From Neil Smith, "'Giuliani Time'"

Shrinkage of the poor population in general, including home- less people, is "not an unspoken part of our strategy," the mayor once explained at a "confidential" meeting of newspaper editors. "That is our strategy."19 And the strategy worked. The erstwhile liberal galleries applauded. "We're not suicidal liberals anymore," announced one community activist turned antihomeless crusader.20 Or, in the true spirit of revanchism: As a lifelong New Yorker doing graduate studies in Chicago, I am grateful that New York re-elected Rudy Giuliani. Of course he's a dictator, but maybe it takes a dictator to run this city. The streets are safer, there's hardly any porn on 42nd Street (believe me, I've looked!). And people actually want to live in New York City. Sure he's unfair to the poor, but what politician isn't. At least Rudy isn't phony about it.21 Our letter writer only omitted the claim that the subway trains also run on time (not)

Would someone offer an explanation of Telos's shift to the right under Piccone.

They first came to my attention in 2006.

https://louisproyect.org/2006/09/14/american-eustonians/

Hello,
I had hoped my first posting here would be on something more interesting, (I am collecting articles from American History Review, NewPol, ILWCH, Labor Studies Journal and the like on the debates between Eric Arnesen, Herbert Hill, Philip Foner, Judith Stein, David Roediger et al. and hope to get suggestions from the mailing list for my reading on the important issues discussed there) but I was sort of blown away by this (maybe I shouldn't have been?) and was eager to share it here:
I was reading Russel Jacoby's 1976 article "The Politics of Crisis Theory" and I happened to click on the homepage of the Telos website. I was intrigued to see an essay on Martin Sklar, one of the founding editors of In These Times, with whose strange turns in politics (supporting Palin and the Tea Party late in his life) I was somewhat familiar. The essay/obituary, which, although I haven't read all the way through, seems to give a favorable assessment of Sklar, was written by none other than the Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation Kim Holmes. 
I thought the presence of one hard-right wing, institutionally attached commissar on the pages of the relatively obscure new left journal might be a fluke, so I browsed a little on the website and found an editor's note on the Summer 2019 issue saying that editor Russel Berman (of the Hoover Inst.?!!), had stepped down "to pursue an opportunity at the U.S. State department. When I looked Berman up, I was startled to find out just how prominent that job was. He, along with the current editor of Telos, David Pan, were on Trump/Pompeo's "Commission on Unalienable Rights", which released its report in July 2020 (here's a video of Pompeo's speech at the release of the report, the report itself, and UC Irvine Law School's letter to the Commission protesting its privileging of religious freedom over other rights in the UDHR. Aside from Mike Pompeo's evangelical fundamentalism, the emphasis on religious freedom in the report and in the minutes of the meetings--referenced in the UCI letter--seem to also be a result of Russel and Pan's editorial focus in Telos on Political Theology, specifically that of Carl Schmitt)

In Vineland, his underappreciated 1990 novel, the author of Gravity’s Rainbow anticipated a United States in which security would become the greatest good.

http://bostonreview.net/arts-society/peter-coviello-pynchon-and-coming-police-state

Liu Yifei, the star of Disney’s new live-action remake of its 1998 cartoon Mulan, posted a message on Weibo last year expressing support for the Hong Kong police as they were brutally suppressing protests in the city. Her comments prompted an online campaign to boycott the movie. The campaign received new impetus this month when it was discovered that parts of the film had been shot in Xinjiang in 2018, when it was already widely known that more than a million people, mostly Uyghurs, were being detained in ‘re-education’ facilities, subject to brainwashing, violence and intimidation. The movie credits thank the Communist Party’s publicity department and the Public Security Bureau for the Turpan prefecture, where at least ten internment camps are operating. ‘It has generated a lot of publicity,’ Disney’s chief financial officer, Christine McCarthy, said yesterday. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/september/boycottmulan

Nice review of my friend Michael Elias's new book.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/scrupulously-woven-on-michael-eliass-you-can-go-home-now/

This fucking dick Bill De Blasio used to show up at Nicaragua Solidarity meetings in the late 90s. He caters to the needs of the real estate industry, wealthy NYers and the police department. He is Rudy Giuliani light.

https://gothamist.com/news/angry-upper-west-siders-wanted-homeless-scum-out-their-neighborhood-de-blasio-took-their-side

Nancy Pelosi has been notably tepid on green legislation – so are the Democrats serious about fighting climate change?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/12/wildfires-democrats-climate-crisis

To prevent harm to the public’s health, we also have both a moral and an ethical responsibility to call attention to the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science recently fostered by Dr. Scott Atlas, a former Stanford Medical School colleague and current senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy.

full: https://portside.org/2020-09-11/do-no-harm-open-letter-stanford-medical-faculty

My favorite comic book author next to Harvey Pekar.

https://comicsgrinder.com/2020/09/11/review-paying-the-land-by-joe-sacco/

Why marxists should not mention liberation and production in the same breath:

A neoprimitivist critique from John Zerzan:

5 . DIVISION OF LABOR
Di-vi-sion of la-bor n. 1 . the breakdown into specific, circumscribed tasks for maximum efficiency of output which constitutes manufacture; cardinal aspect of production. 2. the fragmenting or reduction of human activity into separated toil that is the practical root of alienation; that basic specialization which makes civilization appear and develop.

The relative wholeness of pre-civilized life was first and foremost an absence of the narrowing, confining separation of people into differentiated roles and functions. The foundation of our shrinkage of experience and powerlessness in the face of the reign of expertise, felt so acutely today, is the division of labor. It is hardly accidental that key ideologues of civilization have striven mightily to valorize it. In Plato's Republic, for example, we are instructed that the origin of the state lies in that "natural" inequality of humanity that is embodied in the division of labor. Durkheim celebrated a fractionated, unequal world by divining that the touchstone of "human solidarity," its essential moral value is-you guessed it. Before him, according to Franz Borkenau, it was a great increase in division of labor occurring around 1600 that introduced the abstract category of work, which may be said to underlie, in tum, the whole modem, Cartesian notion that our bodily existence is merely an obj ect of our (abstract) consciousness. In the first sentence of The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith foresaw the essence of industrialism by determining that division of labor represents a qualitative increase in productivity. 20 years later Schiller recognized that division of labor was producing a society in which its members were unable to develop their humanity. Marx could see both sides: "as a result of division of labor," the worker is "reduced to the condition of a machine." But decisive was Marx's worship of the fullness of production as essential to human liberation. The immiseration of humanity along the road of capital's development he saw as a necessary evil.
Marxism cannot escape the determining imprint of this decision in favor of division of labor, and its major voices certainly reflect this acceptance. Lukacs, for instance, chose to ignore it, seeing only the "reifying effects of the dominant commodity form" in his attention to the problem of proletarian consciousness. E.P. Thompson realized that with the factory system, "the character-structure of the rebellious pre-industrial labourer or artisan was violently recast into that o f the submissive individual worker."
But he devoted amazingly little attention to division of labor, the central mechanism by which this transformation was achieved. Marcuse tried to conceptualize a civilization without repression, while amply demonstrating the incompatibility of the two. In bowing to the "naturalness" inherent in division of labor, he judged that the "rational exercise of authority" and the "advancement of the whole" depend upon it-while a few pages later (in Eros and Civilization) granting that one's "labor becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes."
Ellul understood how "the sharp knife of specialization has passed like a razor into the living flesh," how division of labor causes the ignorance of a "closed universe" cutting off the subject from others and from nature. Similarly did Horkheimer sum up the debilitation: "thus, for all their activity individuals are becoming more passive; for all their power over nature they are becoming more powerless in relation to society and themselves."
Along these lines, Foucault emphasized productivity as the fundamental contemporary repression. But recent Marxian thought continues in the trap of having, ultimately, to elevate division of labor for the sake of technological progress.
Braverman's in many ways excellent Labor and Monopoly Capital explores the degradation of work, but sees it as mainly a problem of loss of "will and ambition to wrest control of production from capitalist hands." And Schwabbe's Psychosocial Consequences of Natural and Alienated Labor is dedicated to the ending of all domination in production and projects a self-management of production. The reason, obviously, that he ignores division of labor is that it is inherent in production; he does not see that it is nonsense to speak of liberation and production in the same breath. The tendency of division of labor has always been the forced labor
of the interchangeable cog in an increasingly autonomous, impervious-to­ desire apparatus. The barbarism of modem times is still the enslavement to technology, that is to say, to division of labor. "Specialization," wrote Giedion, "goes on without respite," and today more than ever can we see and feel the barren, de-eroticized world it has brought us to. Robinson Jeffers decided, "I don't think industrial civilization is worth the distortion of human nature, and the meanness and loss of contact with the earth, that it entails."
Meanwhile, the continuing myths of the "neutrality" and "inevitability" of technological development are crucial to fitting everyone to the yoke of division of labor. Those who oppose domination while defending its core principle are the perpetuators of our captivity. Consider Guattari, that radical post-structuralist, who finds that desire and dreams are quite possible "even in a society with highly developed industry and highly developed public information services, etc." Our advanced French opponent of alienation scoffs at the naive who detect the "essential wickedness of industrial societies," but does offer the prescription that "the whole attitude of specialists needs questioning." Not the existence of specialists, of course, merely their "attitudes." To the question, "How much division of labor should we jettison?" returns, I believe, the answer, "How much wholeness for ourselves and the planet do we want?"

-p. 97 Future Primitive Revisited, John Zerzan.

“The Democrats are worthless”: An interview with Howie Hawkins
Gregor Baszak, Platypus Review 126 | May 2020
https://platypus1917.org/2020/05/01/the-democrats-are-worthless-an-interview-with-howie-hawkins/

. . .
"... I think the problem in this country is that since 1936 the
Popular Front, when the Communists went into a coalition with the
liberal bourgeoisie against the fascists, has been the dominant policy
on the Left. However, since 1848 the traditional principle of
socialist politics was class independence from the capitalists. The
so-called “socialists” in this country have forgotten that. They don’t
know that they’re continuing the Popular Front because they don’t
study history. And when you’re in a Popular Front with the Democrats,
you are the junior partner: they set the agenda, and you go out and
knock on doors or make phone calls. You’re not a Left anymore; you’re
just grunt workers for the corporate liberals and neoliberals." . . .

"GB: Some might say that it was the function of Bernie Sanders all
along to get young people to place their hopes in the Democrats.

"HH: I think it’s true. My friend, the late Bruce Dixon used the
sheepdog metaphor. Whether it was Bernie’s intention or not, that was
the effect. And I think that was his intention.

"His wife, Jane Sanders, spoke to the Left Forum in New York City in
2018 and told the audience in the opening plenary to register as
Democrats. I stood in the back and gave it a thumbs down. She said, I
know you’re not going to do that, but you should. He wanted that so
that people would vote for him in the primaries this time. That’s been
his function.

"It’s a shame. I knew him in the 70s when he was a third-party
candidate with the Liberty Union. I worked on his campaign and dropped
leaflets for him. When he set up his Eugene Debs slideshow, I arranged
showings of it. But then when he wanted to get into Congress after
being mayor of Burlington, he got a deal with the Democrats in Vermont
and basically said, don’t run a serious candidate against me as a
Democrat, and I will make sure that progressives in Vermont won’t run
in some of the races that you do want to win. They’ve had this deal
going on. Bernie is nominally an independent, but in practice he’s
functionally a Democrat. For example, in the last Senate election in
2018 when he got re-elected to the U.S. Senate, he was in the
Democratic primary and then he declined the nomination. So he’s on the
ballot as an independent, but there was no Democrat because he’d
gotten their nomination too.

"GB: Since Sanders dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden, the
Left has to plan for a post-Bernie future. Where do you see that to
lie? Do you see that with figures like Ilhan Omar or Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez or do you see it lying elsewhere?

"HH: When push comes to shove, these younger members of Congress line
up with Pelosi. We had a primary. I was the candidate for governor in
New York in 2018, and DSA and the liberals got behind a woman named
Cynthia Nixon who was an actress who supported Hillary Clinton over
Bernie Sanders in 2016. I think they were star struck. She got beat by
Governor Andrew Cuomo by about 2:1, which is basically what the
Democratic Party is in New York. One third progressives and two thirds
regular Democrats who’ll vote for the establishment inside the
Democratic Party. Immediately after the primary was over,
Ocasio-Cortez went on CNN and endorsed Cuomo and all the Democrats.
Cuomo is a corporate Democrat if ever there was one.

"Of course, I was in the race, and so we asked DSA to consider
endorsing us. Instead of having that debate, they had a debate on
whether or not to have a debate on endorsing me. The result was not to
even have the discussion.

"Some people within the DSA and Jacobin say there’s a contradiction
between the progressive Democrats and the corporate Democrats, and at
some point there’s going to be a dirty break, as they call it. I’ve
been hearing that since the 60s." . . .

Thanks Andrew.
we know that anarchism is a political ideology/perspective that has
developed mainly from within petit-bourgeois sectors of capitalist (or
becoming-capitalist) societies

The case for an independent Left party
by Howie Hawkins
International Socialist Review, Issue #107, 2018
https://isreview.org/issue/107/case-independent-left-party

https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1263

Andrew Stewart,and anybody else,what,do suggest then,is the best way forward for left,if our goal is to organize,and build our numbers?

Thanks for the kind word Michael. Could the WEST WING episode re: Gault entail the Rosenbergs as well? Probably, the whole theory of simulation and simulacra posits the invocation of memory, not genuine historical facts, and the blurriness is part of what makes the system effective. It is all about bringing up certain kinds of nostalgia and emotions in service of a very contemporary socio-economic politics. What makes THE MATRIX so brilliant still after all these decades is how brilliantly it uses the device of the science fiction story to illustrate the philosophical concept in tandem with half a dozen others, including Marx, Gramsci, and Althusser.