Andrew's latest play is a quote from Antonio Gramsci (the quote and my comments are next below). Still nothing from Lenin; no evidence yet for Andrew's assertions that "Lenin's key to success was outright
rejection and repudiation of the received wisdom from the prior 50 years
of Marxist theory combined with a novel restatement of principles."
In a high-minded civil debate, one is supposed to actually make one's points--if more or less pointedly, and maybe harshly at times-rather than claim that they are self-evident and require no defense. [this was a response to fkalosar101's 11:11pm 10/15 message, dg]
The Bolshevik revolution is based more on ideology than actual events (therefore, at the end of the day, we really don’t need to know any more than we know already). It’s a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was the book of the bourgeoisie, more than of the proletariat. It was the crucial proof needed to show that, in Russia, there had to be a bourgeoisie, there had to be a capitalist era, there had to be a Western-style of progression, before the proletariat could even think about making a comeback, about their class demands, about revolution. Events overcame ideology. Events have blown out of the water all critical notions which stated Russia would have to develop according to the laws of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks renounce Karl Marx and they assert, through their clear statement of action, through what they have achieved, that the laws of historical materialism are not as set in stone, as one may think, or one may have thought previously.
The paragraph above was part of a brief reaction to news of the Bolshevik revolution written (published December 1917) by young 26-year old socialist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, a couple years after interrupting his graduate work at the University of Turin and increasingly devoting himself to the revolutionary movement (please read the short article). It is obvious that Gramsci had a lot to learn about Marxism and the revolutionary socialist movement. We all always need to 'live and learn.'
Gramsci left Italy in spring of 1922 and went to Moscow (along with two other PCI members) to represent the Communist Party of Italy with the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Gramsci spent the next year-and-a-half in (what became in December 1922) the USSR. Much of his time was spent convalescing from serious health problems but he also was deepening his understanding of Marxism. In October 1922 Gramsci had the opportunity to meet and discuss revolutionary socialism and Italy's situation with Lenin. At the end of 1923 Gramsci began again to participate directly in PCI internal political life (at first from outside Italy across the northern border since Mussolini was 'in power'). Gramsci counterposed Lenin's Marxism to the ultraleft sectarianism of the PCI's founding leader, Amadeo Bordiga. Since the founding of the PCI in January 1921 Bordiga had insisted that PCI members could not participate with socialists and liberals in united fronts against the Fascists. Gramsci was able to replace Bordiga in central leadership of the PCI in August 1924 but he was arrested and imprisoned in November 1926 and, as you certainly know, spent practically the rest of his life as a prisoner of the Fascist regime (until his death in 1937).
On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 6:12 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >
I am not going to play this childish game with you. You know exactly
what the point is that I am making and you want to play what amounts to
an inbred power game.
No need to play games, Andrew. You could just admit that you have no evidence for your assertions.
I
was surprised that you would 'make a point' that amounts to common U.S.
high school history level misrepresentations of Lenin and the Bolshevik
revolution.
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >> ...Remember, (despite what Lars Lih claims)
Lenin's key to success was outright rejection and repudiation of the
received wisdom from the prior 50 years of Marxist theory combined with a
novel restatement of principles.
Andrew, you did not provide one quote from Lenin,
one reference to anything from Lenin's writings or speeches, where
Lenin outright "rejected and repudiated" any major point of Marxist
wisdom. Where can i find Lenin's "novel restatement of principles"?
Andrew, would you please list some of these major points of Marxist wisdom which Lenin 'outright rejected and repudiated'?
The received Marxist wisdom in 1917 at the time of the Russian revolution that Lenin acted contrary to: 1-Socialist revolution could not take place anywhere besides an advanced capitalist country such as Germany 2-Socialist revolution could only take place following a bourgeois democratic revolution 3-From an interview with Lukacs: It
was Lenin who, for the first time since Marx, seriously raised the
significance of the subjective factors in revolution. His definition of a
revolutionary situation, when the ruling classes are no longer able to
govern in the old sense, and the oppressed classes are no longer willing
to live in the old way, is generally known. When his followers adopted
this concept, some made a ‘slight’ difference in interpretation, saying
that ‘not to want to live in the old way’ meant for them that economic
development is automatically turning people into revolutionaries. Lenin
knew that the problem of ‘not wanting to live in the old way’ has strong
dialectical implications and is a manifold tendency of society. 4-Also
consider the numerous criticisms that Kautsky raised (ones I do not
agree with but that is besides the point). The whole Menshevik/West
European Social Democratic indictment of the Bolshevik revolution, made
manifest in the USA by the Socialist Party of America and later Michael
Harrington, claimed a fundamental break with Marx's theory had occurred
when the Bolsheviks took power.
On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 9:43 PM Dayne Goodwin via groups.io <daynegoodwin=gmail.com@groups.io> wrote: > > On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >> >>
...Remember, (despite what Lars Lih claims) Lenin's key to success was
outright rejection and repudiation of the received wisdom from the prior
50 years of Marxist theory combined with a novel restatement of
principles. You need to make a similar jump into the void in order to
understand the current situation. > > Andrew, would you please list some of these major points of Marxist wisdom which Lenin 'outright rejected and repudiated'? > > > On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >> >>
Your analysis is to pull out something about Germany from 85+ years ago
as if that can be mechanically imposed upon the 21st century? Also,
Germany was not a settler-colonial society and Weimar was a
parliamentary system as opposed to a Federalist system. C'mon Louis, de
omnibus dubitandum. Ford's class analysis is there, it is Marxist, and
you just don't want to see it. Remember, (despite what Lars Lih claims)
Lenin's key to success was outright rejection and repudiation of the
received wisdom from the prior 50 years of Marxist theory combined with a
novel restatement of principles. You need to make a similar jump into
the void in order to understand the current situation.
Andrew, you did not provide one quote from Lenin,
one reference to anything from Lenin's writings or speeches, where
Lenin outright "rejected and repudiated" any major point of Marxist
wisdom. Where can i find Lenin's "novel restatement of principles"?
I am not going to play this childish game with you. You know exactly
what the point is that I am making and you want to play what amounts to
an inbred power game.
“Many Palestinians stopped supporting Hezbollah,” said Omar Shaban, the Gaza-based director of the Pal-Think for Strategic Studies think tank: “It’s not about Shia or Sunni—it’s that Hezbollah was helping a régime that many Palestinians don’t like.”
Marwa Fatafta said that Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria made many people question who the group was really representing: “[The Syrian war] was a true test to understand whether that solidarity with the Palestinians—is it a genuine act, is it a genuine solidarity with a just social and political cause?” she asked rhetorically. “Or was it some sort of rhetoric that helps advance certain actors’ political agenda, and serves their own propaganda, and to legitimise them further in the eyes of their people and in the eyes of others, such as Palestinians?”
On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 06:16 PM, Ken Hiebert wrote:
I think the suggestion that they have not published in six months is a bit off. They last published their main paper at the end of May, so coming up to five months.
That is correct, but in reality the May issue did not consist of terribly recent material, and contained nothing written by the Spartacist League.
The May 29 issue of Workers Vanguard consisted to two items:
1. "a translation of a revised article from a March 2020 supplement of O Bolsevikos, publication of the Trotskyist Group of Greece"
2. "We reprint below four sections from the “Declaration of Principles” adopted at the 1938 founding conference of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)"
I think the suggestion that they have not published in six months is a bit off. They last published their main paper at the end of May, so coming up to five months. I have many experiences which would make me bitter towards that group. Nevertheless I did get something from their articles on history.
More to the point. Many people received their political education in that group. I hope that these highly committed people do not abandon politics altogether. Who among us can reach out to them with another political project (or projects)?
And, as the Bolshevik Tendency said, it would be a shame if their extensive archives ended up on the sidewalk.
attn: fkalosar, your ad hominem put downs of Stewart distract and detract from your critique, which I otherwise found valuable. ...
[Y]ou need setting down and setting straight.
Thank you for finding my critique valuable. Stewart's critiques of me and Roger Kulp have invatiably been ad hominem. The fact that he hasn't summoned the intellect to do this with the authority he presumes is his problem, not mine.
Apparently you are comfortable with "infantile" and "inbred." Furthermore, Stewart's equation of "neoliberal" and "New Labor" with FDR is an astonishing mental lapse that should be of concern to his numerous friends on Marxmail. Since this disturbing, if not Trump-like, error was presented as an argument, I make no apology for pointing it out.
I pass over the bizarre and incomprehensible digression on JS Mill and any number of other strange and disconnected assertions.
It's one thing to reach into the Empyrean for some glimmering of insight that eludes one, quite another to miss your stays in navigating through a moderately difficult argument a nd then accuse your critics of failing to appreciate the apodictic certainty of every word you utter.
There's a detailed exchange between Stewart and Proyect that seems more intelligent than his abusive responses to me and Comrade Kulp. He did have a rational response to Kulp's question, but chose to fling excrement instead. I have a lot of disagreements with Kulp, but "infantile" and "inbred"? Please.
In general, my sentiments can be summarized in the words of ee cummings's "Olaf"
Olaf(upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat "there is some shit I will not eat"
As to your concluding threat, comrade, we shall see who sets whom straight in the long run. This kind of thing goes both ways.
If you search for films about labor, one makes every list: Norma Rae. This most iconic of union movies was a critical and box office smash when it came out in 1979, the same year Labor Notes published its first issue. At that moment, when more Americans than ever before were union members, it wasn’t surprising that a movie about a gutsy labor organizer would prove popular.
Now, over 40 years later, we know that the labor movement was not then surging but was on the cusp of collapse. And on the big screen, Norma Rae proved to be a one-off. Feature films expressly about class conflict have always been rare in American cinema, and in recent decades have become even more so.
It is still possible, though, to find engaging and valuable movies about working people where labor/management conflict is not the central focus. Here are my recommendations of some of the best that have come out since Norma Rae and Labor Notes debuted back in 1979.
To keep things manageable, I’ve excluded documentaries and foreign films. Most of my suggestions are available through online streaming services; see the box below for info on where to find them.
Where to Find These Films
Most of the movies listed here are available, either included with subscription or for a small rental fee, on streaming services like Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix. Some are also available on cable networks like HBO or Starz. Justwatch.com is one site where you can search movie titles to see which streaming services might provide them.
Certain Women, Mystery Train, and Daughters of the Dust are also available, with extra features, on the Criterion Channel.
10,000 Black Men Named Georgeis available free on YouTube. Nightjohn is included with an Amazon Prime subscription.
There are a few movies that are harder (or more expensive) to come by. The Killing Floor has recently been restored, and probably will be released at some point on DVD, but for now can only be seen by purchasing a “virtual ticket” through the Film Movement website.
And much to my frustration, two of my favorite movies—Melvin and Howard and Silkwood—are available only on DVD. Though you can find those DVDs for purchase online, neither film has been restored and Silkwood in particular is a really bad quality transfer (even the Blu-ray, which is just a copy of the DVD).
It’s especially mysterious that Silkwood, given its all-star cast and a revival of interest in labor films, remains so obscure. Rather than spend money on low-quality DVDs, I recommend that you see if your public library carries these films so you might see them for free.
UP AND OUT
Big-budget Hollywood pictures featuring working-class leads are likely to be dramatizations of the American dream—what I call “Up and Out” films—in which characters escape, through spunk and determination, their lower-class circumstances. They are, in other words, very often fairy tales, like the many updated Cinderella fantasies: Flashdance [1983], Working Girl [1988], Pretty Woman [1990], Maid in Manhattan [2002].
But there are some films in this category that depict working-class communities accurately, even though the main character eventually leaves them. The early scenes in Coal Miner’s Daughter [1980], filmed on location in the Kentucky hollers, faithfully capture the gritty details of coal town life, and Arkansas native musician-turned-actor Levon Helm is spot-on as Loretta Lynn’s hard-working father.
The bittersweet comedy Breaking Away [1979] reminds us that university towns (in this case Bloomington, Indiana) are populated not just by transplanted professors and transient students but by working people, who may view the placid campuses in their hometowns as enemy territory.
One of the best “Up and Out” films is Real Women Have Curves [2002], set in East Los Angeles. It’s a charming yet serious working-class feminist anthem, a far better one, in my view, than 9 to 5 [1980]. These real women work really hard, though they can also have fun, as shown in what may be the most exuberant scene ever based in a sweatshop.
The film derives its warm authenticity from Latina women: director Patricia Cardosa, screenwriter Josefina López, and a host of superb actors, chief among them America Ferrera in her debut.
DOWN AND OUT
Real Women ends on an upbeat note, but in “Down and Out” films, despair is the dominant motif. The most popular films in this category center around crime, drugs, and violence; most gangland movies at least touch on class dynamics. While they can be excellent in their own right (Drugstore Cowboy [1989], Menace II Society [1993], Winter’s Bone [2010], Tangerine [2015]), collectively they perpetuate the damaging age-old stereotype of a working class defined by vice, immorality, and self-destruction.
Yet there are less sensational movies in this category that deserve our attention. Manchester by the Sea [2016] is a wrenching tale of broken people struggling for redemption in blue-collar Massachusetts. Two films by director Kelly Reichardt—Wendy and Lucy [2008] and Certain Women [2016]—are quiet meditations on the alienation experienced by women in the rural Northwest. They feature achingly poignant performances; if you’ve never given much thought to what ranch labor might be like, see Certain Women.
In 99 Homes [2014], the human wreckage caused by the foreclosure crisis is wrapped into a powerful suspense drama, underscoring that our most destructive criminals live in mansions and collect stock dividends. I’d call Spike Lee’s brilliant Do the Right Thing [1989] a “Down and Out” film, demonstrating how racism fuels the righteous rage felt by African Americans and splinters the working class. It is also wickedly funny, which makes it an exception in this category.
DOWN BUT DEALING WITH IT
For less somber viewing, seek out films where ordinary people are “Down But Dealing With It”; in the midst of adversity, they derive resilience and even joy from friends and family. These movies have similarities to the “Up and Outs,” except the characters remain firmly planted in the working class.
They are often comedic (Mystery Train [1989], Smoke Signals [1998], Napoleon Dynamite [2004]), and one of my favorites in this genre, the quirky Melvin and Howard [1980], illustrates how, for working people, so often the only luck they have is bad luck.
The kindness of strangers infuses The Straight Story [1999], David Lynch’s surprisingly tender road movie. Eddie Murphy is outstanding in the deeper-than-you-might-expect biopic Dolemite Is My Name [2019], but Da’Vine Joy Randolph also shines in an exceptionally rich woman’s role.
Julie Dash’s ethereal Daughters of the Dust [1991] defies categorization, but it can be placed here as a film affirming how culture and family—even ancestors long dead—have sustained the African American community.
RESISTANCE AND ORGANIZING
Workers get by with the help of friends and family, but to overcome oppression they must reach beyond those bonds, and so we conclude with “Resistance and Organizing” films. Pickings in this category are slim.
Norma Rae belongs here, and so does Silkwood [1983], the biopic about the life and mysterious death of union activist Karen Silkwood, who battled to expose unsafe conditions at the plutonium plant where she worked. Meryl Streep is, as always, pitch-perfect in the title role, but Cher (yes, Cher) is touching and honest, and the rest of the cast is terrific too. My opinion may be heretical, but I’ve always preferred Silkwood, in its treatment of unions, women, and working-class life, over Norma Rae.
Two films center on organizing in the “uneventful” 1920s. Matewan [1987], John Sayles’s beautifully shot account of class warfare in the West Virginia coal fields, is deeply sympathetic to the miners, if fairly one-dimensional in its characterizations. While it also lacks nuance, 10,000 Black Men Named George [2002], Robert Townsend’s tribute to A. Philip Randolph, is a solid recounting of the heroic effort to create the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first Black union.
Those films are set in the past, but for a look at workplace activism in the (near?) future, Boots Riley’s wildly imaginative, staunchly pro-union satire Sorry to Bother You [2018] is revolutionary in more ways than one.
I’ll finish with my two favorite films about organizing; indeed they are among my favorite films ever made about anything. The Killing Floor [1984], directed by Bill Duke and written by Leslie Lee, both African American, details the early 20th-century effort to build interracial unionism in the Chicago stockyards.
No other movie so keenly demonstrates how employers sow racial and ethnic animosities for their own gain—Chicago’s 1919 race riot figures in this story—or better depicts the class-conscious dedication required of organizers who struggle against those divisions. For labor activists, all of whom face moments of defeat and despair, the last scene in The Killing Floor should prove inspiring beyond measure.
Organizers are teachers, a point made clear in the movie Nightjohn [1996]. Charles Burnett, an African American director who has garnered critical acclaim but little mainstream success, delivers a multifaceted exploration of that most cruel and exploitative of labor systems, slavery. To my mind Nightjohn provides the most sophisticated treatment on film of the many forms of slave resistance.
As a slave who makes it his mission to teach others to read, Nightjohn recognizes literacy as a source of power and liberation; a purloined newspaper that brings news of Nat Turner’s rebellion is one way that’s made clear.
Like The Killing Floor, Nightjohn is both heartbreaking (I always get teary at the end) and profoundly hopeful. Organizers rarely know how the ripples they create later build into mighty waves.
So these are some of the inspiring films that have come out since Labor Notes started inspiring activists back in 1979. Settle in and pass the popcorn!
(I haven’t included all my favorite movies on this list, and no doubt I overlooked some of yours. You can make additions in the comments, though keep in mind the criteria I used: American films made from 1979 on, and no documentaries. We look forward to hearing your suggestions!)
attn: fkalosar, your ad hominem put downs of Stewart distract and detract from your critique, which I otherwise found valuable. ...
[Y]ou need setting down and setting straight.
Thank you for finding my critique valuable. Stewart's critiques of me and Roger Kulp have invatiably been ad hominem. The fact that he hasn't summoned the intellect to do this with the authority he presumes is his problem, not mine.
Apparently you are comfortable with "infantile" and "inbred." Furthermore, Stewart's equation of "neoliberal" and "New Labor" with FDR is an astonishing mental lapse that should be of concern to his numerous friends on Marxmail. Since this disturbing, if not Trump-like, error was presented as an argument, I make no apology for pointing it out.
I pass over the bizarre and incomprehensible digression on JS Mill and any number of other strange and disconnected assertions.
It's one thing to reach into the Empyrean for some glimmering of insight that eludes one, quite another to miss your stays in navigating through a moderately difficult argument a nd then accuse your critics of failing to appreciate the apodictic certainty of every word you utter.
There's a detailed exchange between Stewart and Proyect that seems more intelligent than his abusive responses to me and Comrade Kulp. He did have a rational response to Kulp's question, but chose to fling excrement instead. I have a lot of disagreements with Kulp, but "infantile" and "inbred"? Please.
In general, my sentiments can be summarized in the words of ee cummings's "Olaf"
Olaf(upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat "there is some shit I will not eat"
As to your concluding threat, comrade, we shall see who sets whom straight in the long run. This kind of thing goes both ways.
Oh for God's sake, this is immature. I know (and imagine you know) that what the Bolsheviks had access to of Marx's theory in 1917 was completely different than what we know today. They didn't have the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, and multiple other materials published in the past 100 years (many of them BY THE SOVIET PRESS AFTER LENIN DIED!) that demonstrated Marx had many more nuances in his thought regarding alienation, the role of the peasantry, the Russian political system, and many more topics. Plekhanov was so esteemed along with Kautsky as guardians of orthodoxy that Zinoviev didn't want to allow for the October revolution.
American Science: Triumph or Tragedy? | Review of *The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump*, by Clifford D. Conner | Hamid R Ekbia | Science for the People via MR Online
American1 science has aspired, for a long time, to present itself as exceptional.2 In 1966, the historian Hunter Dupre invited his colleagues to celebrate, in his view, this long-neglected exceptionalism. More than half-a-century on, Clifford Conner takes on and upends Dupre’s grand thesis. With this mournful but marvelous survey, Conner challenges dominant narratives on the status, objectivity, and integrity of American science, revealing the role played by money, military, and politics in producing its apparent superiority in the aftermath of World War II.
A historian of science himself, Conner is fully cognizant of the accomplishments of American science and technology. In an earlier book, A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanicks” (2005), he demonstrated the contributions of ordinary citizens to science, but he also warned of the corruptive potential of corporate money and military power. The Tragedy of American Science is a meaningful sequel to that story, which follows the downhill trajectory of the sciences, as potential triumphs gave way to mere byproducts of war technology. To show this, Conner diligently traces the course of developments in the physical, biological, and social sciences, naming the institutions, think tanks, networks, and individual scientists who, for more than seven decades, have advanced imperialist objectives and corporate agendas, all in the name of scientific inquiry. The diversity that Conner reveals about these actors with respect to background, discipline, reputation, and affiliation is impressive.
Conner goes about this immense task in four sections, first examining corporatization of science, then militarization of science, then asking “how we got into this mess,” and finally explaining “the only way out.” He begins the first section with the “big fat lie” of nutrition scientists dredging data to formulate government dietary guidelines under the aegis of government agencies, but with funding from major corporations such as Coca-Cola; the resulting nutritional “science” in fact threatens the health of the American population. Likewise, in agriculture, the aggressive development of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) has put global food supplies under the monopolistic control of American multinationals such as DuPont and Dow, exacerbating global inequalities in access to food. These developments have been facilitated by reputable organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, whose members are tainted by corrupting payments (in the form of research grants and consultant fees) from big pharma, big oil, and the “charitable” foundations of the Koch brothers and their ilk.
The second part of the book provides an equally informative account of the dominance of the military in the funding of science, which has reached new levels under the Trump Administration with the willing cooperation of scientists. Conner explains this within the frame of “weaponized Keynesianism” (which seeks to mitigate the recurring cycles of capitalist crisis through military spending) and the related principle of “deliberate waste” (economic output that, in Conner’s words, “will not house, feed, clothe, or otherwise benefit anybody in any way”). What might count as deliberate waste in the U.S. domestic economy, however, serves a very different purpose abroad—namely, the projection of American imperial power around the globe. In emphasizing the domestic function of weaponized Keynesianism, therefore, Conner might have given its imperial function short shrift. Nonetheless, he superbly chronicles the role of the social sciences in advancing the cause of militarists, showing how physical and biological scientists serve as the designers and architects of the weapon systems, while a whole army of economists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and social scientists are mobilized to maintain the myth of the superiority, legitimacy, and righteousness of American militarized science.
So how did we get here, then? The third part of the book takes up this question and gives an “origin” story of these pernicious developments, starting with the Manhattan Project and the myth of “atoms for peace” that continues to sustain the unclean, unsafe, and uneconomical nuclear energy industry. The cast of characters that has staged this twisted drama is large, but its stars include DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), U.S. appropriation of Japanese wartime medical experimentation, and the RAND Corporation (which Alex Abella has dubbed “the think tank that controls America”). The most damning act in the drama, however, is the blanket recruitment of Nazi scientists in all major branches of American science. From rocket and space science (call it hell science) to medicine (call it concentration camp science) and psychology (call it torture science), former Nazi criminals were brought in one after the other and assigned to prominent scientific positions in the US. And with what justification? To borrow from Tom Lehrer’s parody of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi-criminal-christened-the-father-of-American-space-science: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?” The sentiment here might be expressed:
So long as a scientist is willing to do the dirty work, who cares where they’re from?
Given everything the book documents, does this history ultimately qualify as a tragedy? As Conner indicates early on, in framing the history of American science in this fashion, he is inspired by William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams took inspiration from Karl Jasper who found “genuine tragedy…only in that destruction which does not prematurely cut short development and success, but which, instead, grows out of success itself.”3 How else can we understand the history that Conner lays out so vividly in front of us? And in what other terms than “tragic” can we make sense of the fatal failures of American science against the backdrop of its alluring success? While individual “war-time” scientists have instigated very real material harm, the bigger tragedy is in the political, economic, and social system that has turned science into an instrument of exploitation, violence, destruction, and murder. As Conner points out, “the tragedy of contemporary science is less about science than about economics, politics, and public relations.” The COVID-19 crisis has lifted this veil, highlighting the “need to replace the global economic system that serves private interests with one that serves the public interest.”
It is in that spirit that Conner goes beyond revelatory expositions, using the final section of the book to provide “a way out.” As a self-proclaimed “science-and-technology junkie” with a “sunny disposition,” he outlines some of the ingredients of a science for human needs. Taking as an example the Cuban health system— with its expansive medical internationalism and the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world—the ingredients include a list of action items that would put science “under genuinely democratic control in the context of a global planned economy.” The history that Conner has laid bare impels all of us, as citizens or working scientists, to avoid the Faustian bargain of American exceptionalism.
About the Author
Hamid Ekbia is Professor of Informatics, International Studies, and Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he also directs the Center for Research on Mediated Interaction. He is interested in the political economy of computing, in the future of work, and in how technologies mediate socio-economic, cultural, and geo-political relations of modern societies. His most recent co-authored book Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism (MIT Press, 2017) examines computer-mediated modes of value extraction in capitalist economies, and his earlier book Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2008) is a critical-technical analysis of Artificial Intelligence.
Notes
Editor’s note: In this article, the author employs the term “American” to mean “the United States,” as is consistent with Conner’s usage and reflective of U.S. imperialism. However, we recognize that America is composed of thirty five countries (as well as overseas territories, departments and colonies) on unceded and contested land of indigenous peoples; Furthermore, Conner explains that his focus on United States science derives from its primary responsibility for the worldwide tragedy of contemporary science.
A. Hunter Dupre, “The History of American Science—A Field Finds Itself,” The American Historical Review71, no. 3 (1966): 865.
Karl Jasper, Tragedy Is Not Enough (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 95-96.
On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 8:17 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote
Bryan Palmer was a fellow traveler.
Really? I didn't know that. I thought his book "Revolutionary Teamsters" was pretty good.
MEIJI
RESTORATION Turning
to Japan, the question of whether capitalist agriculture is a
requirement for the advent of capitalism in general becomes even
more problematic.
Thanks for the references here. I am familiar with the Brenner debate but not much about similar debates around Japan. A lot of my friends are ethnically Korean Chinese and Japanese. It has only since I've known them that I have received any kind of education on the topics in those countries. The Meiji Restoration is surprising and fascinating, at least to me. I would love to read a comprehensive Marxist history on the subject.
On their historical work, they were deep into James P. Cannon,
and published material on him and other Trotskyists they
considered revolutionary
True, but I was mostly thinking about some of the stuff they did on architecture, laws, living experiments in the early Soviet Union, and similar topics. They also wrote some interesting things about the Communist Party US and the Third International. Most of this stuff I read many years ago in the late 1970s when I was still at the U of C. I read through "Women and Revolution" at the time which contained a lot of interesting stuff. I wonder what happened to all those people who wrote for "Women and Revolution."
They would have done better if they had called themselves a propaganda and publishing company and just handed out pamphlets and let the rest go.
Claiming to operate as a Democratic Centralist organization with only a few hundred cadre at best seems to me a classic category mistake that can only lead to withering away or to an inward looking cult.
I think it is also derived from a misreading of how both revolutionary parties and all parties that fight for the oppressed grow in the first place.
For instance I am pretty sure that in this country we need a party of the working class led mostly by blacks and other people of color. (Just accept as a premise that that is what we need. I may be wrong.) Such a party would not only unite working people but all oppressed peoples.
I also believe that given a revolutionary situation that the only kind of party that can win is a party that can organize and gather forces and probably the best way to do that is through a democratic centralist party organization. Again I could be wrong about all of this. But it is plausible.
It does not follow from any of the premises above that setting up a democratic centralist organization with 1000 people is the way to achieve anything. In fact such an organization can only act as a literary production group or a sect or possibly a cult. In both cases the project is spiritual. It turns an essentially socio-political project into a hermetically religious project.
I admire many of those old groups old revolutionary groups. They were often good writers. And they were often decent fighters. I don’t want to list them here.
But to begin as a literary group and hope to become a socialist party of the working class through the attempted operations of democratic centralism is a romantic idea at best. To begin as a groupuscul with a program and then become a revolutionary party can only be called an accident if it happens.
On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 8:29 AM Alan Ginsberg <ginsberg.alan1@...> wrote:
As we noted in our June article, the SL has been undergoing yet another phase in its endless internal crisis. Is its paralysis partly the result of the downward spiral of its ever more wacked-out internal life?
Louis, I’m leaving Meeropol and fkalosar’s posts on as relevant to what I started to send the latter alone; but thought my post script relevant to the whole list.
attn: fkalosar, your ad hominem put downs of Stewart distract and detract from your critique, which I otherwise found valuable.
This is a style (and a style it merely is) familiar to extensive readers of polemics of Marx and of Lenin and perhaps because of that, excused even imitated. The vicious aspect of vicious logic also sharpens women’s analyses, but having been its all too frequent and improper victims, we tend to note it and edit it out. Male Marxists persist in sounding petty patronizing and insulting when delivering information they feel renders them superior to the uninformed. Whenever you indulge this tendency, you are inadvertently depriving young people, who read less and tolerate pettiness even less, acquaintance with your large body of knowledge and sharp critical faculties. If you read what you writ, before hitting ’send,’ you will see it yourself, I’m sure. If you see it and send anyway, you need setting down and setting straight.
On Oct 16, 2020, at 10:31 AM, Michael Meeropol <mameerop@...> wrote:
I think this is my fifth for the day --- so it has to be my last ---
I am actually impressed by the discussion of "foundational documents" as it was developed (by all contributors) to compare the US to the British Parliamentary system. It is certainly true that a bare parliamentary majority can change British society completely because (I think this is still true) there is no written constitution in Britain other than Acts of Parliament (and court precedent which can of course always be overruled by an ACT of Parliament).
In the US, though the written Constitution is supposed to govern (which is why AFTER winning the Civil War, the Republican dominated North had to amend the Constitution to first abolish slavery and THEN provide for full citizenship for former slaves --- and then for good measure ensured the right to vote --- ), it actually isn't as simple as that.
I still think Eric Foner's book THE STORY OF AMERICAN FREEDOM is a great guide to how "goals" which of course were just words in the Declaration of Independence and even the Bill of Rights had to be fought for --- It was the Wobblies of the early 20th century followed by the more establishment oriented ACLU that made the First Amendment into a REAL prohibition on suppression of Free Speech ---- It was the demonstrators in the South coupled with the rise of black voting in the North after the great migration that pressured the Supreme Court to overturn Plessy --- which of course had made a mockery of the 14th Amendment.
BUT --- the FACT that the 14th Amendment existed gave those who struggled to enforce it something tangible to hang their hats on ---
I do believe however -- that just as Courts ignored the evisceration of the 14th and 15th amendments after Reconstruction ended, it would be possible IN THE US --- despite our Constitution-- for a set of right wing Judges to create a "new constitutionality" for an AMerican version of fascism ---
[so there you have it --- I come back to my "one trick pony" which undoubtedly bores the shit out of many of my comrades on this list --- chalk it up to the droolings of a "senile citizen"!!}
Comrade Lause--delighted to see you being your inimitably grouchy and overbearing self. Wouldn't have it any other way.
Stewart has a lot to say and says much of it very badly or without any real coherence at all. When legitimately challenged or innocently questioned he resorts to personal abuse--"childish, inbred" etc. A little of that goes a long way. Non est qualis erat, I suppose.
His weird reply to my reference to New Labor suggests dementia. I've said everything to him that I consider worth saying. Poor man. There we all go sooner or later I suppose.
However, to the extent that Stewart makes sense on this particular point, he is one of the "nobodies" who seem to regard foundation documents as inherently determining. Not sure what is going on there, so won't belabor the point. (Walt Whitman said we should "stand up for the stupid and crazy.")
Let me try to clarify my points for you and then try to indicate the relevance to the topic of this thread
1) My point re foundational documents, particularly constitutions, is that the rule frameworks they established do not determine the qualitative nature of the political arrangements that can happen under their alleged sway. As rules bodies, they are lifeless in themselves. The "programs" they contain, so to speak, can be hacked to justify any result desired by--oh let's put on our kneebritches and talk 18th Century--"interested parties."
2) The point about New Labor is that for all practical purposes the neoliberal political result under the so-called British constitution is the same as in the United States. Formal rules, the British Constitution, immemorial tradition, and all the rest of it are irrelevant. This is quite obvious. I would like to say that I am surprised that some do not seem to "get' this very elementary fact, but alas that is not in the least surprising.
To the extent that Andrew Stewart's argument on this point is coherent at all--which for the most part I do not think it is, though I am sure there must be matters on which he makes sense or used to make sense--the point seems to be that "parliamentary coalitions" caused fascism, which cannot happen in the United States because Federalist Papers 10. Sorry, buddy--but that's what it boils down to.
I've demonstrated that the first part of the proposition is historically false. As to the second part, the operation of the American ideology is not determined from time immemorial by the gefluegelte worte of the Floundering Bothers or anyone else. The reproduction and adaptation of ideologies in history is a psychological and semantic, rather than a purely intellectual, process to which even the history of ideas and geistesgeschichte as such are not directly relevant.
The documents are merely convenient bits and pieces available for the ready-made assembly process of ideological construction. Ideology is continually renewed and reproduced, and its operations and effects are in many ways unconscious, even when it is itself remanufactured into "official" documents that form the "intellectual" justification for policies and party lines.
Tradition and national character do not in themselves exist--they are functions of social forces and exist in a semantic web, the functioning of which is largely unconscious. If you are looking for the American Character as a really existing intentional object, so to speak, you are on a snipe hunt. You might as well resort to some Tainian pseudo-scientific mumbojumbo about race, milieu, and moment.
It is helpful in dealing with these very basic matters to have some training in and understanding of criticism and the interpretation of texts. Historians always seem to dismiss this as a load of unmanly affectation, which it isn't--although the insane pretentions of "deconstruction" etc. have gone far to discredit what is nonetheless a fundamental intellectual discipline, especially when allied with the study of literary history and, indeed, of history in general. We ignore the semiotic at our peril, as infuriating as the currents of intellectual reaction surrounding Derrda etc. have been.
In a truncated snapshot of the medical journal ins-and-outs, I give three sub-headings & relevant snips below: (1) The Story So far here. (2) Step 2; (3) The Final Nail.
The conclusions to draw should include:
(i) Gilead's unethical behaviour in signing a deal with European agencies €850m (£733m) - when it had been (by prior contract) told the negative results of the WHO-Oxford trial.
(ii) Richard Peto - he was one of those who led the exposure of tobacco as a causative agent of cancer - is very clear that the big Drug Cos will try to denigrate this
(iii) At least in assessing putative therapy: remember: a) Randomised trials reduce bias far more effectively than do observational studies; (b) Bigger - is better - in this particular case.... Of course, that makes studies expensive. Hence the big companies don't want them. Hence they promote bias in science. (Bias here means a 'systematic deviation from the truth').
Hari Kumar.
The more detailed reports below for those interested.
_________________________________________
1.THE STORY SO FAR:
Just start with this editorial in JAMA:
“The experimental antiviral drug remdesivir (manufactured by Gilead) was granted Emergency Use Authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration in May 2020 for patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19.1 At the time, there had been 2 randomized clinical trials (RCTs) that had compared a 10-day course of remdesivir with placebo. The first, by Wang and colleagues,2 failed to show benefit but recruited only 237 patients and may have been underpowered. The second, the National Institutes of Health–sponsored Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT-1), randomized 1063 patients and found that those assigned a 10-day course of remdesivir had a recovery time that was shorter by 4 days (median, 11 vs 15 days) compared with placebo.3 No significant difference was found in mortality between drug (7.1%) and placebo (11.9%) (hazard ratio, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.47-1.04). Since the Emergency Use Authorization was granted, there has been a huge demand for remdesivir from both patients and physicians, generating considerable debate over how to ensure adequate, equitable, and affordable access.” From:
Step 2: That Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT-1) – published in NEJM Oct 8, 2020. Remdesivir for the Treatment of Covid-19 — Final Report”; John H. Beigel, M.D.,
Kay M. Tomashek, M.D., M.P.H., Lori E. Dodd, Ph.D., et al.,
“Remdesivir has very little effect on Covid-19 mortality, WHO finds”; by
Sarah Boseley Health editor Fri 16 Oct 2020 13.00 BST
“The World Health Organization (WHO) has defended its study on Remdesivir after its developer argued that the results were "inconsistent" with previous studies. The WHO trial claimed that the drug doesn't help Covid-19 patients.
“It's a reliable result, don't let anybody tell you otherwise, because they'll try to,” Richard Peto, an independent statistician hired by the WHO to evaluate its trial, told reporters on Friday. He argued that any benefits from Remdesivir may be due to chance, according to Reuters.
The WHO-funded study of four antiviral drugs, including Remdesivir and Hydroxychloroquine, involved more than 11,000 Covid-19 patients in 30 countries. It found that all of the drugs tested had “little or no effect” on mortality, the need to be ventilated or the amount of days spent in a hospital.
Remdesivir's developer Gilead Sciences noted that the results of the trial have not been peer-reviewed and argued that they “appear inconsistent with more robust evidence from multiple randomized, controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals.” The California-based company said that the benefits from Remdesivir for Covid-19 patients were demonstrated in three previous trials, the results of which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week.
“The drug, made by the US biotech firm Gilead, has been talked up as a potential cure and was taken byDonald Trump. A trial in the US had previously showed it reduced the length of stay in hospital. But the gold-standard Solidarity WHO trial, which was based on a far larger sample – 3,000 people on the drug, compared with as many who were not – showed remdesivir had little effect on deaths over 28 days.
Gilead was told about the results on 23 September, 10 days before publication, and was given a first draft of the study on 28 September. The WHO said the company was told the outcome in advance as part of an agreement to provide the drug for free.
On 8 October, Gilead signed a contract for 500,000 doses of the drug with the European commission – which did not know the results – at a cost of €850m (£733m).
Three other drugs were trialled in the Solidarity study, which has recruited more than 12,000 patients across 30 countries, and none had very much effect on mortality. They were hydroxychloroquine, which had already beenfound to have no benefitby the University of Oxford’s Recovery trial,lopinavir, an antiretroviral used in HIV treatment, and interferon, given as an injection under the skin.
“Interferon was disappointing,” said Oxford’s Prof Sir Richard Peto, who was the chief statistician in the trial. “This regime didn’t do much for survival.”
However, it is still possible that interferon given in other ways or in different formulations may have an effect.
The remdesivir results constitute the bulk of the evidence for the drugs being used, Peto said. “It is more than three times as big as all the other evidence in the world put together.”
The Solidarity trial had to be taken seriously, he continued. “The quality of this trial is excellent. This is real world evidence. The phrase has been hijacked by people – a lot of wrong answers have come out from people trying to play games by avoiding randomisation.
In my view, the confidence of the Biden campaign and its supporters is overweening. There remains the "shy Trump voters," the electoral college, voter suppression and then post election litigation and political shenanigans. With Trump's hard core support consistently at 38 to 40%, his campaign doesn't have to peel off too much to make the election close. I bet that Biden wins the popular vote, but given the level and persistence of Trump's core support, hard to see a blowout or a landslide, except on the Coasts.
A Biden Administration, if we get there, is more likely to be an attempt at a restoration of the Clinton or Obama Administration than any attempt at reform along the lines of a Gorbachev or even Louis XVI. Why else would the likes of Michael Bloomberg,the Republicans of the Lincoln Project and the various CIA/NSA personnel be supporting him?
On 10/16/2020 8:05 AM Michael Meeropol <mameerop@...> wrote:
I propose that we save the "President Biden will fail" discussions till we know Trump has not succeeded in facilitating a coup d'etat --- don't you think?
Like Gorbachev, Louis XVI and Nicholas II, President Biden will disappoint at the worst possible time.
Susan Collins Backs QAnon Believers for Maine Legislature
Candidates advocate “God-declared executions” for “traitorous” Jews, Catholics, Black Lives Matter and environmental activists
Sen. Susan Collins is financially supporting the state legislative campaigns of two fellow Maine Republicans who fervently believe in QAnon, the perverse conspiracy theory whose adherents are considered a domestic terror threat by the FBI. In recent days, Facebook and YouTube have announced actions to curb the spread of QAnon content due to mounting fears that its followers — who deify President Trump and believe his enemies are a global cabal of pedophilic Satanists — will engage in violence before or after Election Day.
Kevin Bushey and Brian Redmond, the QAnon believers supported by Collins, are both military veterans who eagerly anticipate a political bloodbath will soon erupt nationwide, ultimately leading to arrests, military trials, and “God-declared executions” for “traitors” like top Democratic politicians and donors, socialists, Planned Parenthood, and Black Lives Matter and Sunrise Movement activists.
Last month, Collins’ personal political action committee, Dirigo PAC, contributed $400 each to Bushey and Redmond. Both are challenging Democratic incumbents for seats in the Maine House of Representatives representing parts of Aroostook County — the poverty-plagued, northernmost area of the state, where Collins was born and raised. The Maine GOP’s campaign fund for House races also gave Bushey and Redmond $400 each last month. For Redmond, those contributions amount to more than half the money his campaign has raised so far.
“Given the closeness of her race, [Collins] should have been really careful about who she gives money to,” said longtime Maine political columnist Al Diamon. He said there’s “no way” the donations to Bushey and Redmond “would not be carefully vetted” by Collins and her staff.
PACs like Dirigo “are very specific about who they give to, because they’re entirely designed to advance your political career,” Diamon said. “So if you give to somebody from one of those PACs, you are expecting something in return.”
Collins’ communication team did not respond to a request for comment.
Redmond is the less prominent of the two QAnon believers Collins is backing, but his advocacy of the conspiracy theory has been on open display. Before his Twitter account was banned earlier this month, his cover photo read “Q’s Army/Irregular Warfare Division” and declared “WWG1WGA,” shorthand for the QAnon rallying cry, “Where We Go One We Go All.” Media Matters reported last month that his account “repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and the QAnon slogan,” and his Facebook account also includes QAnon posts.
In an interview with Mainer, Redmond said he discovered QAnon in the comments section of Zero Hedge, a far-right, libertarian economics blog notorious for spreading conspiracies. “I was hooked right off the bat,” said Redmond, who now considers himself an investigative journalist. “It was an opportunity to wrestle back control of our government from subvertists and treasonists. … As a veteran, I was called to arms.”
Brian Redmond. image/via Facebook
“What I understand about the QAnon program is that the military is going to need to intervene eventually,” Redmond said. Asked what he meant by “military intervention,” he explained: “Nazis never lost World War II. [Nazism] was dissolved, they were consumed into the U.S.A., and the rich, cultist, Satanist families continued to utilize this Nazi force.
“The end of World War III will end with Donald Trump,” he continued. “It’s already happening with the crushing of ISIS. There will be another Nuremberg trial, some of these icons of American industry and business will be held accountable at Gitmo [the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba].”
Redmond said QAnon has caused him to question the very nature of his nation. “I always look at two sides of the coin on this stuff and think, ‘Have I been deceived? … Has [traditional patriotism] really been a trick to expose us patriots, so we are the first on the trains to the FEMA camps? … I’m ready to go to the camps if necessary. That’s why I’m fighting and putting my life on the line. I have faith.”
Redmond is challenging Democrat David McCrea, a retired teacher who’s seeking a third term representing a district in eastern Aroostook County, along the border with New Brunswick. This is Redmond’s first run for public office.
Bushey is making his second attempt to unseat Democrat John Martin. Two years ago, Bushey got over 40 percent of the vote against Martin, who’s served in the Maine Legislature for over 50 years and is still “a major behind the scenes player,” said Diamon.
Bushey’s deeply disturbing political views are all over the Internet. The retired Air Force colonel proselytizes on YouTube as a leader of a “QAnon church” called Omega Kingdom Ministries (OKM), explaining how the conspiracy theory melds with Biblical teachings. In an interview on Crash Barry’s podcast Open Ears Maine, posted by Mainer last May, Bushey said a shadowy group that includes Freemasons, bankers, Catholics and Jews “have worked very diligently to support the idea that we should be in continuous war or having wars, because they like to finance both sides of the equation. They’re the producers, the manufacturers, and they control the money supplies.”
Kevin Bushey’s campaign headshot.
In an article by academic researcher Marc-André Argentino, re-published by Salon last May, he wrote that Bushey and OKM pastor Russ Wagner “are leveraging religious beliefs and their ‘authority’ as a pastor and ex-military officer to indoctrinate attendees into the QAnon church. Their objective is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement.”
This effort has distinctly cultish aspects. “Wagner and Bushey have taught their congregation to stop listening to any media — even Fox News — because they’re all ‘Luciferian,’” Argentino reported. “What they provide instead is a road map to QAnon radicalization…”
On the Home Congregations website (homecongregations.org), the parent organization for Bushey’s OKM church, he published a post on Sept. 30 called “A Word From the Front Lines.” “When we come out of our ‘trench,’ and begin shooting truth bullets of the gospel and other truths, Satan and a lot of the world do not like it,” he wrote, “and the Enemy will shoot back to stop you. … We are now soldiers and soldiers fight battles. It is very much like the 5th columnists … who live inside Enemy territory to carry out intelligence missions and blow up the enemy’s strongholds.”
A series of “prayers” on the site’s homepage is titled “Operation Lock and Load.” The first in the series, titled “Machine Gunner,” states, “We hereby decree: The immediate death, dismantling & destruction of the following anti-Christ organizations and funds.” The long list that follows includes the Democratic Socialists of America, Planned Parenthood, The Lincoln Project, The Clinton Foundation, The Muslim Brotherhood, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and ActBlue Charities.
The fourth “prayer,” titled “S.W.A.T.,” declares, “We cut the head of authority off of each of the following radicalizing organizations and let each of these be exposed, completely uprooted and decimated from our land.” That list includes the youth-led, climate-action group Sunrise Movement and 350, the anti-global-warming organization.
A related post, titled “What’s Coming,” includes this prayer: “Lord, let Your Word regarding the traitor’s fate come to pass, let the military trials and all God-declared executions come forth in this season of reckoning and restoration.”
These types of death edicts are scattered among seemingly contradictory calls for “peace” and lengthy passages of more traditional Christian rhetoric. Bushey did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked if he thought his QAnon beliefs might turn off voters in western Aroostook County, Bushey told Barry, “Well, I don’t know. They’re going to have to make their decisions on their own about who I am and what I stand for. I’m a pro-life candidate and I believe in God and I believe in family. And I’m going to work very hard to let people know it’s time that we bring that type of approach to government.”
Mainer contributor Andy O’Brien contributed research for this article.
A lot of this move to the right by some Jews is rooted in zionism. Nationalism always leads to the right and ultimately to fascism. What other force is so powerful it can turn Jews into Nazis? Still, as a secular Jew, I find nazified Jews particularly loathsome
A firm started by a group of Trump lawyers highlights the campaign’s connections to the false conspiracy theory and reinforces how deeply it has taken hold in the Republican Party.
Senior lawyers for the Trump campaign set up a small law firm last year that is working for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican House candidate in Georgia with a history of promoting QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory.
While federal filings show that the firm, Elections L.L.C., principally collects fees from the president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, it also does work for a number of congressional candidates, and none more so than Ms. Greene, underscoring the connections between QAnon and Mr. Trump and his inner circle. The latest example came Thursday night, when President Trump repeatedly declined to disavow QAnon at a televised town hall.
Ms. Greene is one of several Republican candidates who openly espouse the collection of bogus and bizarre theories embraced by followers of QAnon, who have been labeled a potential domestic terror threat by the F.B.I. and who former President Barack Obama warned Wednesday were infiltrating the mainstream of the Republican Party. QAnon imagines, falsely, that a Satanic cabal of pedophile Democrats are plotting against Mr. Trump, plays on anti-Semitic tropes and stokes realworldviolence — and has been expounded on at length by Ms. Greene in videos.
Elections L.L.C. was founded last year by Justin Clark, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and Stefan Passantino, a former top ethics lawyer in the Trump White House. Matthew Morgan, the Trump campaign’s counsel, is also a partner at the firm. Ms. Greene’s campaign has made 14 payments to the firm since last year, worth nearly $70,000 in total, the most of any congressional campaign.
Mr. Passantino appears in records filed with the Georgia secretary of state as the lawyer who incorporated Ms. Greene’s campaign committee, though the full scope of his work for the candidate is unclear. He also does legal work for a Georgia political operative, Jason D. Boles, who is a personal friend of Ms. Greene’s and who helped set up her campaign. (Mr. Boles has been a recent subject of controversy, after it emerged that he had helped bankroll an effort to infiltrate and discredit voting rights groups in North Carolina.)
Mr. Passantino worked in the White House as a deputy counsel in charge of ethics policy until 2018, and among other things, he dealt with personal financial disclosures related to the president’s eldest daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump. Last year, he was hired by the Trump Organization to handle investigations by Democrats in the House of Representatives. Some of the money that the Trump campaign has paid to Elections L.L.C. has also been directed to him, federal filings show, though it is not clear for what work.
Neither Mr. Clark, Mr. Morgan nor Mr. Passantino commented for this story. In a statement, the Trump campaign said, “Elections L.L.C. is a law firm like many others that do campaign work. Just like any other law firm, its lawyers have clients that have no relationship to other lawyers of the firm or their clients.”
The campaign did not elaborate further, nor did it say whether Mr. Passantino was the only lawyer who had performed work on Ms. Greene’s behalf. Ms. Greene’s campaign did not reply to requests for comment, but earlier this year she told Open Secrets, a site run by the Center for Responsive Politics, that Mr. Passantino worked as her lawyer and Elections L.L.C. did compliance work related to elections filings.
The fact that a law firm with close ties to the White House is doing work for one of the most prominent proponents of QAnon shows how quickly the conspiracy theory has moved from the far-right fringe to the center of Republican politics, presenting a significant challenge to the party at a time when it is already being rejected by many moderate voters.
Ms. Greene has said, without evidence, that after the 2018 elections there was “an Islamic invasion into our government offices,” once questioned whether a plane had actually crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and has said we have “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.” She has also suggested that “Saudi Arabia, the Rothschilds, and Soros” — referring to George Soros, the financier and supporter of progressive causes — are “the puppet masters that fund this global evil.”
While some of her comments have been condemned by House Republicans, Mr. Trump has embraced her candidacy and called her “a future Republican star” and “a real WINNER!” He has also frequently retweeted postings by QAnon followers. During a contentious exchange at the televised town hall Thursday over his promotion of false conspiracy theories, he said of QAnon: “I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard.”
His campaign has presented an uneven response to QAnon. It canceled the appearance of a QAnon-connected speaker at the Republican National Convention this summer, and last month, Vice President Mike Pence canceled an appearance hosted by QAnon supporters.
But campaign officials have struggled to explain their support for Ms. Greene.
“QAnon is not something that we focus on,” Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, told MSNBC in August when asked about Ms. Greene. “We have a lot of things that we work on here in the campaign,” he added. “And chasing down various conspiracy theories is not one of them.”
Ms. Greene, for her part, said in a Fox News interview published in August that QAnon was not a focus of her campaign, adding, “My campaign message the entire time was save America, stop Socialism.”
The creation of Elections L.L.C. reflects an ongoing pattern by Trump campaign officials of collecting payments through new businesses they set up around the campaign, a practice honed by the former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, before his ouster this summer. Mr. Clark also set up a firm called National Public Affairs last year with Bill Stepien, who replaced Mr. Parscale as campaign manager in July.
The founders of Elections L.L.C., Mr. Clark and Mr. Passantino, are also both prominent partners at Michael Best, a Wisconsin-based law firm that has an affiliated lobbying and government relations firm chaired by Reince Priebus, the former R.N.C. chairman, who worked with both men while he served as Mr. Trump’s first White House chief of staff. Mr. Clark is on leave from Michael Best, while Mr. Passantino chairs its government regulations and public policy practice.
The firm’s managing partner, David Krutz, said that Elections L.L.C. had no affiliation with his firm and said Mr. Passantino “maintained a clear division of work” between the two firms. (An associate at Michael Best, Nathan Groth, has also done work for Elections L.L.C.)
With Election Day approaching, Ms. Greene appears to be assured of victory. Her primary opponent, a conservative neurosurgeon named John Cowan, used the slogan “All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment,” and once told Politico, “She deserves a YouTube channel, not a seat in Congress. She’s a circus act.”
But Ms. Greene handily prevailed in her heavily Republican district, and her Democratic opponent has dropped out of the race.
“The Republican establishment was against me,” Ms. Greene said in her victory speech after a runoff in August. “The D.C. swamp is against me. And the lying fake news media hates my guts. It’s a badge of honor.”
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting and Rachel Shorey contributed research.
