[Marxism] (Re: "going through the experience" of Obama disillusionment

[Louis Proyect]

Anthony Boynton wrote:
> I agree with all of Louis Projects observations about the differences
> between today and the context of the 1930's, but would add a few things.
> 

Btw, the name is Proyect although the Czarist directory of Jewish names 
that I looked at up at the YIVO Center of Jewish Research indicates that 
these spellings were related: Project, Proekt, Proyekter, etc.

Although the word is identical to the Latinate project (in Spanish, it 
is proyecto), it has an entirely different meaning in Yiddish. According 
to the Yivo sourcebook, the name means "counting house of a tax farmer", 
prevalent in the Minsk region in the mid to late 19th century. A tax 
farmer was originally a court Jew who was paid a percentage of the taxes 
he collected from peasants. When Jews migrated to Poland and Russia 
after the rise of a banking bourgeoisie in Western Europe, the tax 
farmer played the same role--thus generating some of the first outbursts 
of anti-Semitic pogroms in the East that also had a contradictory 
progressive character insofar as they were against feudal exploitation. 
Unfortunately, the peasant was not able to get his hands on his real 
oppressor, an absentee landlord in Moscow or Warsaw. I surmise that the 
general absence of Proyects today reflects the fury of these pogroms.