Aren't you aware that this is Marxmail? If you
want to refute degrowth arguments, it should be within the
purview of Marxism. Please don't waste the list's time with
stuff from Andrew McAfee, a firm believer in the capitalist
system, or any other such schmuck.
For those who are not
familiar with the name: John Ross was a leader of British
section of Mandel's "Fourth International" in the 1970s and 80s.
When they split he was affiliated with "Socialist Action" for a
long time. Today he is a professor in the service of the Chinese
state.
Am 07.10.2020 um 22:11 schrieb Kevin
Lindemann and Cathy Campo:
U.S. President Donald
Trump—supported by most of the U.S.
establishment—deepened the U.S. government’s assault
on the Chinese economy. The “trade war” seemed to play
well with Trump’s political base, who somehow hoped
that an economic attack on China would miraculously
create economic prosperity for them. In 2018, Trump
slapped tariffs on more than $200 billion worth of
various Chinese goods. Then, Trump’s administration
went after Chinese high-tech firms such as Huawei,
ZTE, ByteDance (the owners of TikTok), and WeChat.
None of this has worked very
well. Trump faces negative legal judgments about his
“trade war,” and the U.S. economy slips into negative
territory. It is not just Trump. Both the Republican
Party and the Democratic Party are committed to a
policy that will not cause China to surrender to U.S.
ambitions. Whether or not the U.S. can backtrack from
this policy orientation and begin a dialogue with
China remains to be seen; doing so would be, of
course, desirable.
Legal
Setbacks
Legal challenges in the
World Trade Organization (WTO) and in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California
went against the Trump administration. This is a
setback for the policy orientation of the U.S.
government.
After Trump announced the
tariffs against a wide range of Chinese imports, the
Chinese government formally took up the matter through
the WTO’s dispute mechanism. After considerable study,
the WTO came back with a verdict. On September 15,
2020, a three-person WTO panel foundthat the U.S. had
violated the provisions of the 1994 General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the treaty that
established the WTO. This was a serious defeat for the
United States; the Trump administration has 60 days to
file an appeal.
The United States government
does not like to lose. U.S. Trade Representative
Robert Lighthizer released a statement condemning the
ruling. “This panel report,” Lighthizer said, “confirms what the
Trump administration has been saying for four years:
The WTO is completely inadequate to stop China’s
harmful technology practices.” The U.S. has paralyzed
the WTO’s ability to hand down a final binding
verdict, as the WTO’s appeals court is currently no
longer functioning because of Washington’s refusal to
accept new members for it.
In 1994, the U.S. pushed for
the creation of the WTO, wrote many of its rules, and
brought China into the WTO in 2001. Because the U.S.
felt in command of the world, the WTO worked to
advance its interests; now that China’s economy has
grown in strength, the U.S. finds the rules of the WTO
to be burdensome. Free trade is only useful to
governments such as the U.S. when it is beneficial to
its companies; the principle of free trade is
otherwise easily rejected.
Even within the U.S., there
is doubt about Trump’s policies. A judge signed an injunction to halt
Trump’s attempt to prevent U.S. residents from using
WeChat as a means to communicate with people in China.
Pressure on TikTok may also dissipate after the U.S.
elections.
Economic
Divergence
A senior analyst at the
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says that the
economic impact of the “chaotic” lockdown in the U.S.
will create major disruptions for at least a
generation. It is unlikely, he says, that the U.S.
will be able to “recover easily.” When asked about
China’s recovery, he said that so far things look much
better. But any persistent reliance of China upon the
U.S. market will have a negative impact on China’s
growth.
China has essentially broken the
chain of the COVID-19 infection, although the
authorities remain vigilant for new outbreaks; in the
U.S., it is hard to talk about a second wave since the
first wave has not yet crested.
What this has meant is that
as early as the second quarter of 2020, China’s
gross domestic product (GDP) rose to
3.2 percent above the level a year previously;
meanwhile, the GDP of the U.S. fell by 9 percent below
last year’s level. China is already on the way to
recovery, while the U.S. does not even know if the
infection has peaked or not.
The U.S. and China publish
somewhat different measures of industrial output, but
the contrast is so striking that it leaves no doubt as
to the relative trends. China publishes data for total
value added by industrial enterprises, which in August 2020 was 5.6
percent higher than a year previously, whereas in
contrast the U.S. industrial output for August 2020 was 7.7
percent lower than a year earlier. China’s level of
industrial production was higher than a year
previously, whereas the U.S.’s was far below it.
As a result of China’s much
more dynamic economic recovery, China’s trade is
recovering much more rapidly than that of the United
States. This is clear for imports—which for other
countries are their exports. In July, the last month
for which there is data for both the U.S.
and China, China’s imports had almost regained
pre-pandemic levels—being only about 1 percent lower than a
year previously. In contrast, U.S. imports were still
about 11 percent below a year
previously.
The result of these trends
is that China will be the center of world economic
recovery from the COVID-19 recession—while the U.S.
will contribute almost nothing to it.
The latest global projections of the IMF
indicate that in 2020-2021, China will account for the
absolute majority, 51 percent, of world growth, and
the U.S. for only 3 percent—and the latest IMF predictions for the U.S.
indicates that this may be an exaggeration of its
growth. Most of the other contributors to world growth
according to the IMF analysis will be Asian economies
who have strong trading relations with China—South
Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and
Malaysia.
To analyze the global
situation, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis has a
very dramatic impact on the pattern of development of
the world economy as divided between developing and
advanced economies. The data in the IMF’s projections show that by
2021 GDP in the advanced economies will
still be 3.6 percent below its level in 2019 while in
the developing economies it
will be 2.7 percent above 2019. This is a major
distribution of world economic growth in favor of
developing economies and against advanced ones.
The April IMF estimates indicate that
in 2020-2021 more than 95 percent of world economic
growth will take place in developing economies—the
data in the April IMF World Economic Outlook database
means it projects that 51 percent of world growth will
take place in China and 44 percent in other developing
economies. Less than 5 percent of world economic
growth will take place in advanced economies.
By attempting to reorient
world trade away from China and to the United States,
the U.S. is therefore attempting to lock other
countries into subordination to its own very low
growth instead of the much more rapidly growing
economy of China. This is evidently strongly damaging
for other countries’ economies.
SPIEGEL:Still,
each year China is strengthening its reputation as an economicWunderland.
Pan:This
miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep
pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese
territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is
completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens does not
have access to clean drinking water. One third of the urban
population is breathing polluted air, and less than 20 percent
of the trash in cities is treated and processed in an
environmentally sustainable manner. Finally, five of the ten
most polluted cities worldwide are in China.
SPIEGEL:How great are the effects
of this environmental degradation on the economy?
Pan:It's massive. Because air and
water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 percent of
our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs
for health. Then there's the human suffering: In Bejing alone,
70 to 80 percent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the
environment. Lung cancer has emerged as the No. 1 cause of
death.
(Somereaders may wonder why I, an anarcho-Marxian agnostic, have posted these
here. As to the first posting I sent it on because of the humaneness of the
wording and the
asserted
intent of the encyclical, ‘The
Brotherhood of Men’.
In this second post, the limits of the papal letter is critiqued by
some of those most affected. There
are billions who ‘believe’, billions that I believe that we, as communists,
must have a way of speaking with, any way but down to them.
(I
will not argue with any who vehemently object to anything touching on
the nature of religion. To me, it is a private affair aimed at
giving meaning to one's existence. As I am unable of providing proof or
disproof of what is asserted, the nature of a god and
therefrom the meaning of our existences,
to
my way of thinking, so
long as one’s
belief
does not impose a hierarchical stricture aimed at lessening the worth
of the Other, I
can voice no objection. Some, whose religion is no religion, will
see it differently.)
The Genius and Limits of Fratelli Tutti
And although it is true that in important ways, we
are heading down the same tragic path with the exclusionary title and
male-only authorship of Pope Francis' newly released encyclical,
“Fratelli
Tutti”, the document itself is challenging, inspiring, and
forceful Catholic Social Teaching -- a must-read for every Catholic
layperson, bishop, and priest who cares about our common future.
The Genius
First and foremost, in a world where nationalist ideologies and
xenophobic policies are gaining a greater hold in societies, Francis
leaves no doubt that ending war and the death penalty are preeminent
tasks for those who call themselves Christian.
Working to reverse the Church's previous "just war"
rationale, Francis writes, "We can no longer think of war as a
solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its
supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to
invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak
of the possibility of a “just war”. Never again war![242]...
He also ends all doubt about where the Church stands on the
death penalty. "The death penalty is inadmissible and Catholics
should work to abolish it." (263)...
Francis shows how the use of capital punishment by the state
spills over into other state crimes. As Catholics in the United
States witness the extrajudicial executions of our black sisters and
brothers in our streets by police officers, the pope's words will
both challenge us and inspire us to use every muscle we have to bring
racial and reparative justice to our communities and to our
country...(15)
How many of us have witnessed or experienced this phenomenon?
How many of us have personally employed these tools? And ultimately,
how has any part of this sad dynamic helped create the kin-dom?
Francis mirrors our own hopes, "God willing, after all
this [pandemic], we will think no longer in terms of "them"
and "those", but only "us". (35)
The Limits
While Pope Francis offers us a compelling and challenging
vision for our common life together in Fratelli tutti,
as the title exposes, there is a gaping blindness in connecting the
treatment of women in the Church and their treatment in the world.
In paragraph 23, Francis writes, "the organization of
societies worldwide is still far from reflecting clearly that women
possess the same dignity and identical rights as men. We say one
thing with words, but our decisions and reality tell another story."
To that, Catholic women and their allies say to those with
institutional authority, "Heal thyself."...
How much more effective would our efforts to end slavery,
especially the sex trade, be if the Church had the wisdom to
understand its complicity in the multitude of sins and crimes against
women? How much more effective would our efforts to end the sex trade
be if the Church modeled true and co-equal partnership between women
and men, lay and ordained in governance, ministries, liturgies, and
in the way we tell the stories of our faith? Francis does not use any
women theologians in the sources for this work. And while he rightly
garners wisdom from Saint Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King,
Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi, and Blessed Charles de Foucauld,
besides the reference to Mary, Francis does not cite a wise woman of
faith as a model for this encyclical...
AN OPEN LETTER TO POPE FRANCIS REGARDING THE
TITLE OF THE FORTHCOMING ENCYCLICAL, ‘FRATELLI TUTTI’
Dear Pope Francis,
...a growing number of Catholics are expressing concern
over your choice of title for the encyclical. We have listed links to
a number of sources below. We understand that the title comes from a
quotation from Saint Francis, and we know that you intend it to
include all humankind. Nevertheless, the masculine noun will alienate
many, at a time when women in many different languages and cultures
are resistant to being told that the masculine is intended
generically...
We remain your sisters in Christ, and we hold you in our
prayers.
The paradox of "whiteness" and the source of its coercive power is that so many fall through the net of its contradictory definition. One speaks of "WASPS" but anyone with the common admixture of German, Scottish, and/or Irish (either Protestant or Papist) is not a WASP because not provably "anglo-saxon" whatever that may mean. Unless your name is Wigglesworth or the like, you are not really a WASP. And the vast mob of "Scotch-Irish" (by no means confined to Appalachia) are commonly admixed, even in places like Virginia, with the genes of what non-German people in places like Ohio used to refer to as "slab-footed Kraut farmers."
These boring, B-flat West European mongrels are as "white" as it is possible to be, but they are not and never will be what the British ruling class might call "quite the thing." If they aren't hillbillies they have no tangible ethnicity or as it were sex appeal at all. They are by nature mediocre, not very bright, and on the whole neither much of one thing nor of another.
These are the "white people" who love Trump--self-reproaching, self-condemned nobodies. The racist mobs claim to "love white people" but the truth is--despite the glamour images of whiteness that float above us and beyond the reach of anybody who isn't a "beautiful Kennedy"--and how white are the Irish anyway?--that nobody can love white people as such without hating some other group, or all other groups.
Whiteness and its contradictions betoken the inevitable failure of liberal democracy and therefore of capitalism--it stands for the failure of "the human" and "human nature" to come into existence: in short, for the actual non-existence of the human race. That race is something that will only come to be, IMO, if "humanity" can surpass and transcend the extinction currently inherent in the condition of human beings, which stems from the continuation of evolution by other means in human history. I don't believe that there is any ready exit from the traps of civilization and technology--no spiritual community or return to nature outside of history. There is no choice IMO but to get through it, bullshit jobs, technology, vast infrastructure, and all. If that isn't possible "humanity" is doomed, though on what actual time scale is nobody knows.
As a culture of protest took hold in 1960s LA,
communities of color also prioritized a radical tradition of
care, emphasizing mutual aid, community control, and the
transformative power of art and politics.
With his poll numbers collapsing, Donald
Trump keeps adopting dumber and more destructive
political messages.
WIN
MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
With a month to go before
the November election, Donald Trump has returned to theCovid-19
messagehe, his administration, and his
allies pushed in the early spring. “Don’t let it dominate
you,” Trump said in a video released Monday evening,
shortly after he left Walter Reed Medical Center, where he
had been treated for several days for Covid-19. “Don’t be
afraid. You’re gonna beat it!” ChannelingEvita,hewaved,
maskless, from a White House balcony, posturing that
he had beaten the virus despite the fact that he was both
very contagious and apparently very symptomatic.
The
following day, he suggested that Covid-19 was no
different from the flu,tweeting:“Flu
season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes
over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu.
Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have
learned to live with it, just like we are learning to
live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”
The
difference between this message and the one he pushed in
February—that Covid-19 was overhyped, a “hoax” being
built up to damage the economy—is not so much substance
as context. What we have experienced over the last seven
months is not comparable in any way to flu season. Over
200,000 Americans have died. The economy has tanked,
shedding tens of millions of jobs. The White House
itself is the center of a massive Covid-19 outbreak that
has infected the president, the first lady, several
senators, and many other administration and Republican
Party officials. Far from a beacon of resilience, the
president has become a symbol of just how deeply the
country has been affected by the pandemic. In public
appearances since contracting the virus, he appears
hoarse, shaky, and frightened; reports of his
hospitalization include at least two concerning drops in
oxygen level and a cocktail of drugs that indicate
pneumonia.
For the last four years,
Trump’s supporters and detractors have retconned his 2016
victory, arguing that, having won an improbable election,
the president must be a political genius. In this school
of thought, Trump’s psychotic tweets and staggering
incompetence are rendered intoperversestrengths:
We are playing checkers; he isplaying
chess. This narrative deserved to die an agonizing
death years ago and should now be cast aside forever.
Trailing in the polls with only 30 days left before the
2020 election, the president has embraced a reelection
strategy that is, even for him, profoundly stupid.
When Trump was initially
diagnosed with Covid-19, there was some speculation that
this could actuallybegoodforhim.
The president’s haphazard pandemic response has received
abysmal marks: Here was an opportunity to change the
narrative. There could, some added, be a “rally
round the bedside” effect, similar to what happened
following U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s
hospitalization for Covid-19 in the spring. “This moment
is an opportunity for Trump to hit reset on his tone-deaf
message on COVID that we are always on the cusp of seeing
the definitive end of the virus,”wrotethe
editors ofThe National Review.“His
lack of realism during the pandemic is one reason his
ratings on handling it are so low.” Get the message right,
this line of thinking goes, and Trump can save his
campaign.
This
argument assumed that Trump could adopt humility and use
his physical weakness as a political strength—that he
could even admit fault, recognizing his own failures and
the importance of frontline workers and first
responders. Voters didn’t think Trump was taking
Covid-19 seriously; here was an opportunity to show them
just how seriously he was taking the virus.
The
president has—characteristically—taken the opposite
path. Despite the fact that he is still obviously ill,
he and his allies are insisting that he is not just fine
but better than ever. Trump has said that he feels
better than he has in “20 years” and speculated that he
is “immune” to the
virus. The message is not just that an unhealthy,
out-of-his-depth president is an American ubermensch but
that, by not dying, he has shown the country the way to
beat the virus: change absolutely nothing and go about
business as usual with a casual disdain for basic safety
protocols.
The last week of Trump’s
campaign has been a greatest hits of his worst political
instincts. At last week’s debate, hefailed
to condemnthe Proud Boys, a right-wing
gang with ties to white nationalist groups. The moment
echoed his “very fine people on both sides”commentsin
the wake of Charlottesville in 2017. On Tuesday, moreover,
he announced that he wasbreaking
off talksabout a potential stimulus
package until after the presidential election. The move
tanked the stock market and further damaged his reelection
chances. The author ofThe Art of
the Dealwas also making a basic and
catastrophic negotiation error, accepting the blame for
both the stock market collapse and the lack of stimulus.
All of this is occurring
in the midst of apolling
collapse. Trump is now trailing withevery
age groupof voters and is underwater
withsenior
citizens—a voting block that helped him immensely in
2016. He is trailing byincreasingly
large marginsin every swing state and
appears to be pulling away in Florida and Pennsylvania. A
landslide defeat grows more likely by the hour; everything
the president has done to try to stem the tide has only
made things worse.
Some are understandablypointing
to 2016as a reason to continue to take
Trump’s chances seriously. Anything can happen in the next
30 days—although, over the last nine days, the president
saw thecontents
of his tax returnsrevealed byThe New
York Times,had theworst
debate performancein American history,
andcontracted
Covid-19. But Biden’s lead has been more stable than
Clinton’s was four years ago. And he has another ace up
his sleeve: Donald Trump can’t d
Currently available as
Virtual Cinema from the Boston GlobeDocs Film Festival until
October 12th, “Nasrin” is a wake-up call to the left
and to human rights activists that Iran is still a hell-hole seven
years after Ahmadinejad’s ouster. (Just clickSelect a Showingand rent
both “Nasrin and another documentary for $10 ) Nasrin Sotoudeh, a
female lawyer and woman’s rights activist, was sentenced to 38
years, plus 148 lashes, in March 2019. That sentence was meted out
because she was a leader of the movement to end the forced wearing
of the hijab as well as her willingness to defend people the
clerical dictatorship deemed “against Islam”.
Among the people she
defended was Shirin Ebadi, a female lawyer and woman’s rights
activist as well who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. For
defending Ebadi and other dissidents, Nasrin was herself charged
with nebulous crimes like spreading propaganda and conspiring to
harm state security in 2010. Found guilty, she was sentenced to 11
years in prison. Ebadi pays tribute to her lawyer in article aptly
titled “The Riskiest Job in Iran”.
U.S. President Donald Trump—supported by most of the U.S. establishment—deepened the U.S. government’s assault on the Chinese economy. The “trade war” seemed to play well with Trump’s political base, who somehow hoped that an economic attack on China would miraculously create economic prosperity for them. In 2018, Trump slapped tariffs on more than $200 billion worth of various Chinese goods. Then, Trump’s administration went after Chinese high-tech firms such as Huawei, ZTE, ByteDance (the owners of TikTok), and WeChat.
None of this has worked very well. Trump faces negative legal judgments about his “trade war,” and the U.S. economy slips into negative territory. It is not just Trump. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are committed to a policy that will not cause China to surrender to U.S. ambitions. Whether or not the U.S. can backtrack from this policy orientation and begin a dialogue with China remains to be seen; doing so would be, of course, desirable.
Legal Setbacks
Legal challenges in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California went against the Trump administration. This is a setback for the policy orientation of the U.S. government.
After Trump announced the tariffs against a wide range of Chinese imports, the Chinese government formally took up the matter through the WTO’s dispute mechanism. After considerable study, the WTO came back with a verdict. On September 15, 2020, a three-person WTO panel foundthat the U.S. had violated the provisions of the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the treaty that established the WTO. This was a serious defeat for the United States; the Trump administration has 60 days to file an appeal.
The United States government does not like to lose. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer released a statement condemning the ruling. “This panel report,” Lighthizer said, “confirms what the Trump administration has been saying for four years: The WTO is completely inadequate to stop China’s harmful technology practices.” The U.S. has paralyzed the WTO’s ability to hand down a final binding verdict, as the WTO’s appeals court is currently no longer functioning because of Washington’s refusal to accept new members for it.
In 1994, the U.S. pushed for the creation of the WTO, wrote many of its rules, and brought China into the WTO in 2001. Because the U.S. felt in command of the world, the WTO worked to advance its interests; now that China’s economy has grown in strength, the U.S. finds the rules of the WTO to be burdensome. Free trade is only useful to governments such as the U.S. when it is beneficial to its companies; the principle of free trade is otherwise easily rejected.
Even within the U.S., there is doubt about Trump’s policies. A judge signed an injunction to halt Trump’s attempt to prevent U.S. residents from using WeChat as a means to communicate with people in China. Pressure on TikTok may also dissipate after the U.S. elections.
Economic Divergence
A senior analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says that the economic impact of the “chaotic” lockdown in the U.S. will create major disruptions for at least a generation. It is unlikely, he says, that the U.S. will be able to “recover easily.” When asked about China’s recovery, he said that so far things look much better. But any persistent reliance of China upon the U.S. market will have a negative impact on China’s growth.
China has essentially broken the chain of the COVID-19 infection, although the authorities remain vigilant for new outbreaks; in the U.S., it is hard to talk about a second wave since the first wave has not yet crested.
What this has meant is that as early as the second quarter of 2020, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose to 3.2 percent above the level a year previously; meanwhile, the GDP of the U.S. fell by 9 percent below last year’s level. China is already on the way to recovery, while the U.S. does not even know if the infection has peaked or not.
The U.S. and China publish somewhat different measures of industrial output, but the contrast is so striking that it leaves no doubt as to the relative trends. China publishes data for total value added by industrial enterprises, which in August 2020 was 5.6 percent higher than a year previously, whereas in contrast the U.S. industrial output for August 2020 was 7.7 percent lower than a year earlier. China’s level of industrial production was higher than a year previously, whereas the U.S.’s was far below it.
As a result of China’s much more dynamic economic recovery, China’s trade is recovering much more rapidly than that of the United States. This is clear for imports—which for other countries are their exports. In July, the last month for which there is data for both the U.S. and China, China’s imports had almost regained pre-pandemic levels—being only about 1 percent lower than a year previously. In contrast, U.S. imports were still about 11 percent below a year previously.
The result of these trends is that China will be the center of world economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession—while the U.S. will contribute almost nothing to it.
The latest global projections of the IMF indicate that in 2020-2021, China will account for the absolute majority, 51 percent, of world growth, and the U.S. for only 3 percent—and the latest IMF predictions for the U.S. indicates that this may be an exaggeration of its growth. Most of the other contributors to world growth according to the IMF analysis will be Asian economies who have strong trading relations with China—South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
To analyze the global situation, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis has a very dramatic impact on the pattern of development of the world economy as divided between developing and advanced economies. The data in the IMF’s projections show that by 2021 GDP in the advanced economies will still be 3.6 percent below its level in 2019 while in the developing economies it will be 2.7 percent above 2019. This is a major distribution of world economic growth in favor of developing economies and against advanced ones.
The April IMF estimates indicate that in 2020-2021 more than 95 percent of world economic growth will take place in developing economies—the data in the April IMF World Economic Outlook database means it projects that 51 percent of world growth will take place in China and 44 percent in other developing economies. Less than 5 percent of world economic growth will take place in advanced economies.
By attempting to reorient world trade away from China and to the United States, the U.S. is therefore attempting to lock other countries into subordination to its own very low growth instead of the much more rapidly growing economy of China. This is evidently strongly damaging for other countries’ economies.
THROUGHOUT 1848, Europe was in convulsions as widespread revolutionary unrest ushered in what became known as “The Spring of Nations” and, in February that year, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published The Communist Manifesto.
The political ferment was as wide-reaching as it was spontaneous, with unstable alliances of social strata and classes with disparate political aims that could not endure. Nevertheless, it ushered in the final transformation of an archaic and unproductive feudal serfdom into the “modern” and “efficient” capitalist labour market. But the whip was to stay, albeit wielded by a different hand.
An independent-minded, self-proclaimed republican who supported the poor and oppressed and continuously irked the ruling elites, Gustave Courbet possessed the kind of spirit needed for such a time.
In 1849, with the Spring of Nations still a fresh memory, Courbet painted The Stone Breakers and with it announced the advent of realism. Courbet had seen the two men depicted breaking stones at the road side near his home town of Ornans and, moved by their plight, recalled: “It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there, I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning.”
The imposingly large canvas (165 x 257 cm) is imbued with dignity and resignation. Courbet portrays these humble, downtrodden workers in worn-out clothes who have “nothing to lose but their chains.” Their plight is as strikingly evident as it is political. The ruthless exploitation of cheap rural labour to build and maintain a local road is a clear denunciation of class oppression.
Significantly, Courbet paints the two at eye-level and with the dark hill cutting off an escape route for the viewer, the impact is augmented spectacularly.
The monochromatic palette and the attention to detail is uniform throughout, with the clothes, anatomy, the tools and every stone given the same value. At the same time, the brush work is not pedantic or inventorising. It has an assured fluency and ruggedness but also economy in each stroke.
“Their tools are scattered on the ground: a hod, a stretcher, a hoe, a rustic pot in which they carry their midday soup, and a piece of black bread in a scrip. All this takes place in full sunlight, by a ditch alongside a road... I have made none of it up,” he wrote to a friend, visibly affected.
Critics were outraged by The Stone Breakers at the Paris Salon of 1850 and even his friend, the poet Charles Baudelaire, disapproved. Yet, three years later, Eugene Delacroix wrote in The Journal: “I went to see the paintings by Courbet. I was astonished by the vigour and the relief of his vast picture; but what a painting! What a subject!”
Although as an avowed pacifist Courbet did not take up arms in 1848, when the socialist Paris Commune was formed in March 1871, he shared its political goals and joined it.
Courbet was elected to the Commune’s council, was put in charge of education and was a prominent actor in the disassembling of the Vendome column, a symbol of Napoleon III’s oppression.
He successfully argued it was “devoid of all artistic value,” promoted militarism and had no place in a republic. He had anticipated by 150 years the present questioning of the role of public statues and monuments.
In 1855, Courbet nailed his colours to the mast in the pamphlet Realist Manifesto. He didn’t give a monkey’s for “art for art’s sake,” his interest was “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearances of my epoch according to my own appreciation of it... to create living art, that is my goal.”
Years later, Emile Zola memorably wrote: “After those remarkable works by Manet and Courbet, no-one would now dare to say that the present day is unworthy of being painted.”
After the Commune’s defeat in 1871, he was jailed for six months and fined £2,000 for his troubles. He left for Switzerland as soon as he was freed and in May 1877 was ordered to pay for the restoration of the Vendome column. Courbet died on December 31, 1877, aged 58 — a day before the first instalment was due.
He wanted to be remembered as belonging to no regime “except the regime of liberty.”
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020, 12:09 PM Ken Hiebert <knhiebert@...> wrote:
This discussion was started when John A Imani forwarded an encyclical letter, FRATELLI TUTTI.
Jerry Monaco responded with this message.
The Papacy, the Last Bastion of Anti-Capitalist Feudal Socialism. And yet our current Pontifex Maximus is as much a rationalist as Gaius Julius Caesar when he occupied the office in the bygone Res Publica. That is saying something given the times.
Jerry, over the course of the discussion, you have characterized various factions within the Catholic Church, among them "ancient power structures” and "leftwing Catholic insurgents.” In your opinion, which of these factions are motivated by adherence to Anti-Capitalist Feudal Socialism?
"Despite all indications to the contrary, many of the most important Russian archives are open and are worth investigating.
The goal of this project is to illuminate archival sources and disseminate information about collections that are available (in-person and online) for the use of students and young experts in the field. Research based on original source materials is of paramount importance to moving the field of Russian studies forward."
This discussion was started when John A Imani forwarded an encyclical letter, FRATELLI TUTTI.
Jerry Monaco responded with this message.
The Papacy, the Last Bastion of Anti-Capitalist Feudal Socialism. And yet our current Pontifex Maximus is as much a rationalist as Gaius Julius Caesar when he occupied the office in the bygone Res Publica. That is saying something given the times.
Jerry, over the course of the discussion, you have characterized various factions within the Catholic Church, among them "ancient power structures” and "leftwing Catholic insurgents.” In your opinion, which of these factions are motivated by adherence to Anti-Capitalist Feudal Socialism?
Hi All --- at the risk of seeming (being?) snarky, I ask (rhetorically) why it matters that the Trump administration is chipping away at the right to vote. I mean
a lot of posts to this list celebrate the increased number of young people in particular who have lost faith in the political process. Using that information, wouldn't
it FIT with our approach to FOCUS on the denial of voting rights as evidence that putting ANY faith in voting is a waste of time ---
I personally do not believe this approach -- I believe any fight for democratic rights (even bourgeois rights) advances the causes ---- reforming a system by increasing the
scope of democratic opportunities whether it be press freedom, speech freedom, etc. is a step in the right direction, not a worthless detour!
SO I do agree the article is VERY IMPORTANT (even if it is REALLY long!)
