskyist rigour. This not very
clear sentence is followed by hundreds of words on the social background
and political development of different social groupings and factions in the
city, which is what I'm suggesting should be taken seriously.
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Re: [Marxism] YPG leader on the fall of eastern Aleppo

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On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 2:30 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> "And his concluding paragraph, which should be a comradely call to
> discussion for a new joint strategy, is instead an ultimatistic demand that
> everyone follow the lead of the Great God Ocalan."
>

Maybe it's a fair criticism that the PYD are being (politically) sectarian.
But maybe there's nothing concrete on offer in terms of alliances and a
propagandistic putting forward of the model of the Northern Syrian
Federation is the best that can be down in a crap situation.

As for the typical crack about the role of Ocalan, Phil Hearse had some
typically wry and sensible things to say about that recently:

Of course the Trotskyist movement, by contrast, has never succumbed to the
temptation to organise itself around the thought of a single great leader,
now has it?



The role of central leaders in many progressive, liberation or
revolutionary movements has often been problematic. For example while he
was still politically active, it appears that every major decision in Cuba
went via Fidel Castro. The over-centralisation of power around Hugo Chavez
in Venezuela was a major problem of the Chavista movement. In Vietnam it
appears that there was a more collegiate leadership around Ho Chi Minh
including Võ Nguyên Giáp and Pham van Dong. In the EZLN, who knows the real
role of Subcommandante Marcos?



Clearly our tradition is against the elevation of single guru, all-seeing
and all-knowing leaders. But whatever the excesses around Öcalan in this
regard, you have to make an all-round judgement of the movement.



When you are the leadership of a movement supported by millions; when you
insist on women’s equality at all levels; when you urge people to take
control of their lives and destinies through democratically organised
solidarity and struggle; and when hundreds of thousands start to do this in
practice, then the social effects will be massive and long lasting. Against
all that, the excesses of extolling the virtues of’ ‘Apo’ won’t count for
much. In any case the movement has had no contact with Ocalan at all for
over a year, and only spasmodic contact for some years before that, as he
is held in isolation on the prison island of Imrali, so for practical
purposes, while there is no doubt that his ideas are hegemonic, the
leadership of the movement has to take its own decisions on both tactical
and strategic issues.


Full: 'Analysing the Kurdistan Workers Party',
http://links.org.au/kurdistan-workers-party-pkk-analysis-hearse-parker-de-jong
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[Marxism] Filipino PLM and Australian Socialist Alliance on Aleppo

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Filipino socialists: Stop the bombing of Aleppo, provide safe passage

December 14

The bombs are falling on Aleppo as we issue this statement and the people
of Aleppo are sending their final messages and last minute appeals to avert
what can only be described as genocide by a brutal regime against its own
people.

Full:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/filipino-socialists-stop-bombing-aleppo-provide-safe-passage



Peace in Syria can only come from the democratic empowerment of Syrians

The Socialist Alliance released the statement below on December 18.

The capture of formerly rebel-held East Aleppo by the forces of the Bashar
Assad dictatorship and its foreign allies has been hailed by Assad and his
Russian and Iranian backers as a decisive victory over their opponents that
will end the war that has devastatedthe country since Assad used military
force against a civilian protest movement in 2011.

However, the violence that has accompanied the regime’s reunification of
Aleppo, the sporadically implemented evacuation of civilians and rebel
fighters from East Aleppo, the continued division of Syria between
competing armed groups, the continued military operations by various
foreign armies pursuing a variety of agendas, and the continued denial of
basic humanitarian needs to civilians in Aleppo and elsewhere all suggest
the conflict is far from over.

Full:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/peace-syria-can-only-come-democratic-empowerment-syrians
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[Marxism] YPG leader on the fall of eastern Aleppo

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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This article includes a fairly detailed analysis of the social and
political background of different factions of the rebels, and
how sectarianisation and ill-fated alliances particularly with an
increasingly militarized and authoritarian Turkey contributed to the
disaster. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the analysis, and from my
relatively comfortable perch in suburban Melbourne I don't presume to cast
definitive judgement on all the tactical moves of those engaged in an
extremely complex and brutal war and revolution, but the analysis and the
perspective for a multi-ethnic, federal, democratic Syria deserve to be
taken more seriously by those too quick to put forward dismissive
caricatures and slanders of this movement. For example in Facebook
discussion I've been struck by the decided lack of objectivity of those
who've gleefully referred to "proof" of YPG-regime collaboration in the
recent fighting, when this "proof" consists of a couple of smudgy, low-res,
long-shot, easily faked pics and videos of YPG and regime flags flying
together, on regime and Russian websites, which some of the accusers
have clearly not bothered to look at let alone critically assess.

The fall of eastern Aleppo
By Polat Can
http://kurdishquestion.com/article/3706-the-fall-of-eastern-aleppo
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Re: [Marxism] An iranian leftist's perspective on Syria

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 1:49 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

The dude is Iranian and grew up under the Islamic regime in Iran.  Not sure
> 'Islamophobia' is therefore an accurate description of his views.  He would
> argue that being against ISIS and the other fundamentalist groups, which
> are the main alternative to the Assad dictatorship, is just sensible.
>
> Western leftists don't have to deal with living under the mullahs; Iranian
> leftists do.
>
> If we're wrong about Syria, we won't be the ones who suffer.
>
> My own views have shifted around somewhat, but I take Karim's perspective
> very seriously.  He loathes the Baathists, and he has firsthand experience
> of their horrors, but his view is that the fundamentalists would be even
> worse.  Witness Iran, witness Libya.
>
> His views can't just be dismissed with the cry of 'Islamophobia'.
>
> Phil
>


I agree with all that. At various international gatherings in Australia
over the last 20 years or so I've sometimes thought the contributions of
some overseas comrades such as from Pakistan could be construed as
Islamophobic but considered that they're the ones with first hand
experience and the ones who've been copping it from hard right forces
organised around Islamist ideology — and that the point was that these
forces are hard right, not that they happen to be in Islamic garb.

I haven't got around to reading Burning Country yet but recently I've read
the latest few entries in Leila Shami's blog https://leilashami.
wordpress.com/. She emphasises the "sectarianisation of Syria", that the
democratic opposition are "increasingly marginalised", that Jabhat Fatah Al
Sham (Al Qaeda rebrand) leading the advance into Aleppo in August was a
"monumental change". The sort of things that seem to get Tony Iltis's
columns in Green Left denounced as Assadist-Putinite-fascism. Of course
Shami sees a democratic, progressive opposition as still existing and
worthy of energetic solidarity. Even if that's true it seems pretty tenuous
as the main way to approach the conflict. Especially as while she rightly
points to the brutal cynicism of the regime in provoking sectarianism, she
doesn't seem to have much to say about the funding-support-meddling of
Saudi Arabia and the gulf states in the opposition. Surely the progressive,
radical democratic uprising against Assad on 2011 has been considerably if
maybe not totally crushed between these pincers. A weakness of Shami's
anarchism is perhaps not recognising that local committees are a necessary
but insufficient condition of a revolutionary movement, that without a
strong progressive leadership and program they're vulnerable to dominance
and cooption by centralised forces with other ideas (as in Iran). And maybe
there's little left for the PYD current to be allied with as it tries to
fight for a consistent policy of self-determination and social justice.

One thing for sure is that there's too much bluster, hyperbole and
name-calling and not enough discussion about Syria among the left.
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Re: [Marxism] Links comment lost in space? Or worse?

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Monday, 9 May 2016, Louis Proyect via Marxism
>
> I spent about 15 minutes yesterday answering Annis but my comment has not
> appeared. This can mean one of two things, neither of which reflects well
> on the SA. It could simply be a case of my comment sitting in the
> moderation queue. If so, the comrades do not seem to quick on the uptake.
> If Slee or whoever decided not to approve my comment, that sucks big-time.
> Any SA people here who would care to give me a status report?
>

Terry Townsend who edits Links has been quite unwell for some time. I'm not
sure if he's back on the job but in any case lack of attention rather than
censorship is more likely. One of your articles against Annis and Clarke
was after all recently up there http://links.org.au/node/4618. While
there's strong agreement in SA for solidarity with the Kurdish
liberation movement there isn't so much with Annis and Clarke on Russia.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Green Left Weekly's coverage of Syria and the swamp of third campism - A Socialist in Canada

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Wednesday, 24 February 2016, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

So amusing. Roger Annis and a couple of other Putinites blast Tony Iltis
> for not being sufficiently deferential to the Kremlin. This is like the
> John Birch Society labeling Eisenhower a Communist.
>

Sonny Melencio used to quip that in his CPP days they weren't allowed to
read Lenin without a Mao condom. Seems like lately Louis can't read Green
Left without a Red Flag condom.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Assad's UN envoy reveals regime support for PYD | TRT World

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Your rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding Louis I was quite clear I don't
think alliances with Assad advance the cause of consistent and radical
democratic solutions to the crisis of Syria and the region. I don't at all
think the PKK-led current are incapable of doing the wrong things in
terrible situations in each of the four states in which they're fighting
brutal and complex struggles. But their recent record is in context of the
region is remarkable, and deserves a bit of solidarity and the benefit of
some doubt when their most vicious enemies (e.g. an Assad crony and the
Turkish state media) slander them.

I was particularly objecting to your turning a self-interested and unproven
*claim* - via a lackey media source beholden to the authoritarian Turkish
government with its own obvious interests in spreading this story,  which
is in any case belied by recent clashes between the SAA and YPG/J and SDF -
into a "reveal", in the subject heading. Which you seemed to have backed
down from to your credit. Other claims of an overall alliance and a
Faustian deal for autonomy have abounded if not necessarily made by you,
and are even more unlikely, given the clear public position of the Syrian
regime not to mention its long-term chauvinistic practice.

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> On 2/19/16 5:18 PM, Nick Fredman via Marxism wrote:
>
>> I do know the PYD and
>> allies have the only thing like a consistent radical democratic program
>> and
>> practice in Syria, and the PKK-led current is the only thing in the region
>> like a leftist radical-democratic force with a mass base, i.e. hegemonic
>> among millions of people. That warrants some solidarity and should mean
>> some care being taken in criticisms rather than blithe denunciations from
>> armchair guerilla commanders.
>>
>
> You don't seem to get the Turkish media report. It does not make any claim
> that the Baathists are okay with a future Kurdistan in Syria. It only
> claims that Assad and the Russians have combined with the Kurds (and the
> Afghan Shi'ites, the Iraqi militias, Hizbollah and perhaps men from Mars)
> to annihilate Syrian rebels. If that is your idea of radical democracy, I'm
> having none of it.
>
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Assad's UN envoy reveals regime support for PYD | TRT World

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Yeah right. This report doesn't reveal anything but makes a claim that's
been made before, and rejected before by the PYD. It's directly from the
Turkish state's Ministry of Truth via it's TV arm, as part of its PR aimed
whitewashing in front of its western senior partners of its current
anti-Kurd and anti-left pogrom at home and closely related meddling in
Syria. The Turkish state has a direct interest in vilifying the Kurdish
movement and has been doing so in spades for years, as sectarian,
pro-Assad, "ethnic cleaning" etc.

The PYD bombed a government check-point a couple of weeks ago, so it did
happen to be true maybe Ja'afari will want his money back.

This is the same guy who recently showed what BFFs Assad and the PYD have
become by bluntly stating:

The representative of the Syrian regime at peace talks in Geneva told Rudaw
that Damascus would show zero tolerance for any claim of federation or
autonomy by the country’s Kurdish minority.

Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s UN envoy and its top man at the Geneva peace talks,
ruled out the idea of federalism as an option for governing post-war Syria.

“Take the idea of separating Syrian land out of your mind,” he said, adding
that “anyone thinking of departing Syria” should be cured of the illusion.


http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/310120162

In the current messy and confused situation I don't know if the PYG is
using the best tactics currently to carry out its mandate of "securing
Rojava in a democratic Syria", and I wouldn't exclude major errors, like
other liberation movements under massive pressure. I do know the PYD and
allies have the only thing like a consistent radical democratic program and
practice in Syria, and the PKK-led current is the only thing in the region
like a leftist radical-democratic force with a mass base, i.e. hegemonic
among millions of people. That warrants some solidarity and should mean
some care being taken in criticisms rather than blithe denunciations from
armchair guerilla commanders.

There's too much cherry-picking of convenient report and facts and ignoring
or disbelieving of the inconvenient from Syria, from different sides I'm
sure but definitely from those who are rusted on to a narrative of a united
and unproblematically progressive opposition to the Assad dictatorship. A
unified opposition - which needs to include support for Kurdish
self-determination  - has been wrecked, perhaps sadly irretrievably, by the
meddling of the venal regimes in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states
as well as the imperialist powers.


On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:05 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> The Syrian ambassador to the UN indicated that PYD-allied forces in the
> country have been supported not only by the US but also by Bashar al
> Assad's regime.
>
> "These Syrian Kurds [PYD-allied groups] supported by the American
> administration are also supported by the Syrian government, just for your
> kind information", the ambassador Bashar Ja'afari told reporters on Tuesday
> following a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on Turkey's recent
> shelling of PYD targets in northern Syria.
>
> full:
> http://www.trtworld.com/mea/assads-un-envoy-reveals-regime-support-for-pyd-49189
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[Marxism] Socialist Alliance (Australia)'s new programmatic document

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Socialist Alliance's 'Towards a Socialist Australia' has morphed into a
programmatic document after extensive discussion. It strikes a pretty good
balance I reckon for a small revolutionary socialist organisation in a
country like Australia between a coherent and comprehensive guide to work,
and laying down chapter and verse on theory and history. All the discussion
that led up to is is publicly available at
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices

*"*The fundamental aim of the Socialist Alliance is to contribute to the
construction of a mass socialist party that can educate, organise and
mobilise the Australian working class and other oppressed groups to replace
the power of the capitalists with popular power.

"To advance this aim we need to build a socialist organisation now and
deepen its connection to and authority among working people.

"We are open to uniting with all those prepared to join us in this aim, and
to be part of any political formation than can advance towards this aim.

"We recognise that any form socialist organisation takes today is just one
step in a much bigger and still unfolding process of building a party
capable of leading such a struggle.

"A party capable of leading real revolutionary struggle will have to unite
the real socialist leadership that develops in the course of the class
struggle".

Full http://www.socialist-alliance.org/towards-socialist-australia
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Re: [Marxism] The broad party question after Syriza

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> SA (Socialist Alternative), of which he is one of the central leaders, has
> pursued a course of trying to unite the Australian anti-capitalist left on
> a solid anti-capitalist basis, so it is not like they are simply
> sectarians.  Apart from the small RSP, no-one else has been interested in
> uniting with SA; they prefer the world of fake internationals and
> sect-building.  The SA-RSP fusion , meanwhile, seems to have been very
> successful...
>
> By contrast to SA,  SocAll (Socialist Alliance) has got weaker and weaker,
> politically and numerically.  The old DSP's 'broad party' strategy simply
> didn't work.
>

Well that's pretty much complete bollocks.

In 2012, months before Socialist Alternative said anything about unity,
Socialist Alliance wrote a favourable review of the Marxism conference and
proposed it be organized more broadly
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50677. After the fusion of the
remnant (less than 20) of the collapsing RSP into SAlt, and an apparent
general turn to unity from SAlt, later that year, Socialist Alliance
proposed a unity process https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/52746. We
initiated joint activities including a sizable meeting in Melbourne
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54152. We helped build the 2013 Marxism
conference, the largest to date. I helped with the children's program (a
good initiative) https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54070. We wrote a
substantial document on programmatic and organisational points
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/unity-dossier-—-5-draft-documents-prepared-socialist-alliance-unity-negotiations.
I was the main author of an 8000 word article on unity for their journal
http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no6-winter-2013/92-revolutionary-unity-to-meet-the-capitalist-crisis
.

SAlt wrote nothing substantial for this process and rejected a number of
proposals for joint meetings. They made no response at all to the
programmatic document or my article. Later in 2013 they abruptly called the
process off with the briefest of excuses, stopped talking about unity and
closed down the hatches on the brief opening up of their journal. The
Marxism conferences, while still big, have been successively smaller since
2013. It's not clear whether they were confused about what they wanted,
divided about what they wanted or were disappointed in the lack of another
quick swallowing up, but a principled and consistent approach to unity it
was certainly not. Some disingenuous and/or confused behaviour is detailed
here
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/unity-dossier-—-2-recent-correspondence
.

Socialist Alliance, while certainly modest and imperfect, has rebuilt in
recent years and is larger and more active than it was at the time of the
unprincipled split by the RSP in 2008. It never had delusions about being a
big broad party in the sense Phil means it, particularly in the DSP's
conception, which was always as a bridge to a bigger and broader
revolutionary organisation (see e.g. http://www.dsp.org.au/node/236). I
think there were errors in the execution of that perspective at least up to
a couple of years ago, but that's what the perspective was, not what Phil
thinks it was. In any case Socialist Alliance has for some years defined
itself as a revolutionary organisation, adopting a substantial programmatic
document in this regard last year
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/towards-socialist-australia. We're also
certainly open to a range of unity options including with SAlt if they get
or re-get serious and are for example in serious discussion with the
Sudanese Community Party in Australia, a significant force.

Phil might have appointed himself an off-shore cheer leader for SAlt but
regarding the Australian far left he has little idea of what he's talking
about.
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[Marxism] Enf orced

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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div style=visibility:hidden until Black was caught in fact Harry suspected 
his every move would be careMly watched until 
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Re: [Marxism] Terry Townsend is writing some crazy ass shit on FB

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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==


Personally I barely have time to follow Australian politics and try to pay some 
attention to Venezuela, Bolivia, Greece and Palestine. If I had more time and 
brain space I'd expend more on South East Asia and India before the Russian 
question which old Trots who are less unreconstructed than they think seem 
obsessed with; along with a continuing scratch to gangrene approach to politics.

Sent from my iPhone

 On 3 Jul 2014, at 8:27 am, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
 marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote:
 
 ==
 Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
 ==
 
 
 Townsend: You doubt Crimeans did not want to join Russia, whatever the flaws 
 of the ballot and the illusions they hold in Putin? Which side of the border 
 were the Russian troops on again? Becuase of Russia's past role, its right 
 for socialists to ignore or downplay the far-right nature of its government 
 and its brutal war on its own people?
 
 ---
 
 That's from the editor of Links, a magazine that aspires to be taken 
 seriously by the international left.
 
 YOU DOUBT CRIMEANS DID NOT WANT TO JOIN RUSSIA...
 
 Is this guy for real? Where does he spend his days. On RT.com?
 
 Back when the Greenleft comrades were telling the world that Stalin had the 
 last word on the national question, I tried to explain to them how fucked up 
 that was. I never expected it to have the disorienting effect that is 
 obviously now in play.
 
 Sad, really.
 
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