On Feb 3, 2023, at 7:01 AM, Roger Kulp <leucovorinsaves@...> wrote:

While lists like Marxmail have their good points, and educational benefits, they are pretty much a relic of the early years ofthe internet. The rest of the web has long since moved on.

A gross overstatement IMO. The people who design and engineer the web continue to do most of that work over email. It's as true today as it was in the 1970s, and there are plenty of young engineers who use it. And there are plenty of other examples of the ongoing vital use of email. email is just no longer alone in how people communicate using the Internet.

Email is better suited to presenting more complex ideas and making an argument; it's longer form than chat, facebook, WhatsApp, Mastodon, etc., and that form is needed for network-based discussions whereas short-form social-media apps are better suited to short comments, annotations, video, images, and non-textual media.

What the moderators have proposed is to use other social media as appropriate to cast a wider net but not to end the list because it has somehow been superseded.

Mark

On Jan 31, 2023, at 7:43 AM, Les Schaffer <les.schaffer@...> wrote:

We would like to form working groups to address these challenges.

• The Moderators Group will moderator and coordinate all of the groups.

• The discussion topic group will generate topics and recruit contributors on those topics.

• The outreach group will recruit new people to the list.

• The technical group will manage our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. accounts.

We might want an admin group to manage email and other social media, if subscribers volunteer to expand to other social media.

Regarding subscribers, I'd like to know how many bots are on this list, since I assume we have some, and with several hundred subscribers, we might be a target for intelligence services and nefarious actors.

If we add other platforms like TikTok, etcetera, then the fraud problem doubles or quadruples.

The alternative is to allow organized misinformation to proliferate and the bad postings will eventually drive out the good.

Properly considered, this might be considered a Moderators' problem, but Moderators have to devote attention to dealing with real people.

Mark

We've had a couple of people volunteer.  Although that is not enough to accomplish the proposal that Les posted, we may propose to do more, just not as much more as some of us think we need.

There was little discussion of a topic that I found interesting, and that is the governance of the list.  Louis governed the list with Les's help.  Those tasks included technical administration, moderation, curation of list content, and recruiting people who would add to the quality of list content.  The upside is that Louis did a good job and nobody else besides Les had to do any work related to the list.  The downside may have been an arbitrariness in moderation that comes with having just one person set and execute policy. So the governance issue is how to replace one-person (really 1+ including Les), with a self-managing mailing list of very broad topic (Marxism) with lots of branches that results in a lot of splintering along with diverse, sometimes contradictory, ideas.  I find that an interesting puzzle.  For instance, holding some kind of election to select a committee to run the list will likely encourage more sectarianism and could trigger competition for control, which would likely undermine the stated mission of the list to be of Marxism rather than one tendency of it. 

In addition to governance, there is also content:  Some people have said that the quality of list content has gone down since Louis left.  I think there's something to that.  The range of topics is small and apart from a couple of hot-button topics, there's little discussion in depth.   

These are the issues that I think motivate the Moderators' Note.  Hopefully we can execute on a couple of them in the coming months.  Those of us in or seventh, eighth, ninth or tenth decades usually don't have much time to commit to new undertakings.  But sharing ideas on this topic is still needed and very much appreciated.

Thanks, Mark

On Jan 31, 2023, at 8:43 AM, Les Schaffer <les.schaffer@...> wrote:

Here are some challenges.

1. The list is English only. Only very rarely does anyone contribute anything in any other language. This limits not only who reads the list and who writes for the list, but the topics and takes on those topics.

This was one of Anthony's ideas in the document that Les posted. I personally resonated with it. Since we are all presumably internationalists, this idea should be worthy of support or at least comment. But it presents a few challenges starting with how to do such a thing.

There are at least four different ways to do it: Translation can be done by humans or by machine translation, and either of these two options can implement a translation from English to multiple languages or from multiple languages to multiple languages. So that makes 4 alternative designs in total.

We cut the alternatives in half by eliminating human translation since we don't have the people to do that, among other problems. And if we can't make this work for translating mail that's posted in English to other languages, then we won't be able to take mail posted in multiple languages and then translate it to different languages.

The simplified problem, therefore, is to continue using English as a posting language and show that machine translation to other languages works. There are a couple of ways to do that: We can translate at the mail server or the mail client. Machine translation at the mail server will incur costs in licensing translation software and integrating it with groups.io. Mail translation at the client avoids those costs. It has the added advantage of already existing in the Chrome browser and gmail and by integrating some other (presumably better) machine translation software in the browser or mail program of your choice.

So, one proposal for realizing Anthony's vision is to try out just translating in Chrome for mail that is received in English, as is the policy today, but translated on a subscriber's mail app to the languages of their choice. We could document how to do it for subscribers who wish to read marxmail in a different language than English, and then evaluate how good it is.

This will require some volunteers

Mark

Because I have guilt feelings about my poor performance in high school French, I have been
subscribed for a while to several newsletters from French sources. When my self-translation
fails I resort to (I should have inserted that I use Mozilla Thunderbird) the add-on called
"Web Translate". For French it works beautifully, but I can not testify to Ukrainian, or an
Asian or Arabic language.

Point being, I think that the day when we can easily machine translate from language X
to language Y is - if not here - fast approaching. Thus I support allowing postings in other
languages - or investigating the potential.

A second thought - I'd be willing to bet that Marxist posters from other countries will have
some acquaintance with English - it seems to have become a fad after WWII. Suggest to
them that a short summery - "en englais" - of their contribution would be welcome.

- Bill

Comrades,
      I don't feel that I am myself able to contribute as a member of a working group but
I  look forward to be able to participate on topics when possible. I am happy with the way you are proposing to resuscitate the list in Lou's spirit. I think, though, we should stick to English for now. At some point when we have a vigorous discussion list going, we can explore other languages and the possibility of using online translations.
    in solidarity,
      michael

On Mar 11, 2023, at 7:46 PM, michael a. lebowitz <mlebowit@...> wrote:

I think, though, we should stick to English for now. At some point when we have a vigorous discussion list going, we can explore other languages and the possibility of using online translations.

Thanks Michael. I think our foray into non-English languages might be as simple as giving instructions on the marxmail main page that describes how to enable translation to non-English languages in a standard browser like Chrome.

Mark

Dear Comrades, (Hi Les!)

Have followed daily and sometimes contributed since 2001.

Did not agree with Louis at all turns (who could?!) but always wished to emulate his intellectual vigor.
And learned to laugh rather than get truly silly and double-down.

So very many worldwide, historical, temporal, human things that Louis caught or connected -- in a frisson with this audience -- that could not be found elsewhere.
For me that was the heart and soul of the list -- and propelled the discourse and invited others to join in that vital project, from philosophical grounds all the way to tactical actions.

Death of people I have gotten to know intervenes in most of my days. That said, Louis' death impacted me so much. I miss him.
Acknowledge here that Michael Yates' online remembrance/eulogy was beautiful.

But I especially miss what Louis might say about current posts on the Marxmail list! 

My work commitment has me once again basically politically underground, with a long stretch of 7-day weeks (a couple of recent years and then some since. Personally I do have beginnings of re-discovering what they revealingly call a "work-life balance." Not that I'm complaining! I have enormous social privilege and am contributing my best efforts to others). But practically speaking it would be folly for me to offer a commitment to advance this project -- although I believe Marxmail should survive and succeed.

Have long suspected (by spotting key stories in the NYT/WaPo) that Marxmail had a much larger 'mainstream imprint' than anyone can prove (= a direct translation into bourgeois discourse) mainly because academic and journalist lurkers could find the connections no one else - except the list participants, preeminently Louis - saw/made. Also, the technical challenges (internet archive/Utah/what have you) that Les dealt with, in the technical struggle to keep the list alive, might be presented as evidence that real world (not virtual) forces would extinguish the light of this list if they could. 

With respect to the future of class conscious workers and intellectuals here in the belly of the beast -- finding a way toward a heterodox and nonsectarian discourse might make all of the difference. 
Therefore, will do what I can to support the continuance of Marxmail. 

Mostly what I've said is perhaps not that useful to the purpose of this discussion. Thank you for the indulgence! (Hiya Hari!)

My 2 cents on the topic would be to support the idea of cultivating a collective of people with a division of labor that leads to Marxmail as a repository of philosophical/scientific (writ large ala Christopher Caudewell!)/social scientific/cultural/civil rights/women's rights/class struggle/bourgeois politics/union politics/etc. -- with informed commentary - in other words task our comrades with covering the fields they have already tilled for years -- but that the task is to not assume that someone else has done it. (If so please repeat it.) For example I still can't get over "Birth Strike" by Jenny Brown. The reason I suggest this is that many on this list (Hello Gary) have so very much wisdom in every post. (For example Gary could be asked to post/crosspost on his present political passions.)

Yes to using technology to solve the language problem -- almost within reach?

Not sure that the details of what electronic platform (listserv and email for grandparents yeah) matters at this particular moment.
An internet presence matters -- and the specific form might change but only if the list survives the coming months/years, -- so the present form seems workable, if not growing.

Keep on 

Don