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Commercial Capitalism | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Louis Proyect
I’m not a professional historian, but I get to play one on the Internet. One of the historical debates that I have been absorbed with since the mid-1990s is over capitalism’s origin. When James Blaut, an anthropology professor who died in 2000, showed up on the Marxism list around then, he had just published “The Colonizer’s Model of the World.” In this book and the next installment for a planned trilogy on Eurocentrism, he challenged the idea that capitalism originated in England and diffused to the rest of the world. The second book was titled “Eight Eurocentric Historians” and included a chapter on Robert Brenner, a professor emeritus at UCLA who gathered disciples under the banner of “Political Marxism.” In brief, Political Marxism, also known as the Brenner thesis, theorizes that capitalism began in the British countryside in the 15th century. For reasons too lengthy to detail here, lease farming on large estates set into motion a market-driven process that inevitably led to the industrial revolution and the British Empire. As a corollary to the Brenner thesis, there is an argument that slavery and precapitalist colonialism had nothing to do with England’s “take off.” Furthermore, in the USA, as historians Charles Post and James Clegg argue, slavery was an obstacle to the growth of capitalism and had little impact on economic development in the north. Unlike the often arcane debate over whether lease farming was the prima facie basis for take off, the slavery debate had much more relevance to current days. The so-called New Historians of Capitalism, such as Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert, wrote books linking slavery to America’s capitalist success. For this transgression, the Trump administration linked their scholarship to Project 1619 and called for a curriculum purged of such anti-American propaganda. Over the years, I have written sixty-two articles contributing to this debate, but assuredly nobody would mistake them for the work of a professional historian. On the other hand, since most of the exchanges occur in paywalled, peer-reviewed journals, my articles might be where many non-academics first learn about the issues. This article will take up “A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism,” the latest book by Jairus Banaji, a professional historian who received the Isaac Deutscher prize in 2011 for “Theory as History.” Other critics of the Brenner thesis include Kerem Nisancioglu and Alexander Anievas, the authors of “How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism,” and Irfan Habib, the author of articles such as “The rise of capitalism in England: Reviewing the Brenner thesis.” full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/11/06/commercial-capitalism/
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Trump's spiritual adviser speaking in tongues
Louis Proyect
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BIDEN'S DEBACLE ON THE BORDER
Louis Proyect
(From FB) BIDEN'S DEBACLE ON THE BORDER by Mike Davis. The best illustration of Latino second-class citizenship within the Democratic Party is not Miami/Dade where wealthy Cuban and Venezuelan exiles pulled out all the stops to cut the blue margin, but in the seven major Texas border counties whose population of 2.6 million people is 90% Mexican origin (tejano). The national party has many neglected or abandoned constituencies, including Puerto Rico, Indian Country and Appalachia, but southern Texas has a unique strategic significance. This was acknowledged two days before the election when Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez visited the McAllen area. "The road to the White House," he declared, "goes through South Texas. Remember, Beto lost by about 200,000 votes in 2018. We can make up these votes alone in Valley. If we take Latino turnout from 40% to 50%, that's enough to flip Texas." But the Biden campaign failed to pave that road with campaign resources and attention to local issues. Continuing a long tradition of electoral negligence, the national Democrats were confident that Biden would automatically enlarge Clinton's winning margin in the region without having to divert funds and personnel from all-important suburban battlefields in Texas and elsewhere. The border, after all, is one of the poorest regions in the country with a population routinely vilified by Republican propaganda as aliens and welfare cheats in a state where polls were predicting historic Democratic victories. A blue wave along the Rio Grande from El Paso to Brownsville was assured. As the hallucination of great gains in Texas dissipated on Wednesday, however, Democrats were stunned to discover that a high turnout had instead propelled a Trump surge along the border. In the three Rio Grande Valley counties (the agricultural corridor from Brownsville to Rio Grande City) which Clinton had carried had carried by 40%, Biden harvested a margin of only 15%. More than half of the population of Starr County, an ancient battlefield of the Texas farmworkers movement, lives in poverty yet Trump won 47% of the vote, an incredible gain of 28% since 2016. Further up river he actually flipped 82% Latino Val Verde Co. (the McAllen area) and increased his vote in Maverick Co. (Eagle Pass) by 24% and Webb Co. (Laredo) by 15%. Rep. Even in El Paso, a hotbed of Democratic activism, he made a 6% gain. Considering South Texas as a whole, Democrats had great hopes of winning the 21st CD which connects San Antonio and Austin, as well as the 78% Latino 23rd. which is anchored in the western suburbs of San Antonio and encompasses a vast swathe of southwestern Texas. In both cases, Republicans easily won. Vincente Gonzalez (D-McAllen) had to fight down to the wire to save the seat he won by 21% in 2018. (The attached file contains complete demographics and election returns for the seven border counties.) Explanation? As Congressman Filemon Velas (D-Brownsville) bitterly complained to a Harlingen newspaper, "I think there was no Democratic national organizational effort in South Texas and the results showed. The visits are nice, but without a planned media and grassroots strategy, you just can't sway voters. When you take voters for granted like national Democrats have done in South Texas for 40 years, there are consequences to pay." Share
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The Election and the Empire
Ron Jacobs
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From solidarity to politics: Transformative action along the Balkan migration route | Lefteast
Louis Proyect
Note from the
LeftEast editors:
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Re: Trump makes baseless election fraud claims in White House address
workerpoet
The bourgeois,media by covering or airing Trump's inane raving conspiracies, correctons aside, are grossly irresponsible and criminally complicit in his campaign of desperate incitement.
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Re: Tony McKenna on lesser-evilism
This is great.Do you have a link so I can share this?
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Re: Why I voted for Howie Hawkins
I am wondering if there are any active Green Party members in this group. I don't just mean Green Party voters, but people who are actual members of their local Green Party ,and do any amount of party work. If there are,I would be interested in knowing what your local Green Party is like. What is the class makeup of the memership? How much of your time is spent on working on legislative work ,be it at the state house ,or the city council level? How much of your time is spent out in the streets ,where the poor and working class are ,both trying to build the party ,and practicing mutual aid programs? How good are you at both growing the membership of your branch ,and keeping existing members?
I was a Green for a number of years. I wasted a good part of this time tagging along with people whose sole purpose was not trying to build the party ,or doing any serious activism and outreach ,but basically being ameteur lobbyists ,at the state house ,city council ,etc trying to influence policy. The membership consisted almost entirely of upper class, or upper middle class liberals, with more than a touch of elitism in each member. One of the party chairs lived alone in a secluded mountainside development of what you would call McMansions. Another spent close to seven figures remoldeling his home. They were all dedicated capitalists ,with little interest in the eco-socialism the the party claims to believe in. It was very difficult to keep their membership above the core group of like four or five people. Most of the younger ,or working class people ,who were excited by a candidate ,like Jill Stein,or Cynthia McKinney did not stick around long. The party I am now involved in ,does exactly what John Reimann talks about ,as far as trying to build a party of the poor ,and working class. Most of us do fit this description ,and spend a lot of our time trying to recruit new members among these classes ,and we are growing like the proverbial weed. There are union members in pretty much every branch ,in all fifty states ,and we have solidarity ,and connections ,with communist ,and socialist parties ,in countries around the world. Our branches are also heavily involved in mutual aid programs ,in the tradition of the BP Party ,and communists in the 1930s. As for Trump, how many times have you heard ,or read, that the reason this election is so close, is because Biden, and the Democrats ,have given the voters nothing to vote for, other than the fact Biden is not Trump. Had Biden offered even just Medicare For All ,during the worst pandemic in 100+ years ,the most cases ,most deaths ,etc of any country in the world ,Trump would have been trounced in a landslide. I am among those who say getting rid of Trump will either not make much difference, or will make the protest movement we have seen among Trump's white nationalist base even worse. I think most of here believe that Trump is not unique ,we only have to go back to George Wallace ,and Lester Maddox. I think most of us would agree that we would have seen a similar political climate ,had either of those guys become president. No, Trump has completely remade the Republican Party in his own image ,as much as Goldwater ,or Reagan did. It's very likely we will see a candidate even worse than Trump ,vomited up by the Republicans ,in 2024.
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Forwarded from Anthony Boyton on the election
Louis Proyect
(Anthony is having technical problems.) A True
Waste Of Time
John Reimann thinks that this year, socialists, revolutionaries, and Marxists (among whom he numbers himself) should have voted for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden. His one and only argument is “There never has been a president like Trump at least since the US Civil War, meaning there has never been an election like this one. Trump's moves towards one man rule/Bonapartism are unprecedented. If he gets back in, it will be through a vast increase in this tendency, which will vastly strengthen his move in that direction. As others have pointed out, his form of Bonapartism - if it is consolidated - is similar to that of Victor Orban in Hungary. Here, it will be bolstered by the rise of the violent vigilante groups.” I think John is very sadly mistaken for a number of reasons. First, the rise of violent right wing vigilante groups began before Trump came into office, and will continue whether or not he wins this election. Trump did not suck those groups out of his thumb, even if he aided their growth. Those groups are growing primarily because they fear that the end of white racial privilege is near. Their fears are fully justified: it is near. Trump did not create the changing demographics of the United States, he only has played on it to win votes. Trump did not create the vigilante groups, he only uses them to help him win votes. If he loses the election he will use them in other ways. Maybe they will try to break him out of jail, maybe they will help improve the ratings of his next reality show. Second, one man rule will not happen in the United States unless a very powerful sector of the capitalist class is behind it. Right now, that is not the case. Trump has cobbled together an amalgam of disparate wealthy individuals and political forces to make up his MAGA monster. He relied on the Mercers, he allied with the Kochs (now only Koch), he made deals with casino owners and offshore financial businesses. He roped in the evangelicals and the right wing of the Catholic church by promising them judgeships, he pandered to the NRA, and he especially pandered to white racism. However, the heavy hitters of the ruling class only put their toes in his pond once he was elected. Except for Mnuchin, they are all gone now. The Republican party itself despises Trump, as revealed by all of the tell-all books of his former collaborators, the remarks of Senator Sasse, and many other signs. They use him for as long as he is useful to get votes. They only defended him from impeachment because of his ability to turn on and turn off a spigot of votes that they desperately need. His own base of aging white reality show and wrestling fans is an add-on to the important petty bourgeois sectors of the traditional Republican base. The Republicans are being abandoned by big capital as attested to by the movement of Republican politicians into Biden’s camp, by the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement of 30 Democrats in House races, and by Biden’s impressive fund raising eclipse of Trump. John does not understand the American constitutional system very well. It solved the problem of Bonapartism long before Napoleon Bonaparte or his nephew ever came to power. Bonapartism is not simply “one man rule”. Bonapartism is one man rule based on playing off the interests of different social classes and class fractions. The constitution of the United States has a system called a “balance of power”. It establishes a temporary Bonaparte as president. The president has enormous, but not unlimited power. Throughout US history the president has represented one or another class fraction, or alliance of class fractions, of the ruling class. For most of the
period from the constitutional coup until the election of 1860,
the president
represented an alliance of the southern slave owners, a sector
of northern
mercantile capital, and the small farmers of the west: all
united in westward
expansion. Various reformations of the alliances of ruling class fractions
occurred over the next century until the New Deal/World War
II/Cold War alliance
came into being. In its final Cold War version it united
financial, industrial,
agricultural and merchant capital into the modern two party
system that we know
so well. Every president from FDR to Obama represented that
powerful alliance
of ruling class fractions. Nevertheless, it had begun to come undone by the 1970’s, and has been unraveling ever since. John is right to say that, “There never has been a president like Trump.” Trump is the first president since FDR who has not represented that ruling class alliance. They were as surprised as everyone else when their tried and tested electoral system chose the wrong person (from their point of view) in 2016. They spent the next four years trying to use Trump, to steer him, and to curb him. Their problem is that their alliance is dying and they no longer have sufficient consensus to act together. They do not have consensus about Europe, China, global warming, COVID-19, the changing demographics of the USA, and most especially they do not have consensus about how to manage the fact that there are no new areas of the world for capitalism to expand into. They cannot “grow the pie” so that all of them can keep getting their shares, or bigger shares. The pie’s growth is over, and so are the politics based on never-ending capitalist growth. Trump’s election revealed the cracks in their ranks, but Trump has not become the center ofr any new alliance of significant ruling class fractions, nor does he have any solid mass base among the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. For now, Biden and the Democrats represent the center of gravity of the American ruling class. Nevertheless, and sadly, this year most of what passes for the left, and most of those who style themselves revolutionaries and Marxists, campaigned and voted for this imperialist ruling class candidate. A tiny minority stood up for principle, and to point the way out of the trap of the Democratic party. They supported the Green Party campaign of Howie Hawkins, the Peace and Freedom Party in California, or one of the write-in campaigns such as that of Socialist Action. Of those, the most visible, the most principled, and the one with the best program, was Howie Hawkins' Green Party campaign. John thinks that “campaigning and voting for Hawkins was an even bigger waste of time than voting for Biden.” He thinks this because he fervently hopes that Biden will stop the growth of the rightwing vigilantes, even though he knows that Biden will not. He thinks this even though he knows Biden is the candidate of Wall Street. Somehow, John has convinced himself and anyone who follows him, to follow the DSA into the most important imperialist political party in the world. IMHO the task of revolutionaries, especially the task of Marxists, is not to join the reformist left in the Democratic Party, but to help the reformists find their way out of the Democratic Party and onto the path of independent socialist and working class political action. John has never been afraid of being in a minority before (even a minority of one), but apparently Trump has scared him so much that is willing to throw a lifetime of political experience out the window. Anthony
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N.Y.P.D. Anti-Harassment Official Accused of Racist Rants
Louis Proyect
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Trump makes baseless election fraud claims in White House address
Louis Proyect
Murdoch newspaper smacks Trump down.
https://nypost.com/2020/11/05/trump-to-speak-from-white-house-as-vote-count-leans-toward-biden/
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NY Times: E.S. Reddy, Who Led U.N.’s Efforts Against Apartheid, Dies at 96
Alan Ginsberg
E.S. Reddy, Who Led U.N.’s Efforts Against Apartheid, Dies at 96An Indian-born acolyte of Gandhi, he campaigned for boycotts, divestments and other protests against the South African government.  E.S. Reddy, an Indian-born acolyte of Gandhi who spearheaded efforts at the United Nations to end apartheid in South Africa, died on Sunday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, who hailed Mr. Reddy’s “commitment to human rights” and his epitomizing “social solidarity.” From 1963 to 1984, Mr. Reddy oversaw the U.N.’s efforts against apartheid first as principal secretary of the Special Committee Against Apartheid and then as director of the Center Against Apartheid. He campaigned for boycotts and other economic sanctions against the white South African government, which segregated and oppressed Black people and subordinated the country’s large population of Indian immigrants. He also lobbied relentlessly for the release of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned anti-apartheid leader who was finally freed in 1990 and then elected South Africa’s first Black head of state four years later. “There is no one at the United Nations who has done more to expose the injustices of apartheid and the illegality of the South African regime than he has,” Sean MacBride, a former U.N. commissioner for Namibia and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said of Mr. Reddy in 1985. In a 2004 interview for the book “No Easy Victories” (2007), Mr. Reddy, influenced by Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent resistance to India’s British colonial rulers, explained the genesis of his interest in South Africa: “I was already interested in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1940s, when the struggle in South Africa took on new forms and Indians and Africans were cooperating in the struggle. During the Second World War, the United States and Britain talked about four freedoms in the Atlantic Charter, but those freedoms didn’t apply to India or South Africa.” The vast pool of Indian contract workers who had immigrated to South Africa starting in the late 19th century had found common ground with Black citizens as another oppressed minority there. India was among the first countries to join what became an international movement to isolate South Africa through commercial and cultural boycotts, and to exert economic leverage by pressuring corporations, universities, foundations and pension funds worldwide to divest themselves of holdings in South African companies.Mr. Reddy embraced that effort. “He had to face many obstacles and antagonisms, coming from the Western Powers mainly,” Mr. MacBride said, “but he had the skill, courage and determination necessary to overcome the systematic overt and covert opposition to the liberation of the people of Southern Africa.”  Image
Enuga Sreenivasulu Reddy was born on July 1, 1925, in Pallapatti, a village in southern India about 90 miles north of Madras. His father, E.V. Narasa Reddy, ran a mining company that exported mica. His mother was a homemaker. His father was jailed for participating in Gandhi’s protest campaigns, and his mother sold her jewelry to raise money for Gandhi’s efforts on behalf of India’s lowest caste, the so-called untouchables. Enuga himself led a strike as a high school student. After graduating from the University of Madras in 1943, he intended to earn an advanced degree in chemical engineering in Illinois, but the shortage of ships immediately after World War II delayed his arrival in the United States until the middle of the semester. When he finally did arrive, in New York, he decided to stay in the city, deciding that he could better keep abreast of events in India from there. Having forgotten by then much of the math he had learned as an undergraduate engineering student, he switched to political science and earned his master’s degree in the subject from New York University in 1948. He continued his studies at Columbia University. He married Nilufer Mizanoglu, a translator of the poet Nazim Hikmet. She survives him, along with their daughters, Mina Reddy and Leyla Tegmo-Reddy; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Utterly broke after a two-month U.N. internship, Mr. Reddy was hired by the then-fledgling United Nations in 1949 to conduct research as a political affairs officer. In the late 1940s, he became active in the Council on African Affairs, a group led by Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. It initially drew mainstream progressive support but faded after the government declared it a subversive organization in 1953 because some of its leaders had Communist ties. By then, India had gained its freedom from the British, a moment, Mr. Reddy said, that should have been the beginning of the end of colonialism. “I had a feeling that I did not do enough,” he said in the 2004 interview. “I did not make enough sacrifice for India’s freedom, so I should compensate by doing what I can for the rest of the colonies.” When he joined the U.N., he added, “that feeling was in the back of my mind.” After he retired in 1985, by then holding the title of assistant general secretary, Mr. Reddy wrote histories of the Black liberation and anti-apartheid movements and the links between India and South Africa. He was awarded the Joliot-Curie Medal of the World Peace Council in 1982. In 2013, he received the Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo from the South African government, an honor named for the former African National Congress president-in-exile. When Mr. Reddy celebrated his 96th birthday last July, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, a South African organization opposed to racism and corruption, congratulated him for a lifetime of “working tirelessly in support of the liberation movement” and “forging an unshakable bond between South Africa and his homeland, India.” Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times’s urban affairs correspondent and is the host of “The New York Times Close Up,” a weekly news and interview program on CUNY-TV. @samrob12
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With Eviction Bans Set To Expire, Jared Kushner-Owned Company Moved To Evict Hundreds Of Out-Of-Work Tenants
Louis Proyect
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Debt
jenorem
A large sum of money owed can seem strangely incorporeal—it may weigh
heavily while still feeling somehow abstract, unreal. Since shame
accrues to debt as
inexorably as interest, many people don’t like to talk about the topic,
rendering it even less visible. (An exception is the President, who has
boasted, “I’ve made a fortune by using debt.”) Like many other problems
in America, debt is often a systemic dilemma for which individual
solutions are expected—save more, cut up your credit cards, get a second
or a third or a fourth job. More than half of all overdue debt on
Americans’ credit reports is from medical bills—which, given the
fundamental facts of human morbidity and mortality, can be neither
avoided nor entirely planned for, especially in the absence of universal
health insurance. Meanwhile, forty-five million people in the United
States carry a collective total of 1.5 trillion dollars in student debt,
a direct result of a punishing formula: since the eighties, college
tuition has risen at four times the rate of inflation and eight times
that of household income. People make, and spend, their own money, to
paraphrase Marx (who knew a thing or two about debt, both personally and politically), but not under circumstances of their own making. Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
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H-Net Review [Jhistory]: Macfarlane on Kathke, 'Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854-1920'
Andrew Stewart
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 3:40 PM Subject: H-Net Review [Jhistory]: Macfarlane on Kathke, 'Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854-1920' To: <h-review@...> Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Torsten Kathke. Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854-1920. American Culture Studies Series. Bielefeld Transcript Verlag, 2017. 312 pp. $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8376-3790-8. Reviewed by Bryant Macfarlane (Kansas State University) Published on Jhistory (November, 2020) Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe Torsten Kathke, a resident lecturer at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies and assistant professor of American studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, offers a dynamic reinterpretation of the Americanization of what would come to be the states of Arizona and New Mexico. True to the analytical strengths of the Obama Institute, Kathke's inaugural publication is a highpoint in the interculturality, transnationalism, critical theory, and intradisciplinary reinterpretation of history. He follows the historiographical tradition founded by western history's "gang of four": Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon, and David Worster. In particular, Limerick would be proud of how Kathke eschews the dogmatic expressions of Turnerian frontier history. In what may be viewed as a seminal work in the New New (or Post-New) western history tradition, Kathke persuasively argues that "between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of World War I, Tucson, and the region that surrounds it, experienced a change not only unparalleled in the United States, but singular within a global context as well" (p. 12). This region--known as the Mesilla--of 29,760 square miles of land south of the Gila River and west of the Rio Grande, was desirable for a deep southern route for a transcontinental railroad and as a resolution for regional American-Mexican border disputes. Kathke examines how the last territory added to the continental United States under the Treaty of Mesilla--better known as the Gadsden Purchase--was markedly different, in both form and function, from other American territorial and polity additions. Through his example of Anglo, Hispano, and Native Americans living in southwestern communities, he offers a multidisciplinary approach that "emphasizes [that] the inherent hybridity of cultures and social interactions" within a community is the result of the community's contiguous region and the specific locations within the region (p. 14). Rejecting a Turnerist or Boltonian understanding of the nationalization of a porous borderland into a single national entity was not an easy process. However, Kathke argues that the Americanization of the Mesilla was a complex interaction between people and a physical environment. The argument laid out in _Wires That Bind_ identifies the unique confluence of events and people that provided a greater understanding of the changes within periphery regions across the globe "during the era of high nationalism and high imperialism at the turn of the century" (p. 22). _Wires That Bind_ has three distinct, nonconsecutive, and topically arranged sections. The first section, consisting of chapters 1 and 2, defines Kathke's terminology and method--modified from other social sciences--to outline how this complex milieu and the challenging environment were fundamentally different from the traditionally defined American West and of the American nation overall. Here Kathke defines the parameters of examination and presents an overarching thesis of Arizona and New Mexico as colonial borderlands through three micro-histories of Yuma and Tucson, Arizona, and Deming, New Mexico, as they relate to the existing body of research. The second portion encompasses chapters 3 and 6, which discuss the roles technology and governance played in transforming a predominantly disparate Hispano-Native American equilibrium into a more Anglo-homogenized society. By emphasizing Anglo control of communication through the mail, newspapers, social clubs, and telegraph--and later through powerful corporate rail, water, agriculture, and mining consortiums--as a method of government by proxy, Kathke paints a history whereby the Anglos continued to appropriate power from the Hispano elite since the early days of America's colonialization of Mesilla. He demonstrates how the pre-American Mesillan identity was forged through the direct result of generations of Spanish influence and neglect to form unique normative cultural and societal constructs. The post-Gadsden assault on these ways of life was to be protected through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the later 1853 Gadsden Treaty. However, the residents of the Mesilla were victimized by politicians and officials "guilty of historical ignorance compounded by lazy racism," and later Gilded Age corruption, like much of the West (p. 224). However, as Kathke persuasively argues, the Mesilla was geographically and socially different from California, Colorado, Texas, or the rest of the American West. Furthermore, the Mesilla's intrinsic ties to Spanish law and traditions, which were radically different from Anglo common law or traditions, led the Washington bureaucracy to adopt the line of thought that it is easier to ignore issues than to endeavor to overcome them. By homing in on the lackluster American execution of legal protections for property, water, and land use rights, Kathke gives an account with "all the makings of a Western tall tale, worthy of Mark Twain" of how the Mesilla Hispano-Native American residents were legally defrauded (p. 222). The extractive nature of Anglo cultivation in the Mesilla through extensive mining--supportable only through the beneficence of the US government's construction of telegraph-linked military fortifications to subdue Native American populations and public domain use of lands for rail and coastal transportation interests--typified the colonial experience abroad and in the Southwest. Mining, according to Kathke, was ruled by mobile communities of miners that "provided a stable cast of characters perpetuating certain solutions" that were often "exclusionary to blacks, Hispanos, American Indians, and other groups contextually identified to be outside of whiteness by the prevailing microclimate," which was only bolstered by the implementation of Anglo common law (p. 244). Because mining is a water-intensive action, industrial-scale extraction and water use were intrinsically linked. Water use soon moved away from a Spanish-American method of water sharing that ensured equal access to limited supplies of water toward an eastern riparian doctrine more suited to "industrial enterprises or industrial-scale agriculture, not communal husbandry of limited pastures" that typified the Mesilla (p. 227). The third section comprises chapters 4 and 5--the connective tissue, the human element of the narrative. Kathke initially presents a linear narrative of how the Mesilla initially welcomed Anglo-pioneers into its ethnic equilibrium, and then how, over a few short decades, the balance had shifted in Arizona to a very nearly Anglo-homogenized society. At the same time, New Mexico held firmly to its Hispano-dominated society while ceding primary political power to Anglo-centric settlements like Santa Fe. To demonstrate this power shift, Kathke presents micro-histories of Yuma, Tucson, and Deming through the key actors in the transition of normative Mesilla society and polity. Here, more than the other two sections, he embraces the social intricacies and complex nature of propagating a regional or national identity through the people's eyes--some recording for posterity, others merely living--involved in the forging of that new identity. The complex interplay of religion, race, class, and politics merge throughout the narrative into a visually complex node-network diagram of society and the environment, shaping a distinctly new identity from the trappings of donating cultures. This continuum allowed the emerging community to continue to repress Native American and Mexican immigrants as "lesser" outgroups to measure their new identity. Kathke asserts that this forging process was continual, non-confrontationally evolutionary and did not become recognizable as part of the American identity until the late 1910s. He does qualify this notion in his conclusion: "race always mattered, but that most of the time it did not matter in the same binary manner that today often dominates discourse.... So many microclimates of race in turn-of-the-century Southern Arizona and New Mexico speaks loudly of this" (p. 250). Kathke presents a narrative that forcefully argues the Mesilla was indeed part of the United States through treaty and purchase; however, it was not part of the collective US identity. By combining both a top-down and bottom-up interrogation of events, Kathke provides a fascinating examination of western history that presents a methodology to broaden the discussion of borderlands in the discussion of transnational history and the more considerable analysis of historical methods. He demonstrates the importance of reminding historians that the archives, no matter how progressive and inclusive we have attempted to be in their examination, still imbue privilege to the privileged. "The 'ordinary,'" Kathke points out, "foregrounded in the intent, are simultaneously denigrated to a position apart from the fabric of the political, of the world of 'famous people,'" in an artificial distinction that those studying the past should be cognitively striving to present history as "interlinking, but also separate, networks" of people who occupy "a limbo in between the two poles" (p. 253). Kathke uses an impressive capacity for archival research to support his deep and wide interpretation of a locally significant, but largely unknown, cast of characters. Local, state, and national archival records provide personal papers, newspapers, and other documents that offer the supporting aim for the exhaustively placed historiographical argument presented by Kathke. Despite being well placed within the historiography and exhaustively researched, his book reaches too far in its claim that the American Southwest stands alone as a global exemplar of a complex periphery. The scope of modern history contains many models of filibustering, industrialization, and complicated multicultural colonial, or colonial-like, relationships for this to hold. Additionally, most of the volume tends to marginalize New Mexico, and I would have liked to have seen how Kathke could have demonstrated his well-documented Arizonian patterns of racial exclusion in juxtaposition with the evidently much more ethnically balanced New Mexico. Despite the titular role of wires and visualization of a railroad crossing on the cover, this book is truly not about technology so much as it is about the transformation of regional and local power as expressed in the ethnic identity of businesspeople, traders, and entrepreneurs. Kathke's inclusion of world-systems theory is largely a non sequitur in his light treatment of the overarching theme of predatory economic behavior. Karen Barad's "cutting together-apart" thesis would likely have been a more relevant lens to examine the subject than an adaptation of Immanuel Wallerstein's multidisciplinary world-systems theory. A more considerable exploration of economics and technology like mining, telegraphy, and railroads, which arguably were the most significant economic drivers in the region in the period under concentration, would have been expected from a volume looking to tie technology to the transformation of societal or cultural norms. A reader looking for an in-depth discussion on these topics would do better to look elsewhere, but a reader looking for a cultural study of the Mesilla will be greatly rewarded by Kathke's effort. As this review is written, the American polity is struggling with categorizing individuals as distinct members of ingroup or outgroup collectives. Future historians will undoubtedly examine the importance of social networks and the inherent instability of their membership that comprise our age. Perhaps, we would all be better practitioners of our craft were we to study the past through similar lenses of fluidity. As we struggle to come to grips with our concepts of modernity in the twenty-first century, perhaps an examination of how modern identity was forged through technology in peripheries at the turn of the twentieth century is more worthy of inclusion in discussion than we had previously thought. Citation: Bryant Macfarlane. Review of Kathke, Torsten, _Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854-1920_. Jhistory, H-Net Reviews. November, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55423 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart
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Thanks Obama - CounterPunch
Dennis Brasky
We do need to consider how we arrived at this place and there’s not going to be room for a blame Susan Sarandon/Bernie Sanders shtick like last time that the where is our brunchers pulled. This falls completely on Obama and the corrupt DNC machinery. As you all know, prior to Super Tuesday, Obama pulled the strings of the other primary candidates, creating a situation that unearthed a most inorganic Biden victory. He got them to pull out and support Biden en masse. Though Obama was reported to have said “don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”, he opted to intervene in the democratic process of a legitimate primary. Elizabeth Warren (oh don’t upset her with snake emojis) helped out too, making sure the progressive vote was splintered. It makes you wonder what was going on there. She sells her soul for no payout, it seems. The whole thing was very well orchestrated if you wanted to set the country up for Donald Trump to win again. One has to question if the aim of the Democrats has ever been to win or if it has simply been to beat back progressives and to continue to bring in virtue signaling donations. This is all not to say that Sanders isn’t clearly at fault in this situation as well. He embraced the sheepdog role and after the first Lucy football incident, he should have run as an Independent if he was serious about truly winning the presidency. How many people who couldn’t afford it plunged what assistance they could into his campaign? It’s a pretty craven and bitter move to do to those young idealists. At some point, you have to hold to your convictions. Say what you will, but these scary Trumpers do hold to their (often toxic convictions) and it’s powerful. They win that way. Bernie has done much to push progressive ideals and has done well introducing them to a large audience, but he also has been instrumental in ripping the hearts out of those who truly believed in his platform. How can you be for the ideas that he offered and still hit the campaign trail for a Biden? Sure, sure the bigger threat thing is what is always given as the excuse— but he likely knew exactly what would happen this second time around. He coalesced progressive support around him during the primary, keeping a trend towards any third party leanings down. He was an instrumental cog in all of this….again. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/05/thanks-obama/
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Re: You’re Tearing Me Apart: On William L. Barney’s “Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy” - Los Angeles Review of Books
Dennis Brasky
a different Civil War in the Southwest The Three-Cornered War is a major accomplishment in expanding our understanding of the scope of the Civil War, and linking it to the histories of Native peoples and the American West. This is a story about the Union emerging victorious — and paving the way for further development of the American West under the Homestead Act and the completion of a transcontinental railroad in 1869. But the Union victory does not have the same moral clarity that it has in the East. In New Mexico, the Union campaign “simultaneously embraced slave emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American empire of liberty.” The righteous campaign of morality that freed the slaves in the South was not the same in the West, where the Union forces emerged from an early victory against the Confederate forces to pursue a campaign of extermination of Native peoples. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-different-civil-war-in-the-southwest
On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 9:38 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/youre-tearing-me-apart-on-william-l-barneys-rebels-in-the-making-the-secession-crisis-and-the-birth-of-the-confederacy/
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Behind the Trump vote
Louis Proyect
(Posted to FB by Tony Prince, ex-SWP) At this point the US election is still undecided. But it’s worth thinking about why Trump did better than expected and why Biden failed to meet the expectations of a “blue wave”.
Given Trump’s character, and many of his policies, it is difficult for a lot of people who can’t stand the man to understand why he is supported by such a significant percentage of the population.
So, to get a few things out of the way first—There is his appeal to racism, which will still garner the support of a certain percentage of the population.
There are his calls for law and order, in spite of his long record as a scofflaw.
There is his pandering to evangelical Christians, even though he doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.
Leaving that. aside, there are more substantial factors.
Just before the election the Wall Street Journal published a “semi-endorsement” of Trump. It pointed to the tax break he gave to the richest Americans early on in his term. Also, he has eliminated many environmental regulations which cost manufacturers money. Also, according to a recent article in the New Yorker, the. Department of. Labor under Trump has basically become an advocacy organization for the employers. For these reasons and more, many big capitalists think Trump is just fine.
Then there are middle-class layers—small business owners and self-employed people. These are some of the people who have been hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Many of them have gone bankrupt or are on the verge of bankruptcy, so when Trump disagrees with the recommendation to wear masks and calls for opening the country back up for business, this resonates deeply with these people. After all, their backs are against the wall, and they don’t want to hear about Covid 19. They want things to go back to the way they were before. The demonstrations in the Michigan state capital several months ago are an example of this social layer.
Then there are workers, especially workers in the Rust Belt, who have been hard hit by the closing of many factories and whose standard of living has declined as a result. It is natural to look for an easy explanation for this situation, and when Trump blames Mexico and especially China, he has a receptive audience. Trump blasted Nafta as one of the worst deals in history, and I remember from my own experience that many of my coworkers used to blame Nafta for the loss of manufacturing jobs. Of course, the new trade agreement that Trump negotiated with Mexico is almost the same as Nafta, but after all, this is about image, not substance.
Now the target is China, which has become the factory of the world, and with which the. US has a major trade deficit. Of course, the drift of factory jobs away from the US and other developed countries is a trend that has been going on for a long time and which will continue regardless of who is president. But the rhetoric on China and the tariffs appeal to many workers. They appealed to farmers as well until China stopped buying US soybeans.
Added to this is the scapegoating of immigrants for supposedly “stealing” American jobs. For workers whose standard of living has been in decline for decades, this demagogy falls on receptive ears.
Trump has made extravagant promises about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the US, which there is no way he can fulfill, but nevertheless, this is music to the ears of many workers. The reality will sink in later. But that is not all. It is true that unemployment was at historically low levels before the coronavirus hit. Although the ups and downs of the economy don’t have much to do with who is president or what the president does, nevertheless, Trump gets the credit for this in the eyes of millions of workers.
Then there is the question of the Democratic Party. For decades, since the time of Roosevelt, working class families have voted for the Democratic Party as the party that supposedly helps the working class. But under successive Democratic administrations like Clinton and then Obama, the conditions of life of working people have not improved. On the contrary, they have continued to slowly get worse. In response to this situation, supporters of the Democrats say, “Well, where else are you going to go? You know the Republicans are not on your side.” But then along comes Trump and says what many workers want to hear. The fact that he is lying through his teeth is not the point; all politicians do that. But not only that—in the minds of a lot of workers, he actually has delivered, given the state of the economy before the pandemic.
Some people say that the poor showing of the Democrats in 2016 and again this year is because they have had terrible candidates. I disagree. Clinton and Biden are the appropriate candidates for a party that has no vision for the future and only want things to get back to normal. The problem is that normal is not good enough. If people thought normal was ok they never would have voted for Trump. In fact the Democratic party is facing a crisis over its identity and its place in US politics, and this crisis will only deepen in the coming years.
Finally, regarding Trump’s low moral character, many workers will say that they are not voting for him because they think he is such an upstanding person (some will say that, but many won’t). Instead they will say that he is addressing their most pressing issues like jobs, and will point to the economic data. And in this maybe they have a more realistic view of politicians. They recognize that they are crooks; they just want a crook that they think is on their side."
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Flat Earth advocacy and pandemic denial
Ken Hiebert
A notorious Metro Vancouver COVID-19 conspiracy theorist has been charged with breaking mandatory quarantine after returning from a Flat Earth conference in the U.S. * * * * * * * According to his Facebook page, Parhar recently travelled to Greenville, South Carolina for an event called Flatoberfest 2020 — a gathering of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat.
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H-Net Review [H-Environment]: Murray on Morrone, 'Ailing in Place: Environmental Inequities and Health Disparities in Appalachia'
Andrew Stewart
Best regards, Andrew Stewart - - - Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/ Begin forwarded message:
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