Off-Guardian is a red-brown conspiracy-mongering website peddling the same kind of bullshit found in Zero Hedge and Global Research. Since March they have been publishing COVID-19 denialist propaganda that overlaps with the far-right. Not every red-brown outlet is okay with this. For example, Moon of Alabama has an analysis much closer to reality. Eric Zuesse, a long-time contributor to Off-Guardian, finally got fed up and wrote an article for another red-brown website based in Russia called Strategic Culture taking Off-Guardian to task. His article was titled "People who are in denial about COVID-19" (https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/24/people-who-are-in-denial-about-coronavirus/). This led the editor of Off-Guardian to write a reply. I understand that these people are off their rocker but they do reflect a tendency on the fringes of the left to get intoxicated by conspiracism.

https://off-guardian.org/2020/08/27/offguardian-is-not-in-denial/

The article is behind a paywall. Would it possible for you to post the text?

_._,_._,_

---

https://www.ft.com/content/fb8013e0-6e5a-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914

Plan to publish full works of Marx is long tome in the making

Tobias Buck in Berlin JUNE 15 2018

Plan to publish full works of Marx is long tome in the making Berlin academic leads 100-year project stymied by war and executions Gerald Hubmann is in charge of the completion of the collected works of Marx and Engels at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Share Save Tobias Buck in Berlin JUNE 15 2018

Plan to publish full works of Marx is long tome in the making Berlin academic leads 100-year project stymied by war and executions Gerald Hubmann is in charge of the completion of the collected works of Marx and Engels at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Share Save Tobias Buck in Berlin JUNE 15 2018 39 Print this page The 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birthday prompted books, celebrations, and conferences while his home town of Trier marked the occasion last month by putting up a 5.5m statue of the German philosopher.

The greatest monument to Marx and his legacy, however, has remained under construction, one page at a time, in a modest office in central Berlin. Here, at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Gerald Hubmann is in charge of one of the most extraordinary book projects of modern times: the completion — after almost a century of work — of the collected works of Marx and Friedrich Engels, the twin prophets of Communism. Capitalising on the excitement of this year’s Marx bicentenary has not been a concern for Mr Hubmann. If all went well, he said in an interview, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (known to researchers by the apt acronym Mega) would be completed in another 15 years.  So far he and a team of collaborators worldwide have released 66 volumes, with 24 volumes to go. An additional 20 volumes comprising mainly of letters and excerpts will be published in digital form only. Their work builds on a number of previous, and dramatically aborted, attempts that stretch back to 1920s Moscow — since when this gargantuan publishing task has experienced almost as many ups and downs as the political ideas the two men spawned. Several of Mr Hubmann’s predecessors ended up in front of a Soviet firing squad after the Stalin regime grew alarmed at the project’s content and direction.

Work on the early edition was abandoned in 1941, with just 12 volumes published. It restarted in the 1970s under a team of researchers from the Soviet Union and East Germany but their progress, too, met a historical roadblock, with the abrupt demise of the two sponsoring countries in 1990. The task of finding, editing and publishing every word written by the two men is grand not just in scale, but in political complexity. Mr Hubmann, a 56-year-old literary scholar and specialist in philosophy, argued that the current edition marked a radical departure. “Even the earliest editions of Marx and Engels were not guided by a desire for authenticity, but were meant to serve certain political interests. That is what makes our edition different: our sole aim is to publish the works of Marx and Engels completely and authentically, according to recognised academic standards,” he said. He is convinced that the lack of rigorous, unbiased editing in previous editions has left generations of readers in the capitalist west and communist east with a defective view of Marx and Marxism. “The image of Marx that we had was too narrow and too ideological.

He was looked at with political interests and political aspects in mind. But Marx saw himself above all as a researcher and a scientist,” he said.  Mr Hubmann pointed to Marx’s famous failure to complete his most substantial work, Das Kapital, as indicative of the misunderstanding. “If Marx had been a pure ideologue, or if he had only had political goals in mind, he would have had no problem finishing Das Kapital — as indeed others later did for him,” he said. “But this was not what Marx was about. Marx simply had not completed his research and could not come up with a conclusion.” Even 200 years after Marx’s birth, moves to correct received interpretations and views of his work can be politically explosive. The Chinese Communist party, for example, has followed the progress closely. Last year, when Mr Hubmann and his team released their long-awaited version of “The German Ideology” — a core part of the Marx-Engels canon, which includes the famous observation that “social existence determines consciousness” — scholars in Beijing were far from pleased. The new version made clear that Marx and Engels never planned to publish the work in its current form.

Instead, the manuscripts assembled and released under that title almost half a century after Marx’s death were part of an aborted magazine project by the two writers.  “The Chinese cannot accept that there is no work called The German Ideology. They see this as removing one of the pillars of Marxism,” said Mr Hubmann. Manuscripts written by Marx and Engels. It is not easy to decipher the intent and direction of their output because of poor handwriting and a tendency to doodle Nor is it easy to decipher the intent and direction of Marx and Engels’ prodigious output. They often wrote side by side on a single page, making it hard to work out what was written first and what was meant to replace other passages. Marx’s famously poor handwriting is one obstacle; his tendency to doodle another. Mice have chomped their way through some key pages. 

Despite his decades of immersion in the work, Mr Hubmann said he was no Marxist. His book-filled office in central Berlin is dominated by a large bust of the German thinker, but the bronze head is placed irreverently on a wooden crate marked “Fragile”. For all the academic distance, Mr Hubmann said Marx had gained relevance and readers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of papers and books about the philosopher has risen sharply. Every release of the collected works has thousands of buyers while translations of the revised edition are under way globally.  “The first pages of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx writes about the way that capitalism spreads across the world, its need to establish connections everywhere, how everything that is solid melts into air — there is a certain prophetic quality about this,” said Mr Hubmann. “I feel very much reminded of today.” 

The article is behind a paywall. Would it possible for you to post the text?

This text presents snippets of an ongoing conversation between two friends from Montenegro, Jovan Džoli Ulićević, a trans activist and biologist, and Čarna Brković, an anthropologist. We met many years ago, during the activist meetings that led to the creation of one of the first Montenegrin NGOs working on the LGBT issues, “Queer Montenegro.” Today, Jovan is a co-founder and director of Association Spectra, which is the only trans-led organization in Montenegro working on the promotion and protection of human rights of transgender, gender diverse and intersex persons, and a member of the Trans Network Balkan, a regional trans and intersex organization. Čarna is a political anthropologist, who obtained her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Manchester. Among various research fields, her research topics include gender and sexuality, humanitarianism, the state, and the epistemology of humanities and social sciences.

https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/trans-in-montenegro/

Turkey and the Growing Tensions in Eastern Mediterranean

Theses on the complex contradictions between imperialist and regional powers, the Arab Revolution and the consequential tactics of Marxists

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/turkey-and-the-growing-tensions-in-eastern-mediterranean/

-- 
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
aktiv@...
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314

(By the way, when the streets are open in my Queens neighborhood the bat and ball game played by the kids is ... cricket.)

Pardon my aside, but that is fascinating.

I don't know that I'd say that mlb is mostly white players. There are a significant number of Latinx players. But these days there are far fewer African American players in the game.

Thanks for the correction, although I have to note that Latinx players haven't been too outspoken on political issues.

On 26 Aug 2020 at 11:17, Mark Lause wrote:

I thought I was fairly familiar with Marx's biography, but I sure
can't remember ever encountering
"a Marxist idea of what party-building is ".  He was at the edges
of a few very contradictory
formations.  Do you mean the German Social Democracy?  I think
Trotsky was familiar with it.

Am I missing something?
_._,_._,_

You might examine the section "The history of the proletarian party" in "An outline
of Trotskyism's anti-Marxist theories (part three)" at
http://www.communistvoice.org/34cTrotsky.html.

--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus