In addition to the analysis, there is the Manifesto related in full, the preface to a Russian volume of prose and poetry, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which stands as something of a manifesto for the Russian Futurists. Then there is the Italian Fascist Co-authored by the writer of the Futurist Manifesto, F T Marinetti.

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it could be argued that prior to 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was a failed writer, and that the Futurist Manifesto was something of a publicity stunt. He had had little success with a drama for the stage performed in Paris the same year the Manifesto appeared, and similarly disappointed with an attempt at writing a novel a year later.

He later enjoyed considerably more success with Zang Tumb Tumb, as a self-promoting Futurist. This is a sound poem based on his experience of reporting on the Italo-Turkish war for the French newspaper, Figaro. The onomatopoeic and alliterative elements of this work is somewhat evident in the way his driving into a ditch in described in the manifesto.

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Today, Futurism has become part of the consumerist landscape.

Modern smartphone cameras have all manner of devices to recreate the iconography of movement established by Futurist artists like Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni.   Moreover, the concept-based multimedia nature of art in the 21st century is evident in art installations rather than room on room hangings of traditional painterly works of art. While this remains part of the movement’s legacy in promotional terms, it acknowledges little of Futurism’s attachment to man and machine in Italy or the folkloric tradition in Russia.

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The document, itself, reads like a work of Victorian fiction. In English, the modern reader is reminded stylistically of the great European romantic writers, Hugo and Dumas, in original translation, which tends to somewhat obscure the authors’ intentions. This irony, no doubt, would be lost on communist radicals today, when we remember that Marx if not Engels despised both these 19th century French writers.

The analysis looks at the communist position in connection with the recent democratic elections in Germany; excerpts have been taken from the first three chapters of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. The very short fourth chapter is a call to arms based on what was posited in the second.

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“To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.”

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This claim has been central to Marxist thought since 1848, when the manifesto was published more or less at the same time in French, German and English.

That there is a state of economic crisis is something most adults living in the west since 2007 -2008 would agree on. At least when looking at the standard of living for the majority. Whether such crises are per se endemic to an immoral system or a manageable side effect of this form of economic relations within society is open to question.

Communism is both the late fruit of German idealism that started with liberal thinkers like Kant and a kind of artisanal good-natured collectivism. The highest of Teutonic aspirations and the humblest of early industrial enterprise. Berlin and at the same time Rochdale. The German capital was the home to ideas such as dialectical materialism and the Lancashire town the place of the first co-op. The two do not always sit well together but both are worthy of equal attention.

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Wearing a mask to abide by the law based on the principle of protecting others is an example of negative freedom; choosing to wear a mask based on a concern for the wellbeing of oneself and others is an example of positive freedom.

If someone decides not to wear a mask at all, there might be valid reasons for her or him not to do so. They sometimes find it ill fitting and a problem if they wear glasses, which tend to steam up. Furthermore, they may work in a community where others rely on the ability to read their lips – either partly, for example those working in noisy industrial environments, or more intensively, as with nursing home staff who need to communicate to those of advanced years who are hearing impaired.

The text this month is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty published is 1859.

Today, Mill would have only recognized the exercising of liberty in the refusal of some to wear a mask if no one else was bound to suffer as a result. A diehard elitist and scourge of politicians, he also would have sided with the scientific community against the mediocrity (if not incompetence) of politicians.

His philosophy was based on the concept of utilitarianism, the overarching maxim of which is “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

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If it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.

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Wearing a mask to abide by the law based on the principle of protecting others is an example of negative freedom; choosing to wear a mask based on a concern for the wellbeing of oneself and others is an example of positive freedom.

If someone decides not to wear a mask at all, there might be valid reasons for her or him not to do so. They sometimes find it ill fitting and a problem if they wear glasses, which tend to steam up. Furthermore, they may work in a community where others rely on the ability to read their lips – either partly, for example those working in noisy industrial environments, or more intensively, as with nursing home staff who need to communicate to those of advanced years who are hearing impaired.

The text this month is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty published is 1859.

Today, Mill would have only recognized the exercising of liberty in the refusal of some to wear a mask if no one else was bound to suffer as a result. A diehard elitist and scourge of politicians, he also would have sided with the scientific community against the mediocrity (if not incompetence) of politicians.

His philosophy was based on the concept of utilitarianism, the overarching maxim of which is “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

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Yet America’s self-appointed role as protector in the region, and the countries just mentioned, against European expansion was only made possible by the Louisiana Purchase. That is to say the acquisition of mainly swampland owned at the time by France running the entire length of the Mississippi river to the East taking in all its tributaries stretching westwards as far was what was then called New Spain.

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In a separate development, Japan were rumoured to want to purchase Magdalena Bay on the Baja California Sur on the Baja California Peninsula off the South-West Coast of Mexico. Both Japan and a number of European powers had been using the waters around the bay for whaling purposes.

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Nine years earlier, Attorney General Richard Olney had warned the British Empire – in dispute with Venezuela at the time – that any interference in Latin America would not be tolerated. The United States under the Monroe Doctrine, would arbitrate between the parties. 

The Doctrine was applied more widely in 1905, leading to further U.S. arbitration to end the Russo-Japanese War.

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Yet America’s self-appointed role as protector in the region, and the countries just mentioned, against European expansion was only made possible by the Louisiana Purchase. That is to say the acquisition of mainly swampland owned at the time by France running the entire length of the Mississippi river to the East taking in all its tributaries stretching westwards as far was what was then called New Spain.

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The season will start in earnest next month (August 2021)

The Monroe Doctrine:

American foreign policy from the time of nation’s 5th President (James Monroe) through to the present can be seen through the prism of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Not fully understood as a doctrine at the time, it became so a generation later. It was meant as a warning to Europe against further colonization of the Americas. Later, in 1904, under President Theodore Roosevelt, who more punitively wanted it as a bulwark against barbarism, a corollary was added. A further congressional re-reading following WW1 was undertaken in relation to the League of Nations, which, had America signed up to, would have given foreign powers some say over deploying American troops for peace keeping missions, thus contravening the Doctrine or how the doctrine was being interpreted at that point. 

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A big thank you to those following previous podcasts. I hope you will not be too disappointed with the next direction explained here as the last Bock-Deer Podcast. From next month, it will be called History Re-Read.

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Twenty-four hours before the deadline of May 31st 100 Gold marks were duly paid to the inter-allied reparations commission. But not under the chancellorship of Constantine Fehrenbach. Yet, his party, Zentrum, the Catholic Centre Party retained its in influence in all the main offices of State, after Fehrenbach and the independent diplomat, Walter Simons, the Foreign Minister, both resigned.

Harrington, Joseph F.

The League of Nations and the Upper Silesian Boundary Dispute, 1921-1922.

The Polish Review, vol. 23, no. 3, 1978, pp. 86–101

www.jstor.org/stable/25777590

THE VIEW FROM RUSSIA

New Politics and the Education of the Peasant

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The Communists had all by sealed victory in the Russian civil war in the country but had practically lost the countryside by April 1921. The famine discussed in the podcasts of October and November in season 1, focused economic on implications of this new politics, I was talking about then and will be talking about now in relation to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) in particular. In Russian transliteration: New Economic Politics. I want to focus more on the politics than the economics.

http://chkprf.narod.ru/Texts/VIL44-155.htm#ch5 NEP in Russian

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm in English

THE VIEW FROM AMERICA

America Declares That She Fought for Herself Alone in WW1

At a dinner at the American Embassy in London on May the 19th to welcome the latest Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, the new incumbent, George Harvey stated his country’s interest in the outcome of the conflict in Upper Silesia and wanted it to play a part in order to safeguard its own commercial interests. But on its own terms, not through the courtly procedures of European diplomacy but as the new President personified in the American approach to diplomacy: humble but unafraid.

Published: May 20, 1921. Copyright © The New York Times

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The Sicheheitpolizei (Sipo) was made up of disparate elements of the Freikorps and others ready to do violence for the sake of the nationalist cause. When I say ‘disparate,’ by way of analogy, I mean as disparate as the many of claiming German linage in order to register to vote in the plebiscite – but that is for later. They were a security force ostensibly acting a as law enforcement agency in the name of the Government but ill-disciplined enough individually to terrorize the population they meant to keep in order by lawful means...

THE VIEW FROM RUSSIA

The doings of the Cheka, one way and the other, can be illustrated by looking at the final days of two very different poets: Blok, Aleksandr Alexandrovich, and Gumilev, Nikolai Stepanovich.

THE VIEW FROM AMERICA

Woodrow Wilson had set the framework for peace, the League of Nations. If fully realized, with the U.S. as first among equals, it could still bring about a kind of proto-globalization. This framework remained visibly in the distance along with a residue of hope in Wilson’s legacy for generations to come. After all, whatever administration may be found in the White House, of whichever strip, the Governance of the USA was surely the most democratic and along with Congress, the most stable. The mere husk that was the Government of the Republic of Germany in Berlin under Chancellor Fehrenbach and Foreign Minister Simons pleaded for help. 

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