Just Another Liberal/Ultra Far Left Blog

From The Unrepentant Marxist, Evolutionary Psychology and Art

Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
Why Darwin?
By Richard C. Lewontin
Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography
by Janet Browne
Grove, 174 pp., $13.00 (paper)

The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin, annotated by James T. Costa
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 537 pp., $35.00

Why Evolution Is True
by Jerry A. Coyne
Viking, 282 pp., $27.95

It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick
by Greg Gibson
FT Press, 187 pp., $24.99

When I was a student I was enjoined to reject the “Cleopatra’s Nose” theory of history, so called after Pascal’s remark in the Pensées : “Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter, everything in the world would have changed.”[1] The intent was not to dismiss biography as a way into the structuring of a historical narrative, but to reject the idea that the properties, ideas, or actions of some particular person were the necessary conditions for the unfolding of events in the world. If Josef Djugashvili had never been born, someone else could have been Stalin.

http://monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php
Monthly Review May 2009
Why Socialism?
by Albert Einstein
This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).
Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is. [click to continue...]

The ‘New GM’: Layoffs, Factory Closings, Offshoring

Nothing about the old way of doing business made sense, and it made a wreck of GM. After decades of closing factories, laying off workers and shifting production overseas, the company now finds itself with $172.8 billion in debt.

It would make sense to change course, radically.

But the Obama administration is not doing anything radical.

Rather, it wants to create a “New GM” that stays the course of the old GM.

If all goes according to plan, the “New GM” will close down as many as 20 factories in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Delaware. Additional plants in Tennessee and Michigan will be put on “standby,” for probable closing. At least 21,000 family-supporting jobs will be lost, as the corporation shifts production to new facilities in China and other foreign countries. Those cuts come on the heels of GM factory closings last year that cost tens of thousands of jobs and shattered communities across the Great Lakes states just as the downturn was developing into a deep recession.

This massive de-industrialization plan — with its rapid offshoring of work once done in the United States — will be paid for by the federal government.

It will cost US taxpayers a great deal to eliminate this many US jobs — Washington has already handed GM $20 billion and is expected to shift another $30 billion into the coffers of the corporation. “Whether that investment will ever be recovered is still an open question,” suggests the New York Times report.

Open Veins of Latin America

Marx and Darwin

A Critique of Darwinism
On Evolution
By JAMES C. FARIS
[click to continue...]

Published on Sunday, May 24, 2009 by The News Journal (Delaware)
Capitalism Produces Rich Bankers, but Socialism Produces Happiness
by Phillip Bannowsky

Socialism is better than capitalism. So say 20 percent of Americans, and another 27 percent say they can’t say which is better, according to an April 9 Rasmussen poll.

There’s hope.

When you consider that virtually no newspaper, broadcaster, well-funded think tank, teacher, or anybody’s boss or commander ever said something nice about socialism, it’s remarkable that only 53 percent of us still favor rule by the moneyed class. Perhaps folks are learning how capitalism sacrifices happiness for individual gain.

As Billy Bragg exhorts us in his update of the socialist anthem “The Internationale”: “Stand up, all victims of oppression/for tyrants fear your might/Don’t cling so hard to your possessions/For you have nothing if you have no rights.”

No less a “capitalist tool” than Forbes Magazine let a red cat out of the bag with a report this month that the happiest countries tend to be Scandinavian socialist democracies. High per-capita GDP certainly plays a role in their felicity, but even social democratic New Zealand, with per-capita GDP only 64 percent of the United States’, ranks with the 10 democracies above us in the happiness index. They pay high taxes in these pinkotopias, but folks enjoy entitlements like free college, extensive elder care, and 52-week paid maternity leave.

Bill Martin
Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation
Bill Martin, Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, Open Court, 2008, 479pp., $44.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780812696288.

Reviewed by Michael Barber, St. Louis University
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