Notice: Rebuilding Marxmail 

the Utah server that housed Marxmail is down and doesn't appear to be coming back any time soon. Lou and I have decided to migrate the list to groups.io. our first task to is to get people re-subscribed, after which we will deal with archives and such. There are a bunch of other features at groups.io, more on them later. 

in the meantime here is the plan: 

1.  we've taken the subscriber list from April 2020 (the last time we accessed the list) and split it into four groups,

   • a few of the regulars,  so we can learn the ropes of inviting/subscribing, email delivery ON no digest

   • those who had email delivery turned off

   • those getting the digest (plain or html)

   • those getting each post (plain or html)

2.  we will  bulk subscribe each of these groups separately. To set your delivery option to digest (plain or html) or to no delivery, go to the Subscription tab for marxmail  (see screenshot at this link) once you log in and simply click on the option you want and then Save your options. email delivery each message is the default setting. 

3. to those of you who have unsubscribed since April: we apologize for mistakenly trying to re-subscribe you. you should be able to  simply refuse this invitation, or if you accepted, you should be able to easily unsub yourself using the groups.io interface. more on this as we get up and running.

4. i've set up the list so any new member has to send one moderated email before they can post unmoderated. this is a groups.io feature that is supposed to cut down on spammers and such. bear with us while we sort out these details. if i can turn off moderation completely i will, but the advantage of moderation for new subscribers is we can slow things down until everyone  sorts out their settings.

5. we will now allow HTML and photos and other attachments, within reason, as we have a fixed GB limit to storing these things for the use of the subscribers. We'll work out the details as the subscriber list stabilizes.

6. Lou and I will set up the home page and send instructions on changing your settings and how to use the new features of groups.io

7. note that you can use # hashtags to identify topics covered in your post

Les/Lou

Hi Stephen,

Yes, let's hope for the best. [fill in as you wish] knows we need this list.

In solidarity,

Mike

what program do you use for reading email? we can look for instructions on adding "safe" contacts.

Les

Online I use what originally was MSN mail, I think its now called Outlook.com. I rarely look at this online.

see if any of the information here is of use:

https://sumo.com/stories/whitelist-email

Les

This is a nice feature that didn't exist in the other list: being able to compose a message to the list directly from inside the interface. link: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/post

cool, i didnt realize "New Topic" meant a new post. duhhhhhh

Hegel’s dialectical analysis of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution provides the groundwork for Marx’s theory of historical materialism.

Why Hegel?

G.W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) presents us with one of the greatest critical overviews of the Enlightenment. The German philosopher Hegel wrote his magnum opus in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, and the legend goes that the ink on the Phenomenology manuscript was still wet when Hegel fled with it during the Battle of Jena (1806). Even amid the French occupation of Germany, Hegel saw Napoleon as the “world-spirit” on horseback and supported France’s revolutionary export of liberal institutions throughout Europe.1 By Spirit, Hegel means the development of human activity, or the historical process of emancipation, and Hegel wrote the Phenomenology as a philosophical odyssey of human freedom. Unfortunately, while devoting some space to discuss Hegel’s political views, Jonathan Israel fails to address the Phenomenology’s engagement with the Enlightenment project, as well its implications for the French Revolution and beyond.

(continued at:
https://www.leftvoice.org/hegel-enlightenment-and-revolution?fbclid=IwAR1kuXzlH7Did39Zr4mR0838CqdYtkhsvnoUHAye30k7XxTOAZhr9BM4UGE


Jim Farmelant
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfarmelant/
http://www.foxymath.com
Learn or Review Basic Math

NY Times Sunday Book Review, July 26, 2020
These Radical Black Thrillers Fantasized About Dismantling the Police
By Adam Langer

You could almost say these novels predicted their own fates. A telling bit of dialogue appears midway through “Operation Burning Candle,” Blyden Jackson’s 1973 thriller about a Black disciple of Jungian psychoanalysis who fakes his death in Vietnam and returns to America with a group of other veterans to take down the white establishment.

“You may get to write one book, maybe two,” a student activist warns the Jungian revolutionary, Aaron Rogers. “But they’ll get you because they have to. Your ideas are just too damn dangerous for them.”

In this exchange, Jackson foretold not only his character’s future but his own as an author, as well as that of the literary subgenre to which he belonged: the revolutionary Black thriller of the civil rights era. Composed of equal parts pulp fiction and radical politics, a series of novels by Black writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s fantasized about dismantling American police departments, the media and even the government itself — a marriage of form and content that landed them in the small oval of the Venn diagram where Fred Hampton and Frederick Forsyth overlap.

Some of the novels found popular and critical acclaim; one author was hailed in The New York Times as “among the best of contemporary novelists.” But their books soon vanished. Either the audience dried up or publishers got skittish about the radical content and moved on. The authors moved on too — to new topics or, more often, new careers.

These days, the books are tough to find. They’re available as mildewed paperbacks on Bookfinder.com, in small-run reprints from university presses or as hard-to-read bootleg PDFs. Yet their themes and plotlines — featuring corrupt police officers who take their cut from drug dealers’ profits, and institutionalized racism that pays only lip service to equal opportunity — remain distressingly relevant. Together, the trajectories of the books, their heroes and their authors offer a cautionary tale about the struggle to achieve lasting progress on civil rights in America, as well as about the danger of creating speculative fiction that’s a little too truthful for comfort.

Blyden Jackson was a Marine drill instructor who worked in the ’60s as an organizer for a New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, where he embraced the tactics of civil disobedience to draw attention to inequities in education. In 1964, he helped stage a sit-down protest, tying up traffic on the Triborough Bridge. For a time, he was romantically involved with Eleanor Holmes Norton, who would become a nonvoting delegate to Congress, representing Washington, D.C. One wonders if she inspired “Elaine,” the young activist in “Operation Burning Candle” who tells Aaron his ideas are too dangerous to get away with more than a book or two.

Elaine’s prophecy proved accurate. Notwithstanding a rave review from Mel Watkins — the first Black editor on the staff of The New York Times Book Review — Jackson published only one more novel: “Totem” (1975), an African quest story that’s even harder to find than his debut. Jackson went on to a comparatively anonymous existence as a husband, father, emergency medical technician and president of an ambulance squad in Middlebury, Vt. When he died in 2012, he left behind an unpublished novel: “For One Day of Freedom.”

Uncanny parallels exist between his first book, “Operation Burning Candle,” and the Black radical thriller “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” (1969), by Sam Greenlee. I was reading Greenlee’s book on a bench in the 103rd Street subway station when I noticed a stocky man looming over me. He had a big beard, long dreads and a United States Army jacket buttoned up all the way. “That’s a good book, man,” he said, then made a solemn Black Power fist and strode off.

This is the sort of book you want to discuss with strangers. In it, Dan Freeman, a seemingly mild-mannered, jazz-loving Chicago intellectual, becomes the C.I.A.’s first Black employee and uses the techniques he learns at the agency to train gang members in his hometown to start a revolution he won’t survive to witness. Greenlee based the novel partly on his experiences as an information officer working overseas for the United States Foreign Service. Even more than 50 years after it was published, the book feels thrillingly incendiary, as if it, like its hero, were only pretending to play by the rules while actually providing a blueprint for revolution. “No one could imagine that Freeman, tame, smug and self-satisfied, would ever rock the boat; much less suspect that he planned to sink it,” Greenlee writes.

Though “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was adapted into a film in 1973, Greenlee, like Jackson, published only one other novel: “Baghdad Blues,” in 1976. It follows a disillusioned Black Foreign Service worker during a coup in Iraq, where Greenlee was posted in the 1950s. With its suspicion of Western imperialism and its skeptical hero, who finds more in common with the Iraqis than with his fellow Americans, the novel is a spiritual cousin to Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.” Its attitude is neatly summed up in an observation that appears while the coup is taking place outside the United States Embassy: “I walked through the gloomy halls, watched the frightened white faces and inside I laughed like hell.”

By contrast, Barry Beckham’s 1972 novel “Runner Mack” is much more phantasmagorical and impressionistic. There are echoes of Malamud and portents of “Da Five Bloods” as it tracks the misfortunes of a baseball phenom drafted into the Army. There he meets the charismatic Runnington (Runner) Mack, who hatches a quixotic plan to bomb the White House. But Mack’s fate — dead by suicide — and that of Beckham’s career as a literary writer fit the pattern of the genre’s other radical Black authors and novels. Feted with raves for “Runner Mack,” Beckham had a varied career, editing college guides for Black students, writing nonfiction, teaching creative writing at Brown and Hampton universities and starting his own publishing company. But his next novel, “Will You Be Mine?,” didn’t appear until 2006, and then via his own Beckham Publications Group.

Julian Moreau’s 1967 “The Black Commandos,” in which a group of highly skilled fighters battle bigots, fly a saucer to Washington, D.C., and take over America, is a utopian revenge fantasy that can be seen as a precursor to modern novels, graphic and otherwise, featuring Black superheroes. John Edgar Wideman’s 1973 “The Lynchers,” about a group of Black men who plan to lynch a white police officer, is doleful and ambitiously literary, anticipating Wideman’s distinguished writing career. Both novels share with the others an intensity, an immediacy and a timeliness, despite being consigned to obscurity decades ago.

Near the end of “Operation Burning Candle,” Aaron Rogers flags down a cab. He’s been shot in the gut by a cop after having launched an attack on the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden. The driver wants to take him to the hospital.

“Can’t go to the damn hospital,” Aaron says. “Take me to Harlem!”

The driver drops him off at 116th and Lenox, and he staggers into a playground. Racked with pain, he deliriously imagines that he is being dragged onto a slave ship. But in his dying moments, he looks up: Lights flicker in apartments across the way. People have lit candles, expressing solidarity with the revolution he has started.

“Everywhere there were burning candles!” Jackson writes. “Aaron lay back down. He was glad.”

Today, if you walk to the intersection where Aaron exited his cab, it’s hard to say which playground Jackson had in mind. Two are equidistant from the corner of 116th and Lenox Avenue. One is named for Sojourner Truth, the other for Martin Luther King Jr. On a recent Saturday morning, you couldn’t see any candles in the windows, but on three of the four street corners, vendors sold Black Lives Matter T-shirts and face masks; some had “I CAN’T BREATHE” printed on them. Juneteenth parade marchers chanted slogans and carried black, red and green American flags and pictures of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. And, if you looked up, you could see signs in some windows. One said “BLM.” Another was a sheet of paper cut into a heart.

Adam Langer is the author of a memoir and five novels. He is the senior editor of The Forward.

I've been getting notices of each comrade who is now being resubbed. We're up to 165 and have about another 1200 to go. We are working with an April backup that Les Schaffer made so it might not have newer subscriptions. By the same token, there might be a handful of people who unsubbed between April and now. My apologies for having to make them unsub again and to those of you who need to resub. All in all, things should stabilize in a few days and we should be in good shape.