Re: [Marxism] Egypt yet again
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == He added: 'I am pretty sure that any freely and fairly elected government in Egypt will be a moderate one, but America is really pushing Egypt and pushing the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.' That could be, and ElBaradei may be Washington pre-positioning for a Mubarak replacement, but I'm not seeing much analysis as to why moderate democratic, that is, Washington friendly, democratic regimes haven't come into existence in the Middle East and North Africa. The reasons can be summed up in two names: Israel and Saudi Arabia. The first for some strange reason beyond that of normal realpolitik has been converted by the United States into an American colony implanted in that region, and therefore it and the U.S. will always be hostile to any Arab democratic-nationalist aspirations; the second is a post-feudal, theocratic-monarchical extended family tyranny - the ultimate tribal Arabs so beloved of neocons and U.S. foreign policy wonks - that parasitically draws life from petroleum rents, and will therefore also always be hostile to those same aspirations. Seen this way the U.S. approach is not really a case of ineptitude, but of no alternative to opening up a potentially lethal Pandora's' box. However, given that Washington's response is not a case of ineptitude, it's also possible to envision the possibility that the U.S. could take that risk and push for a democratic transition to a regime that would continue to collaborate with imperialism and its M.E. colony while containing the anti-imperialist and anti-Saudi tensions within itself, as in Iraq - but notably not as in Lebanon right now. Meanwhile, more power to the Arab revolution - may they go all the way! -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Why Tunisia's Revolution Is Islamist-Free
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Depends. One could argue that the workers were isolated in the Russian Revolution (please don't pull this discussion off in that direction, this is pure, but relevant IMO, example), requiring that they join forces with the growing peasant/ex-soldier revolt gathering strength. In the Tunisia case, note that the rebellion began in smaller towns in the countryside (Kasserine, etc) , and has picked up again in response to the new government. It is there that the Tunisian working class must seek its allies. It is at moment such as this that the liberal middle classes and the radicalized working class inevitably part ways. This should not be mistaken for 'isolation'. Isolation would be if the workers in the capitol stood alone (as in the Paris Commune). The middling types almost certainly seek an imperialist-backed solution, especially as many of these profit from the tourist trade. -Matt If the working class gets isolated, we are in trouble. 2011/1/18 DW dwalters...@gmail.com: The NYT piece posted by Louis notes that the middleclass has withdrawn some from the protests...replaced by more working class demonstrators. David Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Nader is losing it
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Looks like I have to withdraw my Bloomberg scenario - which BTW saw Bloomberg as a wedge vote splitter, not a winner. He'd just need to get the conservative redneck-hating urban yuppie vote to help Obama. That's exactly the kind of vote that would otherwise go to neo-liberal slickster Romney (a winner), making this the Bush/Cheney IV - Obama II Admin in 2012. But no: Michael Bloomberg rules out running for US president http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11979287 That leaves Scary Sarah as Bummer's only salvation, given the current field and political trajectory. Obamas' latest campaign - Tax Reform will under the Obama Republicans likely be a step in the direction of Stephen Forbes Flat Tax Utopia. As for Nader, I can see him losing it in any number of ways, on a variety of issues. Big deal. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Obama Isn't Spineless, He's Conservative
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The problem with negative criticism of Obama, is that the alternative is worse In that sense I agree with US Communist Party assessment FDR, was a reactionary but had a mass movement pushing him Obama hasn't - George Anthony Thanks Ralph. The reply above is not only formally logically incoherent - is Mitt Romney really worse than Obama? - but is incoherent, as a case of historical material cognitive dissonance, in that doesn't take into account the vastly changed circumstances of the U.S. ruling class over the last 80 years since FDR's time. The CP's assessment was formally objectively correct in its time - certain sectors of that ruling class did have some space for reform, though it still required timely intervention in a bloody world war to realize this space - but even more importantly these same sectors had their own self interest in enacting reform whose side benefits could be considered progressive - lowering the cost of housing for privileged workers for example. The grand example was the vast expansion of infrastructure into the West and South of the U.S. launched in the 1930's and I say this was the essence of New Deal reform (See The New Dealers, Jordan A. Schwartz, for evidence) - and who would say that the low cost electrification of working class neighborhoods is not progressive? On this basis New Deal reform could emerge and advance *independently*, whether mass pressure existed or not - and that pressure really didn't begin to make itself felt until midway into FDR's first term, and was met with repression and austerity in his second. It was the then objective correctness of the CP analysis that of course lent real traction to their policy up till the 1970's. But note from the above that the policy was *not* to pressure the bourgeoisie into liberal reform with independant mass mobilization, but to hand one's hat - to tail - the independent reform movement of a liberal bourgeois sector, and in this connection, to work against independent mass mobilization as a harmful impediment that would deny this liberal bourgeoisie the political power - through splitting the electoral vote - to implement reform. That is the exact opposite of George Anthony's analysis. No Pushing Allowed. If someone starts pushing, jump in from of them as a friend and get them to stop (i.e. channel into the DP). But today, as Obama so nakedly makes clear, there is no significant sector interested in reform addressing the profound structural problems of capitalism in the USA. A high speed rail project to nowhere running between San Francisco and LA (nowhere in that there are few places to go by rail at the termini - get a car! But why not just drive down there by car?) is no more intended to address these problem as are US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan intended to address the spatial manuver problems of U.S. imperialism. The Less Evil has done up and died. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Keep Them Doogies Rolling..
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == When it comes to the herding of Pwog-Dems, it seems Scary Sarah (who I had the pleasure to watch bag and gut a caribou on the North Alaska tundra on her TV reality show) has picked up a wingman on her left in the dirty work of Terrorizing the Pwogs: Ishmael Reed: What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/opinion/12reed.html?ref=opinion Take that liberals! You're not only holding a gun to the heads of the American people, but you've got a white hood on your head, too! From some of the comments, I am happy to report that Reed doesn't get some progressives. Keep movin', movin', movin', Though they're disapprovin', Keep them doggies movin' Rawhide! (Snap! Crack!) Don't try to understand 'em, Just rope and throw and grab 'em, Soon we'll be living high and wide. Boy my heart's calculatin' .. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Obama Isn't Spineless, He's Conservative
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == True, but what is to be noted is that Obama has been fairly artless in keeping the LibDemPwogs in the con game - that will be seen as a fault of his in the eyes of his sponsors. After weeks of chanting blackmailers and hostage takers at the Repubs, they wake up one morning to find themselves framed, holding the gun to the American people's head! Bwaahh-Ha-Ha! No wonder they blew a gasket. Now Obama has had to wheel in Ol' Billy Boy himself to feel their pain and otherwise herd the miscreants back onto the reservation (later to be converted into a concentration camp for their extermination under a more advanced reactionary regime). But if the aloof, affectless O'Bummer (apologies to the Irish) fails at this particular task while implementing the policies he was hired for, then we might see Scary Sarah offered the Repub nomination, Bloomberg run a right wing independent campaign (pitched as moderate revulsion at Scary Sarah, splitting the Repub side of the conservative vote), a weak Obama re-elected, and the LibDemPwogs herded baying and mooing in terror by a helicopter borne, tight black leather clad Palin, hunting rifle at the shoulder, Pwog-plinging hither and yon, just to make sure they stay put. And that's how it works, bioches... -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Flash: Royal convoy attacked as English students revolt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The hilarity of Charlie and Camille insisting on their night on the town at the cabaret in the midst of a major event in political economy. What the hell were they to expect! -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] A letter from a spurned lover
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Once again, should President Obama help elect in 2012 someone who can preside over a much more socialist administration and congress, he will in my opinion have done a decent, shrewd, and more extraordinary service to US citizens and the world than he might possibly otherwise. Just what on Earth is this person talking about? -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Krugman's latest
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response? What's even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. Methinks perhaps Team Obama hopes that, if they can only be good boys and girls and crawl obsequiously enough on their bellies, their Repub monopoly partners will reward them with a designated loser candidate in 2012 - Sarah Palin anyone? - along the lines of Bob Dole in 1996. At least that's what the Clinton script they've been reading from - and what a dull, mechanically delivered and wooden reading it has been - says. Well, that's the only sense I can make of it. Otherwise one must conclude that they're just frickin' idiots. Meanwhile enjoying the Pwog meltdown: the Dems really are a dead end, told you so. The leaders are doing all they can not to draw the proper lesson from this. They'll talk about anything rather than admit that Obama is and was always a political enemy and that they were had. Running Scary Sarah will also serve to keep them in line and dampen down any serious electoral challenge from the left. What a bunch of sheep. Things won't change until the old generation of leftist leaders are flushed down historys' proverbial toilet. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Report on French Strike
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From The Eighteenth Brumaire During 1848-51 French society, by an abbreviated revolutionary method, caught up with the studies and experiences which in a regular, so to speak, textbook course of development would have preceded the February Revolution, if the latter were to be more than a mere ruffling of the surface. Society seems now to have retreated to behind its starting point; in truth, it has first to create for itself the revolutionary point of departure – the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone modern revolution becomes serious. It remains to be seen if this is but a return to the starting point of the mid-1990's, or a new stage in the class struggle internationally. The conditions are quite different, even reversed: capitalism was in a hubris of triumph, and France but an isolated holdout before the neo-liberal juggernaut; the heroic, and more importantly, successful, resistance of its working class represented one of the first early cracks in that facade. Today capitalism is in public disgrace, and therefore the road is wide open to go beyond the events of the 90's. To not do so will make yesterdays' success today's failure. That wouldn't be the end of the world, because the truly urgent question today is: how are the working classes of other countries going to arrive at the French point of departure? Only we outside of France can create the revolutionary point of departure for French workers and for ourselves. Only then will modern revolution becomes serious, in France or any other country. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Cuba headed in the same direction as China and Vietnam?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Interestingly enough, the Poodle Across the Pond (the BBC) takes a somewhat different tack from the US reports, seemingly anxious to defend the socialist character of the state: Unlike the prospect of suddenly being left without work that faces many in the UK, as the present government's budget cuts loom, these cuts in Cuba are being undertaken after a long period of consultation with the trade unions and other organisations. Workers know what is going to happen to them. The programme is to be undertaken in stages, the effect on people's livelihoods is to be mitigated and it is important to understand that the announcement does not mean that all the 500,000 workers mentioned are to become unemployed. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11302430 -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Disgusting attack on BDS in the Nation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Interesting timing, just as the movement is meeting with its first real successes. Shows that decades of dealing with the lesser devil is finally catching up with The Nation in Obama-time, as it allows itself to be a platform for openly right wing and anti-progressive propaganda. Yes we may find out shortly who is on which side of the barricades. -Matt Message: 6 Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:16:40 -0400 From: Louis Proyect l...@panix.com Subject: [Marxism] Disgusting attack on BDS in the Nation To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: 4c1a7498.7060...@panix.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed http://www.thenation.com/article/against-boycott-and-divestment Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Pure idiocy from Katrina vanden Heuvel
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On this I have to generally agree with Carrol, even though the Pwogs are not trying to stop us, but to prevent a Pwog split away from the Dems, as always. That is something they _have_ been quite effective at ever since the CPUSA pioneered the tactic. However these days the vast majority have forgotten that they are following a Communist Party line, chuckle, chuckle. They are historical idiots, for certain. I'm convinced that 90% of the Pwogs will go down with the regime ship. We could pick up a few fragments here and there, but I wouldn't base a strategy on a big Pwog split that would break open the regime - of which they are an important pillar. -Matt Gary MacLennan wrote: Lou P: Reform agenda? Change agenda? Someone tell this idiot to wake up and smell the coffee. Gary0 In that context they need to start alarming us to the so-called danger from the Right and that is what this idiot is doing. I am just waiting for the person to come up to me and to argue that we need Obama to be elected to keep out the fascists like Palin. I promise you I will go off in a big way. In other words KvH is carrying out a _extremely_ intelligent (NOT idiotic) stratetgy (which has worked for a century more or less) of maintaining leftist attachment to the DP. Lou is being a bit dull in seeing her as an idiot. It never pays to underestimate one's enemy. Her position is idiotic if and ONLY IF you assume she has the same goals we have, but she doesn't. Her goal is to defeat us, and her strategy is one the effectiveness of which has been demonstrated over and over again. Lou can win a cheap rhetorical victory on this e-list by calling her an idiot. It must feel good. But this gross misunderstanding of basic premises is a block to effective leftist thought. Carrol Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Castro: Swastika has become Israel's banner
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Do you think A. Lieberman is a fascist politician, leading a fascist movement? He is part of the present government. My own view is there are a variety of fascisms, of which the Nazis were only one strain. Further, I think postwar fascism has been integrated and subordinated to the structures of US democratic imperialism. I don't adhere to the narrow Paxton view which requires that an actual fascist party be in power to qualify as fascist. That would be the requirement for a fascist government, overlooking the possibility that the _regime_ could be fascist, with the actual fascist party or faction on the sidelines as a minority regime supporter. That could easily fit the present Israeli case. But by the Paxton definition neither Franco Spain nor 1930's Japan were fascist. Do you agree? Neither are bourgeois democracy and fascism mutually exclusive. I think that what many define as fascism is actually the classical fascism of the 1920's-30's. But times have changed, and so do political movements. Fascism varies both over time and place. BTW, it is interesting and relevant to the Israeli-American case that the Nazi strategy was to convert Europe into its own racially hierarchialized continent sized settler state-empire. Just like the old 19th century USA. Except they failed. This is a clue to one of the historic functions of fascism as a political movement, government or regime whose program corresponds to the objective requirements of primary accumulation, what D. Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession and what Luxemberg saw as not merely as a prehistory of capitalism, but as coexistent, concurrent and vitally necessary to the existence of capitalist accumulation proper (on this one point I agree with Luxemberg without endorsing other views). Classical fascism was therefore the mode of fascism corresponding to the late phase of the colonial imperialism of Lenin's time. Pre-war Showa Japan had a similar project in Asia, which they implemented in Manchuria (See Japan's Total Empire, Louise Young). Who knows, had the Nazis succeeded, they would have dumped Hitler and mellowed in victory as the United States of Europe. Compared to the orthodox tradition, this is a richer and more nuanced view of fascism that weaves it into the normative structures of capitalism, rather than treat it - and herein lies I believe the Paxton-Berlot political agenda - as a purely exceptional and even accidental phenomenon in relation to capitalism and imperialism, in any case preventable with proper political regulation. -Matt While I share Castro's disgust at the Zionist entity's reprehensible crimes, he misses the point: Israel is a bourgeois democracy, as well as a colonial settler-state, and its state is founded on racism (rights for Jews that Arabs are denied). But to call it Nazi, i.e., fascist, is hardly a defensible Marxist position. Just because a democracy does evil things (e.g., the U.S.'s crimes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...), doesn't automatically make it fascist. DT Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Siezed and detained by Israel, US activist describes experiences
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The mistake is to assume that this a generalization about imperialism. It is no such thing - only a reference to a specific, and very peculiar, instance: Israel. The generalization concerns ideology and politics: Where is the center of Zionism - in Israel of the United States? I say it is in the U.S., and that U.S.-Israel form a political and ideological identity. Israel is the United States in the Middle East. Regardless of the road to the defeat of imperialism, Israel will never be defeated, the Zionist regime will never be on its last legs a la South Africa, so long as the above is true. To make the above not true, Zionism must be defeated in the USA, in its homeland, where it reflects the settler state legacy of the USA, and therefore everything retrograde and troglodyte about the USA in particular. That settler state legacy is actually in an important contradiction with the objective requirements for the continuation of US imperialism today, and the agony of the US-Israeli connection is a particular externalization and objectification of that contradiction. As this is a contradiction embedded in the very foundation of the USA, it is doubtful that US imperialism can overcome it, or break its special connection with Israel. -Matt On 6/4/2010 1:50 PM, Matthew Russo wrote: The bottom line: Israel will never be defeated in the Middle East so long as it is not defeated here in the U.S.A. The neocons are the intellectual and ideological core of the American Radical Right. I think the opposite is the case, not just in the Middle East but on a world scale. The idea that imperialism needs to be defeated in the imperialist countries first is a statement that imperialism will never be defeated, unless the last century or so is some weirdo bizarre aberration, that will be turned on its head. The ONLY hope for humanity is in the victory of the global South against the North. Joaqu?n Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sex and the City #2
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == But really -- surprise! -- the film is all about the clothes, the food, and the real estate And strategic product placement, let us never forget. Not just Gucci - McDonalds' too! My first intro to this series was while staying with a lady friend in Kobe Japan. Glitzy new Yawkers speaking in dubbed over Japanese, - they dub everything over into their own language, no subtitles - very amusing effect. It has always been fascinating as a particularly effective women-targeting Unreality Show. Gawking spectator to capital and all that. Ridiculous bourgeois lifestyles marketed to working class women. Hence the product placement per above, and the simpatico presentation of the inner lives of the main characters. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] 24-hour general strikes just don't work anymore
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == It is interesting to compare the situation in Europe with that of the U.S. in this regard. A coordinated 24 hr general strike on the level of a single big state like California would mark a big step forward beyond the fragmented provincial fight-back efforts we are currently seeing now in response to the assault on state workers, carried out on the basis of traditional business union turf cartelism that characterizes the U.S. trade unions. In other words, a coordinated response is what's on the agenda in the U.S. The difference with Europe is that a crisis originating in private capital was offloaded onto the public sector, and this latter is in turn being made to pay _along_ with the private sector workers. In Europe the crisis is directly one of state capital. Objectively on the agenda is the assumption of state power by the working class - obviously there is a big gap between objective reality and the reality of consciousness, as shown by the fact that workers and socialist parties are carrying out the European bourgeoisie's' program. Nevertheless an institutional dual power program is something that can immediately be put forward in the affected countries. Not so in the U.S. -Matt Asfar asIcan see, and correct meif I'm wrong, the onlyvalid strategy is to call for UNLIMITED general strikes and workers'councils. The problemisof course, that socialism within the working class is not yet seen as a realalternative to capitalism, as was the case in the 60s. Bureaucratic unionism is largely to blame for this state of affairs in the West generally. Theystill cling on to Social Democraticidealseven though it is clear that the whole labour movement is disintegrating together with Capitalism. Capitalism cannot sustain itself, and Social Democracy is taking the plunge with it. Dan, I believe you are correct about the limitations of a 24-hour general strike (of course, there are matters of degree; in the U.S. such an action would likely have a different immediate impact).I recently suggested on a Spanish (Spain) site about the impending call for the general strike in Italy that perhaps it would be more useful to take the occasion of these limited actions to begin organizing independent workers councils/committees, first, to discuss the impact of their actions and next, to work within unions to coordinate new actions within the general strike activities and eventually work toward having these councils/committees take the responsibility for determining the length of actions and maximizing effects on production and commerce (e.g., affecting transportation and communication, but responsibly supporting vital services--to the working class not to business). I wonder if there even is any immediate venue for this kind of progressive coordination of action that can have the effect of both organizing the working class and promoting a plan of action? Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Bush to Kirchner--the Best Way to Revitalize the Economy is through War
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yeah, I miss ol' Baby Doc Bush already. Better to have the enemy universally hated rather than grooving on the slicked-up version of the same. Too bad key sectors of the U.S. ruling class got hip to the damage he was doing and decided to alter the program -Matt And I thought Bush didn't know a thing about the economy and what kept business in business. I guess I have to withdraw my assertion that Bush is a complete idiot or rather modify it. Bush is a complete idiot who perfectly represents the needs of his class for belligerent idiocy. Short version, not just a moron, but a moron and a vicious motherfucker. Love child of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, inheriting his brains from his father, and his sunny disposition from his mother. Be governed accordingly. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The war on science continues
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Joaqu?n Bustelo wrote: I know how much people really REALLY hate Obama but making the sorts of claims that appear on the subject line will only convince those familiar with the subject that Marxists are not worth taking seriously. Yeah, I hate Obama that much. And I don't give a good god-damn who takes me seriously or not. This BP oil spill and Obama's response has me spitting mad. Hear, hear!! Who in their right mind wouldn't be hopping mad at all the BS being so rudely rubbed in our faces? Not least of all this lifeless automaton of a President!! Oil Boom School 101 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6ZN6r5-1QE IMF Sez Spanish reserve army of labor at 20% isn't doing the job: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/10149806.stm U.S. states budget squeeze (Obama does little but watch) + EU austerity + BP oil spill = Mrf*g c**ksrs!! -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Krugman on Corp and Repugs
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Krugman's political analysis is likely wrong. Putting aside the fact that ObamaBot the Tin Man has no inner FDR or soul of any kind, I'd wager that the U.S. and world ruling class - not necessarily congruent with the rhetorical run of the mill corporate interests - want to stick with the horse they know. For this the radical right rebels have a useful idiot role in dividing and disabling the Republican Party between now and 2012. Barring unforeseeable accidents. The wild card, as always, are the ELITE ruling class radical right, the American Zionist neocons. Racism isn't the only thing animating the Teabaggers; there is also their falling out with the neocons, whom they blame for the fiascos of the Bush years that gave them Obama. The neocons, meanwhile, must be disgruntled with Obama's foreign policy and retreat from overt unilateralism. For now they are out in the cold and at a crossroads - which way to turn? Between the two, the neocons are the more dangerous faction over the longer run. The Teabaggers are clowns. The neocons proved that they could grab executive state power in the Bush years, and can do it again. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Marx on Russia Today
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == If posted previously, apologies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptb6WSAt2zE Panitch vs. neo-classical Euro-muttonhead, a couple of Americans (on perhaps quasi-Keynesian neoliberal, the other libertarian, they weren't as bad as the Euro, though the libertarian shifts ground to politics and ideology when he runs out of answers). Leo gets cut off anytime he touches on Russia today. Watch the crown go wild on the utterance of the forbidden word: exploitation! Exploitation! Exploitation! Exploitation! -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Card Check: Labor's Charlie Brown Moment?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Robert Fitch has worked as a union organizer; he is the author of *Solidarity for Sale* (NY: Public Affairs, 2006). http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=178 I especially endorse Fitchs' characterization of U.S. trade unions as (I paraphrase) rent-seeking labor lord fiefdoms. It not accidentally has its analogue in the monopolistic political system, as these both have deep roots in and bear the marks of the peculiarities of U.S. capitalist development, rooted in its history as an agrarian settler state without a traditional post-feudal landlord class. As to what to do, it pretty obviously follows for Fitch's analysis. My own preference is to start with the Latino immigrant labor movement, some of them presently being screwed over by the SEIU. There is a reason they are in the far rights' gunsights. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Zinn: the historian who changed history
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Zinn and the New Left scholars writing in the wake of the civil rights movement--and under its influence--understood that central fact of race and racism in American history. This alone placed them light years ahead of Beard. And much better historical materialists ML Sorry, but the central fact of the American history that produced the characteristic American racist ideology was the quest for surplus profits from the North American lands in the face of a relative absence of labor power, a condition lasting until the 1890s. This fact brought forth, among other things, the institutionalization of chattel slavery along racially coded lines as imported from the Caribbean beginning in earnest from the 1670's onward. This would be a materialist approach to understanding the roots of American racism. While it is quite likely that the progressive historians did not grasp this, neither too does the subjectivist identity politics approach of the New Left school a la Zinn. Indeed I find the former still more more useful than the latter in grasping some of the key threads of that history. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] reset to 5.31.2008
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Thanks Louis and Joaquin for the quotes from the classics on this issue. I believe we can also use our own living brains to relate such principles to the actual situation in the U.S. and fairly quickly see through to the nub of the issue: 1) The Democrats, like the Republicans are not simply capitalist parties, but as Obama is demonstrating beyond all possible doubt, the former, like the later, is an utterly reactionary rightwing party, albeit more moderately rightwing, while the latter is the party of the radical right. In no way is the Democratic Party a liberal party. 2) It is reasonable to see intervention in bourgeois elections as a tactic only so long as this is not divorced from strategy. Middle class progressives and workers who vote for the Democrats - even inconsistently as independent swing voters, another generally reactionary category as they will often swing to the Republicans as well - are per #1 above themselves the rightwing of the masses of the workers whose revolutionary mobilization is the strategy. They are therefore the *last* sector of the working class or of radicalized petit bourgeois (this latter admittedly an oxymoron since progressive Democrats are by definition not radicalized) to be appealled to in pursuit of the strategy. It hence makes no tactical sense to open a conversation with this sector via the electoral system as presently constituted in the U.S., rather, the electoral system - as opposed to the particular rightwing parties mentioned in #1 - should be used to open a channel with the excluded sectors of the working class and radicalized petit bourgeois, of the former probably comprising a majority of the class. Note that this is a bit of an inversion of the old socialist adage that there was nothing progressive about working class non-participation in the electoral process. By the same token in the U.S. at least there is nothing necessarily progressive about working class participation in support of a completely reactionary party regime. This includes the growing oscilations between the two rightwing parties by this sector which though a measure of a growing crisis does not yet mark a qualitative break with the whole set of regressive policies and ideologies of the regime. This includes the Obama election. Reagan Democratic workers swung from Republicans to Democrats under the inpact of the economic crisis. The implication is that radicalized splinters could emerge from even this most conservative sector of the working class under conditions that would radically differ from the present, and in that case this conservative sector should be related to in a way analagous to that of the petit bourgeoise. But in the U.S. there will be a sector of the working class that will side with counterrevolution down to the bitter end. Don't kid yourselves here. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Barbarism of Slavery by Charles Sumner
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The free soil farmer-settlers (and never forget that these were *settlers* bent upon the eradication of the indigenous population) were not strong enough as a social force at the time of the American Revolution; on the contrary the strongest settler current was coming out of the Upland South (i.e. Virginia and North Carolina) at that time. Some of the northern states had not even abolished slavery yet. Their only competitor were the Yankee farmers of New England (where land was largely settled and owned relatively evenly, therefore rents were high), who had hardly begun their irruption into upstate New York in search of cheap rents. More to the point, the deleterious effect of slavery upon ground rent, due to its suppression of capital accumulation on the land in general outside of the accumulation of slaves, was hardly perceived at that time. But by the 1850's the Midwestern farmer-settlers had come to understand very well the negative effects of slavery upon the prospective market price of their land, much as a homeowner neighborhood association might perceive the effects of the opening of a house of prostitution in their midst. It was these Indian-hating, Negrophobic Midwesterners, whose idea of free soil also meant soil free of natives and Blacks, who, organized into federalized state militias were the social force that toppled slavery despite themselves. It certainly was not the abolitionists, to whom far too much attention has been paid. This is true even in their ostensible role as provocateurs, pushing the slaveholders to an overreaction they could have easily rationally avoided. For the absolute condition for the effectiveness of the abolitionist propaganda was the existence of the mass of slaves themselves as an objective fact, and nobody knew better than the slaveowners themselves the terror that would ensue should there be an uprising. It was the psychotic terror of the slaveowners themselves, so similar to the Islamophobic terror that seems to govern the U.S. ruling class today, that was the accidental trigger for the Civil War; it was the Midwestern settlers-in-arms that were their gravediggers, as their almost unbroken string of victories in the Western military theater shows. -Matt (Quote) Speech by Charles Sumner on the floor of the US Senate, June 4, 1860 _http://medicolegal.tripod.com/sumnerbarbarism.htm_ (http://medicolegal.tripod.com/sumnerbarbarism.htm) Comment This is good stuff although the question remains, why was slavery not abolished state wide in 1776? The quality of struggle by popular forces are not enough. The serf rebelled for a thousand years if not more. Something else must enter the equation for popular forces to achieve their cause and vision. We must minimally agree that the slaves as a class could not overthrow the system of slavery. If this is true, and it is, what other social forces were required to realize the vision of the first American Revolution? In 1861, the slave class of the South was not sufficient to overthrown the system of slavery. Why not the overthrow of slavery throughout America in 1787? WL. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Repubs take Kennedy's seat
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Any comments? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8469359.stm Turnout ranged from ~23% for the city of Boston to 50% in the suburbs, according to these: http://wbztv.com/local/scott.brown.martha.2.1434536.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31683.html (rightwing trying to spin this as a huge turnout - it was for them) Looks like likely Democrat voters stayed home in the one state that was the real life model for ObamaCare. I can only laugh...f**k you Dems, you get what you deserve. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Obama channels Beck
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The uses of listening to right-wing radio: Casually flipped on Glen Beck while driving, and Beck is raving on about whether Obama had joined his media-concocted 9-12 movement. Beck then replays his favorite passage form Obamas' war speech at West Point, where he calls on Americans to return to the spirit that possessed this country immediately after the 9-11 event, hence Beck's 9-12. Thank you Mr. Beck for pointing out the most reprehensible piece in the entire speech: the re-invocation of that wonderfully racist lynch-mob spirit that so pervaded the land at that time. Death to the Arabs! bellowed a fist-pumping African American man (yes he was!) strutting around downtown Oakland on the day after, and his was not an isolated sentiment. I must confess that at that moment I felt like walking up to the guy and, pretending to sympathize, shout Yeah! and after we get all them d**n Aaayrabs, we can go and string up all the godd**n n*s too!. Since I am still alive and well today, it is hopefully clear that prudence got the better of me on that splendid 9-12 day. Yes, Barak Obama, by all means let's return to the lovely spirit born on that glorious day. We all know what unfolded over the next few years under its spell. This, a call to return to the period before that which made his own Presidency possible, I submit, was the most dangerous passage in the whole of Obama's West Point speech. I fervently hope Obama ends up a one-term President. This time around it would be better if the Clinton Dems fell on their faces fair and square without an independent left spoiler to blame, so I was relieved to hear that Nader was going to run against Dodd for his Connecticut Senate seat (the same state whose Democrats kicked Joe Lieberman out, only to screw up the general election but, point made). For purely tactical reasons I'd prefer no 3rd party run from the left in 2012. Obama might pull a rabbit out of a hat between now and then, but the odds are running against, and I'd want to bet on those odds and see the Clintonites and their right-wing policies exposed as the real spoiler in the eyes of the pwogs (whom I might then start calling 'progressives' again). As far as the avenue of electoral politics goes, I'd be against 3rd party politics - I don't want any 3rd party, I want to build a mass movement with an electoral arm - so long as this avenue is available to us - aimed at the disruption and ultimate destruction of the existing 2-party regime. That is something that must be build from the ground up, targeting offices at all levels, municipal, state and congressional. My own preference is to take on the Pwog-Dems in their own safe districts, where they get predictably reelected year after year, like a permanent bureaucracy. After, the constituencies in those districts overlap with our own natural constituency: the multi-ethnic working class. So there is plenty to do in the next 8 years without having to worry about Presidents - until 2016. The standard cautions against electoralist opportunism are raised here. That is a risk to be dealt with, best by ensuring that the core of any mass movement related to this, not be organizationally determined by the demands of the electoral system. We have the whole rich experience of not only the old SDP's and Euro-CP's etc., to draw on here, but also the Brazilian WP and Chavez as well, as negative examples. For those fond of comparisons with the political crack-up in the antebellum period of the Civil War - I don't blame you for the comparisons - keep in mind it is not going to happen that way again. The relations of social power to the state institutions is radically different today, as I am sure we all realize. The crackup then could occur mostly within the electoral system because base and superstructure were still in close correspondence then - that fact was the source of the longterm historic strength of the USA in the 19th century. So then it made sense that an opposition, then of the Lincoln Republicans, would pursue a strategy aimed at seizing control of the Federal apparatus, particularly the Executive. (Worked great for Andrew Jackson in 1828). Our situation is very different. I see elections working into a strategy in the form of the creation of an enduring working class - colored wedge just big enough to trigger an explosive political crisis. Meanwhile it should be a multi-faceted platform to systematically expose the workings of the regime. The immediate obstacle will be the continuing mass illusion that you elect people into office to get things done - an illusion eagerly propagated by the Pwog-Dems (I hope this label goes up there with mugwumps, hunkerers, fire-eaters, doughfaces and other choice phrases) - after all, that's
[Marxism] Irony Alert
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yes, the right-wingers are openly gloating now (from Alternet): - There's a big fat irony here: *Obama's supporters are furious at him because he finally kept one of his promises (Afghan war).* So much for the theory that progressives are smart. ;) - Obama's treachery will lead to new discussions about the need for a 3rd party to the left of the DP. My guess is that many of the people involved in the discussions will be disillusioned Democrats. The revolt in liberal ranks by Jane Hamsher, Garry Wills and Michael Moore is an expression of important trends that can lead somewhere down the road. Despite the fact that such people do not recite chapter and verse of the Grundrisse is no reason to turn up our noses at them. I have my doubts about the Pwogdems (expressed before), but of course the few splitters should be welcomed - to a reminder of their own class character, by spelling out that we do not favor yet another middle-class 3rd party effort. See my previous Obama channels Beck for more details. And Moore will be expected to open his ample wallet as need be. To complaints from that quarter that a working class approach would be too radical, I'd say that never have the prospects for the standard middle-class approach been so dim, and that of the other been so ripe. And they will only get riper, no matter how the present economic crisis is surmounted for the time being. Because this isn't 1948 - it is more like 1876 in reverse (for the bourgeoisie). -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Crisis of Capitalism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Short version, we are barely past the beginning of this crisis. We have barely realized, in terms of consciousness and in loss of value, the depth of the overproduction in ships, aluminum, steel, copper, clothing, aircraft that afflicts capitalism. We are in the early stages of this. Without being overly optimistic, I'm in general agreement with A's perspective, which is not reprinted here. The stuff about whether this is a crisis in, of or whatever is purely semantical to me - we all agree that the economy we are talking about is capitalist, and that it has experienced some kind of at least conjunctural crisis. Does this crisis present an opening for the working class (that's us)? Yes! Will we all walk through it? Don't know yet, keep your eyes wide open! The part that is reprinted above is the objective part of the crisis that I don't have enough info on to judge its depth and breadth. One factor is that since the crises of the 1970's I think the imperialist bourgeoisie have learned to live with a certain level of chronic overproduction, especially after even the Volcker Shock revealed how deep they would have to go, and the swaggering Reaganites didn't have the huevos for a full frontal on the U.S. working class, opting instead for their timid salami slicing approach, whining and bulling the Japanese, ripping off the Latins, etc.. Cowards, turned out Ms. Thatcher was wearing the family jewels in that crowd. The unexpected (for them) dissolution of the Soviet Union and the more expected opening of China saved them from that task for a certain historical period that we all just lived through. Alongside the usual orgy of rentier looting, rather than increase the organic composition of capital at the same wage rate in the U.S., they deployed that same old c/v ratio at drastically reduced wages in China. Yes, there was the computer revolution, I know, I work in the industry, but I think this was deployed to increase the turnover time of commodity and money capital, rather than increase the organic composition of capital in production via robotization (which is possible), either here or in China. Rather like the railroad in the 19th century. Who needs robots when there are millions of Chinese peasants to turn into rabotny? Anyway, that's my rough cut of 30 years of capitalist economic history. But here we are again, 30 years later. Full frontal assault or not? Depends on whether overproduction has risen beyond that certain tolerable level or not (a level in itself which is relative, relative to a lot of other variables, such as turnover time mentioned above). And here is some evidence from a real thin cracker crust D.C., Hayek and Malthus - quoting reactionary, ole tobaccy chewin' Tyler Cowen of Fairfax, economics prof. at George Mason U. in Virginia: Dangers of an overheated China http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/business/economy/29view.html?ref=global-home That's one shoe. The other that needs to drop awaits (probably) Obama's next State of the Union speech, where he may or may not announce another StimPak as part of his economic program. All I'm hearing is rumors so far, but the Krugman/Reich crowd is waxing almost hysteric over Larry Summers supposed opposition to another round - which wouldn't surprise me coming from that POS. If the Clintonite Bank Democrat O-bummer opts for austerity, then we are looking at an extended period of massive unemployment not seen in, well, probably in living memory. In that case, all bets on surmounting the crisis in, of, for, at capitalism are off! And I can't see how the Great China Overproduction export machine wouldn't blow a gasket under those conditions. As for Dubai, don't know if this is another scam or a real problem (I guess with commercial and residential RE?). And on that same front here in the U.S. looks like they are trying their pathetic best to head off another surge in defaults: U.S. Will Push Mortgage Firms to Reduce More Loan Payments http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/business/economy/29modify.html?ref=global Even as lenders have in recent months accelerated the pace at which they are reducing mortgage payments for borrowers, a vast majority of loans modified through the program remain in a trial stage lasting up to five months, and only a tiny fraction have been made permanent. Mr. Barr said the government would try to use shame as a corrective... Ha, Ha, shame yeah right. Even the immediate financial phase of the crisis is not over, it seems. Oh, and food stamps are all the vogue: Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/28/us/20091128-foodstamps.html Check out the multimedia map. Oh the stigmas' gone, gone away for good, oh the STIGMA'S gone... (apologies
Re: [Marxism] theses on the economic crisis
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == OK, let me take a swing at this. Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic, because the old adage politics makes strange bedfellows IS true, as in that the twists and turns of crisis and its resolution are more convoluted that we ever think. I think what is described below is a crisis of the working class, its organization, consciousness etc. That's old news, and well predates the present _capitalist crisis_ (reworded to avoid the semantical confusion). As one historical example - and warning, it is ONLY by way of example, the intent is not to delve into a period-specific discussion cast in terms of dead terminology from a now-dead era: At the time of the first WW, the large majority of workers of Europe and the U.S. believed in fighting and dying for their own imperialism, because they believed that the crisis was the encroachment of the others on their own turf. Very very few listened to the Zimmerwald Left. They listened to the Dobbs/Limbaugh/Beck's of their time. Yet this did not prevent the Russian Revolution from opening up a whole era of revolutions of all sorts, an era that lasted until the 1980's. So go figure. It is impossible to project the dull sameness of yesterday and today in the face of a potentially deep crisis of what is after all the dominant system. And I listen to Dobbs/Beck (not Limbaugh, what a Repug hack bore); my fav is Michael Wiener, or Winer, or whatever, aka Savage, based right here in SF. And I read Capital, and maybe so does Wiener for all I know. Hey, whatever happened to him, he's been off the air for some time? BTW, you forget that types like Dobbs also piss off a lot of Latinos, and politically speaking I'm a lot more interested in this sector of the U.S. working class, especially in connection with the immigration question. It is almost analogous to the Slave Question before the Civil War, because it involves a racially despised super-exploited population stripped of civil rights, in connection with a supposedly hard and fast territorial question, Mexico and the border. (in fact it was the original war with Mexico that created the present situation, that also lit the fuse for the actual Civil War, when it came time to consider the status of the California territory as either free or slave) When, like the Zimmerwald Left, I'm looking for cracks of light in the dull pall of unconsciousness that is a lot of the U.S. working class, I look there. -Matt Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:19:29 -0800 From: Rakesh Bhandari bhand...@berkeley.edu Subject: Re: [Marxism] theses on the economic crisis Cc: marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: 4b120461.7030...@berkeley.edu Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed At this point, I would say that those who say that this is a crisis of the deregulation of the banking sector alone clearly outnumber who think that this crisis is also rooted in the structures of capitalism itself. I would also say that those who say this crisis stems from overly loose monetary policy or the Greenspan put, plus the GSE's pushing loans to underqualified minorities in an attempt to realize Clinton/Bush's ownership outnumber those who think this crisis has something to do with capitalism itself by a number also of 90 to 10. In other words, there are a lot more people listening to Dobbs/Limbaugh/Beck than reading Marx. Americans don't read anyway. And those who think the financial crisis originates in China's anti capitalist mercantilist policy of oversaving clearly outnumber the critics of capitalism who would argue the increasingly unequal distribution of income brought about by capitalist competition is the root cause of the crisis (oversaving by the rich that did not make sense to invest given stagnant workers' income and was thrown into a global casino). Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Chinese Revolution (90 years ago)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sigh, I only wish I could somehow parse the real meaning out of WL's intriguing oracular mysteries. For ex: Then there is Obama. He is the best thing to happen in America in 30 years. Obama as President means class comes to the fore. Now I certainly think that the 2008 election results were a sharp expression of a desire for real reform of the US status quo on the part of masses of voters. But 30 years takes us back to...Jimmy Carter's time. Don't recall any really better things happening at that time, in fact we were on the cusp of a lot of really bad things that were just about to happen. And does class comes to the fore because the President is black and we are now all somehow post-racial? I dunno about that...given the economic situation I think class will come to the fore no matter what. The breathtaking absence of even a twitch of reformist impulse in the Obama crew usefully underlines this with the fact of the death of American Progressivism. But will the Obama Betrayal be the decisive catalyst? I think it is speeding things up, and that is good, but is not decisive. Putting aside the attempts at theory, perhaps the one thing that might have some legs here is the perspective that substantial sectors of the U.S. proletariat are being cast outside the traditional relations of production as we've historically known them for the first time. Using Anthony B's analysis, the Black Panthers writ large. This issue is not yet decided, but they don't have much more time - if they think they can sit around with their thumb up their asses doing nothing for years with 20% real unemployment, like the U.S. bourgeoisie seems to think they can - they're insane. -Matt Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Zizek on the Berlin Wall
It is really telling to compare the PRC's capitalist development with that of the U.S. from the latter 19th century - early 20th century, a meme often found in the bourgeois press. On the basis of a relativity high wage structure - an early spur to mechanization - U.S manufacturing was primarily oriented towards development of the internal market: agriculture and mineral extraction via the expansion of the railroads and early mechanization of agriculture, the products of these latter then exported on the world market. It was only later in this period that manufactured goods themselves became significant export items. (One of my concrete tasks is to find exact numbers to confirm this). The major point is that this was overwhelmingly an independent development. There was of course always foreign investment, but this was a secondary and non-determinant component. And when the United States accumulated monetary reserves on these exports, these were in a gold standard currency, not today's Chinese fiat pile. The PRC path could not be more different. It is also telling that leftist or nationalist Chinese observers tend to concur with the dependent development view of China: The neo-Maoist Minqi Li (The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy - because neither China nor anywhere else will rise as a successor hegemonic center, and I share his long run optimism), Henry Liu (yeah, I know, I know) or the guy I posted from NLR, Ho-fung Hung (China: Americas' Head Servant?). -Matt -- Yes, I agree-- it's all historical, but the reference Zizek makes is specifically to China. I agree also that China is not a successor state to the US in the configuration of advanced capitalism. It, China's new model capitalism, is based on the rather old cheap labor model, more representative of capitalism in the 19th century, before the massive application of machine power to production in the 2nd half of that century. And agriculture is conducted at a level of productivity far below that of capitalism. Doesn't mean every bourgeois doesn't drool over the prospects of having a police state, but it does mean, IMO, China is facing tremendous social upheaval and class struggle. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Zizek on the Berlin Wall
[Hope the CR formatting doesn't get too hosed] With his clown suit off. It is an appropriate warning about the political direction taken by disillusion with capitalism and democracy in E. Europe. The excerpt below raises the most interesting questions: This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself. But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment? Actually there has never been any natural connection between modern democracy and capitalism. That illusion comes from 19th century Britain, where it was the capitalist, free trade Liberals, the lineal descendants of the 18th century Whig Dissident tradition, excluded from the spoils of Empire on religious grounds, crowded into the purely Little England capitalist industrial enterprises in order to make their way in the world, who also led the drive for extension of the suffrage. The great counter-example is none other than the homeland of democracy, itself, the United States before the Civil War, where the democracy under the figurehead of Andrew Jackson possessed a distinctly anticapitalist edge - and not uncoincidentially, in a seemingly curious role reversal, an anti-New England Yankee edge as well - the cousins of those same English Dissidents. In those days, to be called a capitalist was to have an insult hurled at one, to be considered someone who fed at the public trough for private gain. Hence the present case of the PRC is not really mysterious at all, if we hold to the perspective established after the Russian Revolution that we still very much live in the transition from capitalism to - well, it used to be called socialism, but by any other name it will still be the same rose in my eyes if we succeed in avoiding a civilizational catastrophe and build on relatively intact forces of production. In this context the PRC remains a transitional state and social formation even as the mode of production becomes more coherently capitalist (of a rather odd developmental type, if you compare it to the U.S. from the Civil War to the 1920's). It is this that Putin thinks of when he regrets the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.: that a Soviet Union intact would have been a far better environment for the restoration of the capitalist mode of production, than the farcical Made in U.S.A. mess he inherited - really, a shift from the incoherent forms of production, with elements part capitalist, part socialist without either being dominant, that characterized the U.S.S.R. in the past - no wonder it didn't work. In short, PRC type formations ARE the optimal way forward for the capitalist mode of production today and in the future - not uncoicidentially the leading imperialist countries, especially the U.S.A. and Britain, are trodding down the PRC path in their own way in a kind of bureaucratic state monopoly capitalism with Anglo characteristics (as the CCP leadership would tutor to them), including an evacuation of the real effectivity of the private property form otherwise misnomered neoliberal privitization - the present health care process in the U.S.A. being an excellent example. And in the case of the U.S.A. there is a hoary old tradition of state intervention to fall back on, dating back to the very foundation of the Federal Republic, with its now antediluvian, transitional (unbeknown to its founders) project for the creation of a synthetic state bourgeoisie out of the swarming, relatively undifferentiated mass of petit bourgeois dirt farmers, barter merchants, small proprietor shop manufacturers, land speculators, swindler - and huckster - settlers of every stripe - a sack of potatoes of truly continental scale. The lives of Jackson, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, and John C. Calhoun (before this latter shifted to being the mouthpiece of the Slaveocracy in the 1830's) were the leading avatars of this process, and the Democratic Party they founded the chosen vehicle. A state and social formation that turned out to be transitional _to_ capitalism - the highest, final and 'most perfected' of all from the early modern epoch that opened with the triumph of the Dutch Revolt and the English Revolution in the 1640's - somehow managed to survive into the new transitional epoch. How these arbitrary juxtaposed strata, as if suddenly thrown together by an earthquake from sedimentary layers formed in distinctly different historical conditions, will interact will be very interesting to watch and, should there be some significant slippage, to hopefully act in as well. In this historical context the radical right reaction makes perfect sense, just as that of classical
[Marxism] China: America's Head Servant?
The NLR makes another connection to the real world. -Matt http://www.newleftreview.org/A2809 Free, should be accessible. Beijing is well aware that further accumulation of foreign reserves is counterproductive, since it would increase the risk associated with the assets China already holds or else induce a shift to ever riskier ones. The government is also very aware of the need to reduce the country’s export dependence and stimulate the growth of domestic demand by increasing the working classes’ disposable income. Such a redirection of priorities has to involve moving resources and policy preferences away from the coastal cities to the rural hinterland, where protracted social marginalization and underconsumption have left ample room for improvement. But the vested interests that have taken root over several decades of export-led development make this a daunting task. Officials and entrepreneurs from the coastal provinces, who have become a powerful group capable of shaping the formation and implementation of central government policies, are so far adamant in their resistance to any such reorientation. This dominant faction of China’s elite, as exporters and creditors to the world economy, has established a symbiotic relation with the American ruling class, which has striven to maintain its domestic hegemony by securing the living standards of us citizens, as consumers and debtors to the world. Despite occasional squabbles, the two elite groups on either side of the Pacific share an interest in perpetuating their respective domestic status quos, as well as the current imbalance in the global economy. Unless there is a fundamental political realignment that shifts the balance of power from the coastal urban elite to forces that represent rural grassroots interests, China is likely to continue leading other Asian exporters in diligently serving—and being held hostage by—the us. The Anglo-Saxon establishment has recently become more respectful towards its Asian partners, inviting China to become a ‘stakeholder’ in a ‘ChiAmerican’ global order, or ‘g2’. What they mean is that China should not rock the boat, but should continue to help maintain American economic dominance (in return, perhaps, for more consideration of Beijing’s concerns over Tibet and Taiwan). This would enable Washington to buy precious time to secure its command over emergent sectors of the world economy through debt-financed government investment in green technology and other innovations, and hence remake its ailing supremacy into a green hegemony. This seems to be exactly what the Obama administration is betting on as its long-term response to the global crisis and declining American power. If China were to re-orient its developmental model and achieve greater balance between domestic consumption and exports, it could not only free itself from dependence on the collapsing us consumer market and addiction to risky us debt, but also benefit manufacturers in other Asian economies that are equally eager to escape these dangers. More importantly, if other emerging economies were to pursue a similar re-orientation and South–South trade were to deepen, then they could become one another’s consumers, ushering in a new age of autonomous and equitable growth in the global South. Until that happens, however, a recentring of global capitalism from West to East and from North to South in the aftermath of the global crisis remains little more than wishful thinking. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Economists Seek to Fix a Defect in Dat a That Overstates the Nation’s Vigor (NYT)
Pertains to an earlier discussion of post 2000 productivity growth in the US - Matt: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/economy/09econ.html?ref=business A widening gap between data and reality is distorting the government’s picture of the country’s economic health, overstating growth and productivity in ways that could affect the political debate on issues like trade, wages and job creation. The fundamental shortcoming is in the way imports are accounted for. A carburetor bought for $50 in China as a component of an American-made car, for example, more often than not shows up in the statistics as if it were the American-made version valued at, say, $100. The failure to distinguish adequately between what is made in America and what is made abroad falsely inflates the gross domestic producthttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/gross_domestic_product/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier, which sums up all value added within the country. American workers lose their jobs when carburetors they once made are imported instead. The federal data notices the decline in employment but fails to revalue the carburetors or even pinpoint that they are foreign-made. Because it seems as if $100 carburetors are being produced but fewer workers are needed to do so, productivity falsely rises — in the national statistics. That may help to explain why the recovery from the 2001 recessionhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/recession_and_depression/index.html?inline=nyt-classifierwas a jobless one for many months and why the recovery from this recession is likely to generate few jobs for many months. On another front, many argue that labor productivity is rising faster than the pay of workers who made the greater productivity possible. That argument would be watered down if more accurate data showed that productivity had been overstated. “What we are measuring as productivity gains may in fact be changes in trade,” said William Alterman, assistant commissioner for international prices at the Bureau of Labor Statisticshttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/bureau_of_labor_statistics/index.html?inline=nyt-org. The problem is particularly acute in manufacturing. Imported components constitute an ever greater share of the computers, autos, appliances and other finished merchandise that roll off assembly lines in the United States — and an ever greater share of all of the nation’s imports. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Interesting Article on Dollar Collapse in WSJ
While this scenario may come to pass, such a move would not be risk free by a long shot. Should the USD fall and remain below historic support levels - I think 79 on the JPY - then the so-called reserve currency status of the USD would come under further stress as the world market moves into uncharted waters at a time when quite a few maps are lacking in the crisis currently being traversed. In particular every commodity still exclusively denominated in USD would take a devaluation hit, or else USD prices must rise - but this latter is not an automatic given. So Washington's Persian Gulf satrapies, for example, would take a hit. I suppose these latter could be filed under 7) we get the currency traders, the funds with huge dollar resources, resources estimated by the Financial Times to vastly exceed the combined dollar reserves of Asian and European central bankers... as the petro trade is another rent-extraction racket, no different in essence from the exactions of the paper exchange markets. -Matt [Marxism] Interesting Article on Dollar Collapse in WSJ To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: 32fcf7b198724e6490ab231a59190...@dmsthinkpad Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1; reply-type=original Today's WSJ has this front page story: US Stands By as Dollar Falls The dollar fell to a 14 month low against other currencies Thursday, intensifying a trend that the Obama administration has publicly suggested it opposes-- but which it appears prepared to tolerate quietly. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Polanski
That it is a class issue does warrant some Marxist attention, but beyond that, yes, let's move on. That Polanski should be tossed in the slammer as a sterling example to all and sundry _precisely_ because he is a member of the ruling liberal intelligentsia is the relevant principle in play here. -Matt I've been reading this list on and off for a while now and have to say that I can't believe the amount of bandwidth that has been wasted discussing Roman Polanski. Why aren't you all discussing McKenzie Phillip's incestuous relationship with her father, too? I personally could care less what happens to Polanski since the question of innocence or guilt has already been answered by Polanski himself. His credentials do not excuse him from prosecution, nor should he be dealt with differently in terms of sentencing because of his Hollywood profile. My point is, what the hell does this have to do with Marxism beyond a passing interest? It certainly doesn't deserve the three-five days of debate among supposed Marxists that has already occurred on this list. -ron jacobs YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] 15.1 Million unemployed in US!!,
You raise a good question. The problem is twofold: 1) the U.S. Left is largely petit-bourgeois and divorced from the working class (and its rising unemployment) and therefore gravitates to the Democratic Party as its natural political home, because 2) there is no independent - or even D.P.-dependent - mass working class movement in response to the economic crisis as of yet, and therefore no alternative force for middle class leftists to gravitate towards. The two conditions dialectically reinforce one another. Glum comparisons with conditions in the 1930's are in order, but don't overlook a positive flip-side of the absence of a substantial working class-oriented Left: the absence also of an organization such as the C.P. that was positioned to steer the working class movement back into the D.P., as well as the absence of the shining example of a bold bourgeois reformer to steer them towards: just compare the courageous FDR to the pathetically weak Obama. BTW, this latter difference is _not_ the product of an FDR urgently moving to head off the threat of an independent working class movement, whereas Obama does not face such an urgency; rather, it reflects the profound change in the resources (and subsequently historical character) of the U.S. ruling class that granted FDR tremendous room for maneuver - the U.S. ruling class had a lot of reserves as the stalinist line went in the old days. Indeed the U.S. bourgeoisie was the _only_ major ruling class capable of what we'd call progressive reform in what was otherwise a deeply reactionary decade everywhere else, including in Stalin's Soviet Union. OTOH Obama is incapable of enacting even reforms that would clearly benefit large sectors of the U.S. bourgeoisie such as lowering health care costs, for current example, a reform that would advance the competitive position of U.S. capital in the world market. FDR smashed the J.P. Morgan interest; Obama further strengthens Goldman Sachs and indeed the whole finance cartel. This is not because Obama does not face the threat of an independent working class movement, but because the finance cartel is absolutely essential to the maintenance of the outsized U.S. military apparatus and therefore the global geopolitical position of the U.S. The U.S. relies on this, rather than a mighty industrial base as it did in FDR's time. So do not expect a move towards reform even in the face of the emergence of the working class threat. Instead, expect just the opposite: intensified reaction. -Matt YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] last night's town hall meeting
My own view is that the health care reform battle is toast, put a fork in it. Reform here is an even better government organized and subsidized health industry cartel with a lot of prime low risk customers mandated to buy their product., in exchange for some obvious regulatory reforms concerning well-known insurance loopholes. Nothing structurally different here, just a tighter, richer boondoggle. Time to start looking down the road to the next battle, as immigration reform is rumored to be next on the Democrats agenda. Here left liberal pwogs appear to have already surrendered the high ground, pre-capitulating on illegal aliens during the health care thing. But the hydra-headed far right wackos might just be playing with fire here, since the immigrant rights movement proved itself the only mass movement alive in the U.S.A in our time a few years back, in reaction to a few hysterical overweight, middle-aged American white guys from Pennsylvania calling themselves Minutemen - they probably aren't even up for that minuscule timespan without a dose of Viagra - coming down to the Arizona border to protect it. This was about the time the Iraq War started to go sour, and the the far right hydrahead bleaters were anxious to change the subject and went gunning for a new target. After hundreds of thousands mobilized for immigrant rights in cities such as Dallas, which probably hasn't seen a mass demonstration on its streets since the Civil War, you'll notice that those big, brave Minutemen kinda shriveled up and went 'poof'. Don't want to mobilize the 'wrong' people, for crying out loud! For this reason I look forward to this next battle, besides which we can really smack the liberals around on this without even the pretense of agreement on 'reform'. The key will be that the far right continue the idiocy of depicting whatever Obama does as communist, including on this issue. Otherwise, sad to say, but given the actual course of Reagan's 6th term, one of the best things that could come out of the Obama experience would be if one of the right wing's wacko minions were to (heaven forbid, of course) actually assassinate Obama.The righteous anger they would have unleashed upon themselves would be richly deserved. -Matt No doubt. Worst mistake ever made after the Civil War was allowing South Carolina back into the union as a state, rather than maintaining the military occupation. The frenzy whipped up by the money- backed white religious right is truly remarkable in its racism, including threats to hunt Obama made as jokes by candidates running for office. Hey, I thought threats against the president, even as jokes, were a federal offense. Somebody needs to tell the FBI that Obama is president, no matter what the cross-dressing ghost of J. Edgar Hoover thinks. Three things enable this-- the fear and panic of the white property-holders bailing furiously to stay afloat in their little dinghys, the passivity of the working class, AND the Obama administrations's determination to follow through on Bush's policies to maintain that passivity. Most recently, the Obama administration will institute the E-verify program that requires companies and contactors doing work for the Feds to submit names and IDs of employees for verification of legal residency status. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
