1. marxmail@groups.io
   Date   
in re/ "Latest 100 Messages"

Les Schaffer
 

a number of people are reading marxmail at the  "Latest 100 messages from Marxism list" website. due to changes i made (to the code that generates the Latest 100)  in the last couple days, not everyone's email to marxmail has been reflected on the Latest 100 site. i've just fine-tuned those changes so this should no longer happen.

if for some reason you notice an email you sent to marxmail did not make it to the Latest 100, please let me know and i will continue fine-tuning.

for those of you that have grown accustomed to reading the Latest 100, know that you can get nearly the same result by browsing to https://groups.io/g/marxmail/topics

Les
The Swerve; We are Many | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Louis Proyect
 

Yesterday, I saw “The Swerve”, a film that also depicts the physical and mental breakdown of a middle-class woman. It has the same mixture of horror and personal drama as “Safe”, as well as a stunning performance by Azura Skye as a high school teacher whose life begins falling apart at the seams. In this instance, it is not the environment that is sickening her. It is her family that is the toxin.

---

Starting tonight at 8pm EST, there will be a virtual cinema premiere of “We are Many”, a documentary about the massive antiwar protest that took place on February 15, 2003. Directed by Amir Amirani, it allows leaders of the peace movement such as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Leslie Cagan in the USA to describe what amounted to the largest single-day protest in history ever to take place.

full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/09/21/the-swerve-we-are-many/
Re: Eric Topol on vaccines and the election

fkalosar101@...
 

Which Democrats are seeking to "delay a potentially viable vaccine"?  And how specifically are they attempting to do this? I hold no brief for the Demicraps, but this is pure smear.  You can rob a burglar and murder a murderer, and it's still robbery and murder.

"Jacob Miller" utters a vague denunciation that assumes in the first sentence a fact not in evidence that cannot be proved. It's contemptible.  And since when do we inoculate millions with a vaccine that is only "potentially viable" merely to salvage the fortunes of a would-be dictator? 

I smell a puppet made from a very dirty sock.  Pee yew.
H-Net Review [H-Environment]: Miljkovic on Kenner, 'Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change'

Andrew Stewart
 



Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 21, 2020 at 10:48:32 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Environment]:  Miljkovic on Kenner, 'Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Alison Kenner.  Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate
Change.  Minneapolis  University of Minnesota Press, 2018.  
Illustrations. 248 pp.  $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5179-0287-2;
$100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5179-0286-5.

Reviewed by Ela Miljkovic (University of Houston)
Published on H-Environment (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey

Climate change is altering the experience of and ways we care for
asthma, contends Alison Kenner's _Breathtaking_. Long-term variations
in weather conditions--brought on by the rising average temperature
of the earth, among other factors--have both intensified asthmatic
episodes for diagnosed sufferers and rendered disordered breathing
more prevalent among residents across the United States, Kenner's
specified area of concern. Indirectly, climate change has also
influenced approaches to asthma management, increasingly resulting in
more holistic models of care, models considerate of the
multifactorial causes of the disease and the structural,
socio-spatial inequalities that make certain communities more
vulnerable than others to environmental illness. Individualized forms
of treatment relying on prescription medications and behavioral or
home modification practices, the most traditional, and often the
first, line of attack in asthma treatment, are insufficient in the
context of the contemporary climate change-induced asthma epidemic,
which necessitates broader, more collective forms of care. These
different frameworks of care, or "carescapes," upon which people
depend to cope with, mitigate, or control asthma symptoms are at the
center of Kenner's ethnographic account of a major (339 million
affected individuals worldwide), yet widely misunderstood, public
health problem.[1]

_Breathtaking_ is the result of over a decade of research, bringing
together an impressive eighty-one interviews with asthmatics based in
seven US cities and the professionals--doctors, biopharmaceutical
scientists, community health workers, breathing instructors, and
mobile health application developers--who aim to provide chronic
asthma sufferers a sense of relief. Participant observation in local
asthma education programs and national breathing therapy workshops
enriches Kenner's understanding of knowledge production surrounding
respiratory health as well as of the labor involved in caring for
asthma from the standpoint of both practitioner and patient. The
author's personal reflection on attending several immersive breathing
retraining classes not only makes for captivating reading but, more
importantly, also complicates the notion of "normal" breathing. As
she struggled through her sessions, Kenner, a non-sufferer, suggests
that even those of us who breathe seemingly without strain stand to
benefit from "car[ing] for the place of breathing in the world,"
especially as our world becomes "increasingly unbreathable" (pp. 5,
27).

Operating under the generally accepted premise in a majority of
recent clinical literature that asthma manifests itself differently
from person to person, Kenner's comprehensive, "multisited"
ethnographic approach carefully attends to the time and place of
asthma and its multiple care strategies (p. 21). It does so by
exploring the public and private spaces in which asthma is felt and
dealt with. Many of Kenner's interviewees in chapters 1 and 2 have
learned to stay a step ahead of debilitating flare-ups of asthma by
listening to bodily signals and environmental cues--a tight chest,
the slightest wheeze, distinct smells in the air, for example--or by
adhering to treatment protocols, such as regular inhaler usage or
alternative, non-pharmaceutical pathways like the Buteyko method
(examined in chapter 3), provided they have the resources to do so.
Some forge virtually asthma-free home environments if they can, while
others refrain from participating in activities, oftentimes sports or
exercise, known to exacerbate symptoms. But asthma is, at times,
unavoidable and uncontrollable, largely because its warning signs
evolve, disappear, or reappear over an individual's life course, or
simply because of season or locale changes. In such cases, the onset
of asthma is difficult to predict, nor does the disease always take
shape as an acute attack. Sometimes, asthma is chronic and may not
even be recognized by asthmatics as asthma in the first place. And
yet, despite the stories Kenner's breathers tell of an asthma that is
both aggressive and evasive, persistent cultural and media
representations of the disease simplify asthma as a singular
condition. _Breathtaking _thus constitutes an important corrective in
these discourses, revealing the extremely complex nature of a dynamic
and heterogeneous disease.

Kenner's work is novel in other ways as well, specifically in the
arguments it makes about the look and feel of asthma care in a more
environmentally unstable future. While the "biomedicalization"
(preference for medical intervention in disease management) and
neoliberalization of asthma have, since the 1980s, firmly located
primary responsibility for asthma care (here including surveillance
of symptoms and compliance with prescribed regimens) within the
individual, Kenner convincingly demonstrates why such approaches no
longer suit our modern reality. Her detailed survey of three hundred
cellphone-operated health applications in chapter 4 and an ongoing
climate and health awareness workshop series in chapter 5 highlight a
transformative trend in asthma thought and care: the reframing of
asthma as a condition that requires collective management.
Particularly enlightening is Kenner's analysis of asthma apps, which
indeed function as a "technology of the self designed to enforce
personal responsibility for health" but also promote collective care
infrastructures in many ways (p. 119). For instance, developers
consolidate individual inputs made in health apps into environmental
data, which in effect gives asthma sufferers the tools to detect
potential dangers lurking around in nearby environments.

If apps are changing the look of asthma care, then public-facing
health workshops are reworking the feel. In chapter 5, Kenner delves
into the Climate, Health, and Home initiative, which further
reinforces the idea of asthma as a larger public health issue rather
than solely an individual preoccupation. By implementing a curriculum
that prioritizes climate change education, presenters strive to make
underserved communities aware of the macro-level factors producing
health impacts and of existing resources and services designed to
take the burden away from individuals attempting to care for their
asthma under unwieldy conditions. A memorable example was project
facilitators' treatment of heat waves, which are projected to become
hotter and last longer due to global warming, as a latent catalyst
for asthma. As Kenner concludes, climate change "is forcing a shift
in how public health workers talk about asthma ... [while] scientists
are increasingly positioning disordered breathing contextually,
referencing the complexity of ecosystems, atmospheres, and temporal
changes" (p. 162).

Like those who experience asthma firsthand, Kenner readily
acknowledges that asthma lacks an easy solution. However, her final
recommendations enumerate the essential steps society must take to
not only make the world more breathable but also improve current
chronic asthma sufferers' quality of life in the process. In the
absence of swift and uncompromising action on the part of US
legislators to combat climate change, Kenner advocates democratizing
access to affordable health care; integrating breathing training into
the doctor's toolkit; and enacting policy, at all levels of
government, to improve the indoor environments in which we spend the
majority of our time.

_Breathtaking_ will have a broad appeal. Public health scholars and
professionals will learn a great deal about the trajectory of asthma
control in the US, and particularly about the critical role that
community-oriented solutions play in a world deeply affected by
climate change. Sensory studies scholars will appreciate the fine
attention Kenner pays to the various ways asthma makes itself legible
on the human body and, by extension, the importance of corporeally
derived experiences in popular day-to-day interpretations of the
condition. Those in the environmental humanities will find in
_Breathtaking_ a sophisticated investigation of nature-society
relations as they pertain to the air we breathe. Finally, general
audiences have much to gain from this work, as it will help readers
learn to attune to their own breathing patterns and deviations
therein. One might find that disordered breathing is far more common
than assumed at the outset.

Note

[1]. "Asthma, Q&amp;A," World Health Organization, May 15, 2020,
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/asthma.

Citation: Ela Miljkovic. Review of Kenner, Alison, _Breathtaking:
Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change_. H-Environment, H-Net
Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54944

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
Re: Photography and Labor in Marx's "Capital"

Mark Lause
 

The first presidential candidate on a socialist ticket was a photographer, an old abolitionist named Simon Wing .  The rolls of the First International and the early social democratic organizations in the U.S. also included a number of photographers.  That always struck me as suggestive of something worth some deeper digging.

Cheers,
Mark L.
Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists - ICIJ

Louis Proyect
 

The most important week of our profession – Tempest

Louis Proyect
 


A roundtable interview with the Movement of Rank and File Educators

https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/09/the-most-important-week-of-our-profession/
Progressive Patriotism | Lefteast

Louis Proyect
 

Translated from the Russian original on Colta.ru by Maxim Edwards. LeftEast publishes this text not by way of unreserved endorsement but rather in an effort to initiate a debate about leftist strategy. In our editorial discussion at least, it generated plenty of questions: Do we need to limit our imagination of political community to the form of the nation-state? Can we meaningfully expect to control the meaning of the notoriously shape-shifting ideology of nationalism? Hasn’t the progressive patriot niche in Russia been already occupied by forces that are not all that progressive, ranging from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation to red conservatives (kraskony) on- and off-line? How applicable is the authors’ version of progressive patriotism beyond Russia, or put another way, what has been the experience of leftist political formations based on it in Hungary (the Fourth Republic) or Latin America? Some of these questions have already been debated on Russian-language social media. What we hope to do with this translation is to broaden the debate around Kirill and Oleg’s very important and clearly articulated strategy proposal.

https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/progressive-patriotism/
Weaponized Words: The Language of Anti-Communism - COSMONAUT

Louis Proyect
 

Joshua Morris discusses the development and deployment of anti-communist rhetoric in the United States from the beginnings of the 20th Century to the early Cold War.

https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/09/20/weaponized-words-the-language-of-anti-communism/
Marx from the Margins

R.O.
 

Re: War Clouds in Eastern Mediterranean

RKOB
 

You are simply wrong to claim that we don’t support the Kurdish national liberation struggle. In the document which you criticize we say: “As the RCIT has repeatedly pointed out, we refuse any political support for the bourgeois-Islamist Erdoğan government. We support the right of national self-determination of the Kurdish people.” (Thesis 7, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/war-clouds-in-eastern-mediterranean/)

Similar we state in the more extended theses “Turkey and the Growing Tensions in Eastern Mediterranean”: “14. In terms of domestic politics, the Erdoğan regime is a government based on a bourgeois-parliamentary system which increasingly takes bonapartist features. However, calling it “fascist” as many Stalinists are doing is a silly caricature of the very term. Furthermore, another important feature of Erdoğan’s domestic policy is the intensified national oppression of the Kurdish minority. Revolutionaries in Turkey fight for a workers and poor peasant republic and the unconditional right of national self-determination for the Kurdish people.” (https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/turkey-and-the-growing-tensions-in-eastern-mediterranean/)

What we don’t do – in contrast to you – is to support and cheer the YPG which serves as foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism since more than five years.

Hence, your analogy with the Libyan rebels (which you continue to smear as racist) is unfounded. You say: “But RKOB seems to have a double standard.  In 2011 the Libyan rebels were allied with NATO in the campaign to overthrow Gaddafi.  Yet RKOB does not denounce them as pro-imperialist.”

The “little difference” between the YPG and the Libyan rebels is that the later started and waged the struggle independent and that the intervention by NATO (and their collusion with elements of the rebel leadership) was episodically. The Western imperialists never could bring the country under their full control. Hence, not long after the downfall of Gaddafi the U.S. Ambassador was killed and nearly all imperialist embassies were evacuated. No NATO troops were stationed – may be some special troops operated in secret here and there but there were no military basis.

You might also remember that Obama – in his final long interview - mentioned the military intervention in Libya as one of his big mistakes. Guess why?!

And if the GNA government would be loyal servants of imperialist Great Powers why did they not support it with substantial military aid in the past years?! In contrast, they either stay neutral or support Haftar.

Now compare this to the years-long relationship of the YPG and US imperialism. You have US troops on the ground, close collaboration, military bases – and all this since many years!

One must be really totally blind to ignore the difference!



Am 20.09.2020 um 10:52 schrieb Chris Slee:
RKOB acknowledges that "Turkey is oppressing the Kurds", but downplays this by saying that the oppression of the Kurds is "an important issue but not the only one in this region".  Of course it is not the "only" issue, but since it is "important" then we should express our solidarity with those fighting for Kurdish rights against the Turkish state - including the PKK and YPG/YPJ.  But RKOB does not do so.

He claims that the YPG is "circling around US imperialism".  I assume he is referring to the cooperation between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the US in fighting against ISIS.

But RKOB seems to have a double standard.  In 2011 the Libyan rebels were allied with NATO in the campaign to overthrow Gaddafi.  Yet RKOB does not denounce them as pro-imperialist.

RKOB denies that the Libyan rebels were racist.  They included a diverse mixture of political ideologies, so I will not generalise about the whole rebel movement.  But certainly a powerful section of the rebel movement was extremely racist.

The rebel militia from the city of Misrata ethnically cleansed the black population of the nearby town of Tawergha, destroying their homes and driving them away, causing them to flee to refugee camps in other cities.  Even after the war against Gaddafi was over, the Misrata militia refused to allow the refugees to return for more than 6 years.  In 2018 an agreement was reached that they would no longer be blocked from returning, but as far as I know few have done so, because of the devastated condition of the town, and because of continuing fear of the Misrata militia.

In judging whether the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord is better than the Haftar forces, their attitude towards black people, including the refugees from Tawergha, would be one criterion (not the only one, of course).  I have not studied this question sufficiently to form a definite opinion on this.

Chris Slee
 

From: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io> on behalf of RKOB <aktiv@...>
Sent: Saturday, 19 September 2020 4:38 PM
To: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io>
Subject: Re: [marxmail] War Clouds in Eastern Mediterranean
 

In my opinion, there are the following problems in your argument.

1) You say, rightly, that Turkey is oppressing the Kurds. This is surely true and has to be opposed by all socialists and democrats. But in contrast to the perception of you and other supporters of the YPG, politics in the Middle East does not circle around the Kurdish question. It is rather the YPG which is circling around U.S. imperialism (and sometimes other holders of power like Assad).

You can not and should not judge all states and forces primarily by what they say on the Kurdish issue. It is an important issue but not the only one in this region.

2) You say: “Erdogan's desire to make Turkey more influential in the Middle East - to make it more like an imperialist power.” We can discuss about Erdoğan’s “desire”. But this is not decisive for Marxists. It is the objective role of different forces in a given conflict. There have been national liberation movements in history fighting under the banner of Islam which might have “desired” to create a “global caliphate”. However, objectively they were fighting the occupation by British, French or US imperialism. Apologists of imperialism took this ideological mantle as a pretext to denounce such struggles. Communists don’t do this.

It is necessary to have not an impressionistic characterization of a state (“the desire of its head is …”) but an objective class analysis of its political and economic position. A brief summary of our analysis of Turkey can be read in chapter V of this book: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2018/

3) The difference between the Libyan GNA government and General Haftar is similar to the difference between Morsi and General Sisi in Egypt. Or, to give another analogy, between the Erdoğan government and the Turkish military dictatorships from 1980 onwards. Yes, they are all bourgeois. Yes, they all collaborate in one way or another with this or that Great Power. But if you are blind to recognize the difference between a semi-democratic bourgeois parliamentary system and a full-blown dictatorship, you repeat the nonsense of the Stalinist “social-fascism” theory of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

It is because you are incapable to recognize this difference that you put the foreign intervention of Saudi Arabia/UAE on the same level as Turkey’s. One attempts to bloody crush a liberation struggle. The other tries to exploit and manipulate it (in order to finally liquidate it). “In the end” it is all the same. Likewise, “in the end” we will be all dead. But in the meantime we can do a few things if we are not instantly killed! Serious political people must not ignore this difference!

4) It is a well-known slander of pro-Gaddafi people to denounce the Libyan Revolution as “anti-Black racist”. Behind this is the claim that the Gaddafi dictatorship had been somehow better for Black people. There is no doubt, that there exist (and always existed) anti-Black chauvinist trends in the Arab world. But the Libyan Revolution did not centre around the issue of Black people and did not follow an agenda of “anti-Black racism”. This is Gaddafian slander of the revolutionary process and a cheap excuse for refusing to take sides in the civil war (see only this e.g. the second half of our essay: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/liberation-struggle-and-imperialism/).

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

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

Re: Notes on the passing of Stephen F. Cohen | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Dayne Goodwin
 

I agree with Louis that damages paid to SWP by government were
minimal. I recall the SWP rejecting a much more generous settlement
offer early on (1976?, suit was initiated in 1973) in order to
continue exposing government repression. I believe the government
also paid over $400,000 to SWP attorneys for legal expenses. But
total government payout is put somewhat in perspective by report (in
NYTimes article) that the government had paid at least $1.7 million to
their informants in/on the SWP.

On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 3:10 PM Alan Ginsberg <ginsberg.alan1@...> wrote:

Judge Griesa's 1986 damages award to the SWP was $264,000. From the Court's decision:

The SWP is awarded damages in the amount of $42,500 relating to disruption activities, $96,500 for the surreptitious entries, and $125,000 for the use of informants, or a total of $264,000.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/642/1357/2398821/

NY Times article on decision is at
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/26/nyregion/court-finds-fbi-harassed-socialist-group-unlawfully.html

The government dropped its appeal of Griesa's ruling in 1988.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-17-mn-2024-story.html
Re: Modertor's note

Jacob Miller <jmiller1982@...>
 

There is more than one argument being made. Yes, racism existed (exists) and yes slavery helped develop capitalism in England (primarily), but whether you see the motivation for this slavery being racism or financial determines whether you fall on the racialist or Marxist side of the discussion. As CLR James, said, "to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous."

Jacob
We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole

Louis Proyect
 

Jacobin gives a platform to people who agree with the guys at Stanford who go on FOX News minimizing the danger that COVID-19 poses. They are totally into the Swedish herd immunity model, just like all the Sandernistas at  Jacobin are into the Swedish economic model. It's enough to make you puke.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/covid-19-pandemic-economy-us-response-inequality/
Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Two: Running Low on Oxygen

Louis Proyect
 

Re: Modertor's note

Andrew Stewart
 

Having studied the topic thoroughly for a decade, the undeniable reality is that the accumulative processes necessary for the constitution of the American capitalist system were dependent upon the racialized slavery system.

In the Grundrisse, which was only published in 1939 in Moscow and in English in 1973 by Vintage, has a direct mention of American slavery as a form of capitalism, throwing to the wind the claim by Eugene Genovese, et. al. that the South was a feudal economy.
 
"The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they -are- capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour." [Emphasis in original] (pg. 513, Martin Nicolaus translation)
 
Noel Ignatiev's scholarly review of Foner's book on Reconstruction traces out the entirety of a debate within the Sojourner Truth Organization and people like Roediger and Glaberman over the matter <https://libcom.org/library/american-blindspot-reconstruction-according-eric-foner-web-du-bois-noel-ignatiev#footnote2_0zxgoiz> and <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/sojournertruth/slaverysymp.pdf>

Appeal to revolutionaries: We must defend each other from state attack

Berta Joubert-Ceci
 

Re: Photography and Labor in Marx's "Capital"

R.O.
 

This paper contains an interesting definition by Marx of the division of labor as  'labor of severed body parts'. You could call it anatomic reductionism?

"No Exchange without Likeness"
       For Marx, commodity production depends both on the division of the laborer's body and on a kind of artful bodybuilding that I have argued resembles the kinds of photographic montage produced in the mid-nineteenth century. As Marx writes, commodities are "merely a number of parts fitted together" (Capital 474). The work of commodity fetishism is, to a large extent, the work of composing bodies and body parts into the seductive and smooth contours of attractive merchandise—the work of making a commodity body capable of casting "wooing glances" at consumers (204). The "body of the commodity" is a composition of two apparently heterogeneous groups of objects—natural materials and laboring bodies: "The physical bodies of commodities are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour" (133). Marx defines this labor as an objectified form of the laborer's body, but in the form of severed body parts: a "productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, [and] hands" (134). While the performance of labor seems to divide the body of the worker into dis posable parts, the division of labor performs a primary dismemberment in preparation for this "productive expenditure" of body parts:
    [The division of labor] converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations... Not only is the specialized work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation .. . [It] is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. (481-82) The division of labor makes men into "monsters" in order to collect them and their embodied labor more efficiently. It at once "cripples" a body by transforming a whole body into a single part and multiplies the uses of an individual body by dividing it up into parts, each of which can be used for specialization. While the division of labor seems to mimic the operations of synecdoche, in which a whole body is reduced to a single and representative part (the worker as a "hand," for example), Marx stresses how the division of labor makes it impossible for a body so divided to be represented at all. Parts can only refer to parts, because "the individual himself is divided up." That is, the productive divisions of manufacture seem to make the referential divisions of synecdoche impossible. But as fragments of individual laboring bodies are passed "from hand to hand" (Capital 455) in the process of production, they become inseparable and indistinguishable from the parts of the commodity being assembled: "[A] 11 these membra disjecta come together for the first time in the hand that binds them into one mechanical whole" (462).20 Blurring the distinction between embodied commodities and commodified bodies—between components that look like body parts and body parts that look like components—Marx figures production as a form of artistic and mechanical labor, an artful composition of the "membra disjecta" of labor. Turning imperfect monsters into perfect products becomes the aesthetic labor of commodity fetishism. --pp.131,32


On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 05:22 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
On 9/20/20 11:11 AM, wideangle wrote:
Photography is my thing. 
 
 
Re: Modertor's note

Jacob Miller <jmiller1982@...>
 

I don't see how anyone could view it otherwise. "Racism is in the DNA of the country." Is this a Marxist idea?

Jacob
Re: Notes on the passing of Stephen F. Cohen | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Alan Ginsberg
 

Judge Griesa's 1986 damages award to the SWP was $264,000. From the Court's decision:

The SWP is awarded damages in the amount of $42,500 relating to disruption activities, $96,500 for the surreptitious entries, and $125,000 for the use of informants, or a total of $264,000.

The government dropped its appeal of Griesa's ruling in 1988.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-17-mn-2024-story.html