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Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2020 23:39:26 GMT
The Structural-Anarchism Manifesto: (The Logic of Structural-Anarchism Versus The Logic of Capitalism) by Dr. Michel Luc Bellemare Ph.d. trentu.academia.edu/MichelLucBellemare"This book outlines a new form of anarchism, i.e., structural-anarchism, which advocates for a series of micro-revolutions, designed to install an anarchist federation/patchwork of municipalities, cooperatives, and autonomous-collectives, devoid of capitalism and devoid of any federal state-apparatus. Specifically, structural-anarchism is a form of anarchist-communism. It is communism from below, rather than, the Marxist notion of communism from above, i.e., authoritarian-communism. Furthermore, this book explores the complications and the complexities of the basic fact that we are increasingly living within the confines of a disciplinary surveillance society, where privacy is really based on an individual’s ability to expose the surveillance mechanisms monitoring his or her private life. The assumption is that surveillance and discipline are now total and that most surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms never attain the light of public knowledge and scrutiny. As a society, western democracies have moved beyond democracy into a new socio-economic formation, the framework of the soft-totalitarian-state, i.e., bourgeois-totalitarianism." Quote from Amazon.
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Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2020 23:40:52 GMT
Contemporary anarchism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchismContemporary anarchism, in the history of anarchism, is the period of the anarchist movement continuing from the end of the Second World War and into the present. Since the last third of the 20th century, anarchists have been involved in student protest movements, peace movements, squatter movements, and the anti-globalization movement, among others. Anarchists have participated in violent revolutions (such as in Revolutionary Catalonia and the Free Territory) and anarchist political organizations (such as IWA-AIT or the IWW) exist since the 19th century.
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Post by Admin on Aug 4, 2020 8:55:09 GMT
Mollie Collins -
"We need an alliance of socialist, anti fascist, anti rascist, Black Lives Matter campaigners, environmentalists like Greens, Xtinction Rebellion, cooperatives, Socialist union members to grow a grassroots movement to inform and lead a movement to end global corporate capitalism. A movement to take urgent action to end the use of fossil fuels and destructive plastics. A movement to stop the escalation of wealth to a handful of billionaires. A movement for a fairer society and an end to the market system which feeds greed and exploitation."
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Post by Admin on Aug 23, 2020 4:48:43 GMT
A socialist, anti-colonial revolution in America would mean the death of global imperialism medium.com/@rainershea612/a-socialist-anti-colonial-revolution-in-america-would-mean-the-death-of-global-imperialism-b12c27216cda"Envision a future where the territory now called the United States, along with the other countries in the hemisphere that exist as a result of colonialism, have been converted into a great swath of nations which are once again controlled by the indigenous tribes. Imagine a scenario where U.S. imperialism is defeated once and for all through the abolishment of the U.S. itself, which was created through the imperialist theft of indigenous land and the subsequent slaughter of most of the region’s indigenous people. It can feel challenging to imagine this coming about, because colonial occupation has been the reality throughout the vast majority of the hemisphere for centuries. Yet in instances like Haiti’s anti-slavery and anti-colonial revolution of 1804, or Cuba’s socialist revolution against a U.S.-backed dictatorship, or the restoration of indigenous rule during Evo Morales’ 14-year socialist presidency, cracks in the wall of colonial and capitalist control have appeared. By examining the pre-colonial past, the history of anti-colonial resistance so far, and the present conditions surrounding colonialism and capitalism, I can construct a picture of what an anti-colonial revolution in this hemisphere will look like. The great civilization that the First Nations were building-and that they should be able to resume building The pre-colonial nations in the continents now called North and South America were not the sparsely populated, “primitive” societies that colonialist lore portrays them as. There were as many as 112 million Natives in the pre-contact Americas, with around 90% having been killed by disease, violence, and biological warfare in the following centuries. Many of their nations ran on democracy, and far from all being isolated to their own territories, the inhabitants of these nations passed around resources throughout vast distances around the continent. They had made many technological advancements that the Europeans hadn’t. And rather than having all lived in tepees as media portrayals suggest, the different indigenous societies had a diverse range of housing. It’s necessary for me to dispel the settler narratives about who the continent’s indigenous people were back then, because American culture’s ingrained disdain for these societies prevents popular support for decolonization. Our society, particularly the country’s communist movement, must recognize that returning sovereignty to all of the indigenous nations is a feasible and necessary way to rectify the injustices against colonized peoples. By “colonized peoples,” I mean not just the indigenous people but the black people. These groups have experienced centuries of genocide as a result of the project to make the continent into a hub for imperialist power and capitalist profits, and an anti-colonial revolution will necessarily include an effort towards restorative justice for both of them. Therefore, the governmental structure that exists in North America after such a revolution will need to consist of the following aspects: -The abolition of colonial states; the European-created governments occupying indigenous nations must be disbanded. -The creation of the modern equivalent of the indigenous confederacy that the leader Tecumseh tried to create; after the colonial governments are abolished, their militaries should be seized and put under control of a democratic indigenous confederacy which consists of all the First Nations. -The creation of an African Autonomous Oblast, where African descendants receive reparations for slavery and an independent African nation. (This territory would be formed after the appropriate cooperation between the First Nations.) -A First Nations Citizenship program for non-natives, one where settlers who either don’t want to be part of the First Nations or aren’t eligible for First Nations citizenship are deported to their ancestral homelands. In other words, a removal of the white supremacists who pose a threat of committing violent acts. -Abolition of all colonial prisons, the creation of a restorative justice system for criminal recidivism, and a re-education campaign where the colonial textbooks are replaced with factual accounts of the indigenous genocide. -Continental universal healthcare, housing, food, and education, along with a full employment program that conducts ecological restoration, sustainable agriculture, and the building of a renewable energy system. This will only come after the seizure of the means of production from the capitalist class all throughout the former American colonies (which will happen in time as the autonomous First Nations develop towards socialism). The post-revolutionary arrangement within South America would for the most part be the same, so long as this revolution is also oriented around anti-colonialism. What the anti-colonial and class struggles within the hemisphere have been able to accomplish so far Colonialism and imperialism still haven’t been thrown off throughout the vast majority of the Pan-American hemisphere because capitalism has developed along with these systems, and capitalism has created vast mechanisms for keeping the colonial power structures in place. The white settlers in the bourgeois class and the relatively privileged proletariat have lacked the economic incentive to overthrow the capitalist and colonialist systems, because they’ve stood to benefit from the continued subjugation of the colonized. And since these privileged groups have naturally always been the ones with the most ability to participate in capitalist electoral politics, the social contract has sustained itself. These settlers have attained their control through means of violence against the populations which have stood in the way of capitalism and settler-colonialism. Slavery, forced transfers, mass killings, and campaigns of terror have served this purpose from the start, keeping the African and indigenous peoples from stopping the success of settler-colonialism in the hemisphere. In the last century or so, eugenics against the colonized peoples has also been part of this. The proliferation of police forces throughout the capitalist world, along with the rise of global U.S. imperialism, have perpetuated the control of the U.S. empire both internally and externally. Aside from repressing the colonized peoples and the proletariat throughout the imperial core, much of these engines for imperialist violence have been used for preventing revolutions in Washington’s foreign colonies. As capitalism has developed, they’ve also served to re-colonize decolonized lands through economic means; the financial entrapment of Latin American countries to large corporations and the International Monetary Fund has involved death squads, brutal repression of people who’ve rebelled, and violent coups against leaders who’ve worked against the financial interests of the empire. In this way, the past decolonizations of various lands have become mainly symbolic victories for anti-colonialism, because the capitalists have nonetheless retaken control over these lands. This spread of neo-colonialism has correlated with the last century’s vast campaign to stop the spread of socialism throughout Latin America. There have been at least 56 U.S. interventions in Latin America, and the U.S. has interfered in the elections of the vast majority of Latin American countries since World War II. The only socialist Latin American countries that still exist are Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela, with Bolivia having been socialist-controlled last year before Morales was overthrown in the latest U.S. coup. Despite imperialism for the most part holding back Latin America’s development towards socialism so far, the hemisphere’s existing socialist countries demonstrate that this situation has the potential to change. As Nelson Mandela said, socialist Cuba and its aid for the anti-colonial movement in South Africa “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.” It showed that when a nation arms itself well after breaking away from imperial control, it can avoid being reconquered and spread the revolution to other countries. Venezuela’s Chavista government, with its three-million-strong people’s militia, is following in this example. These keys for breaking away from imperial control-a popular movement, a socialist revolution, and a project to create a strong national defense against imperialism-are being increasingly pursued by those who would lead the hemispheric revolution that I’ve described. The obstacles that the current Pan-American revolutionaries must overcome The immediate priorities of the Pan-American socialist and anti-colonial revolutionaries are to save all the current regime change target countries from being overthrown by the imperialists, to further the rising anti-capitalist and anti-colonial popular movements throughout Latin America, and to protect indigenous people from the escalating abuses that the colonial governments are carrying out. The latter cause mainly pertains to the indigenous migrant concentration camps of the United States, to the Canadian government’s use of police and paramilitaries to force through a pipeline within tribal land, and to the Bolsonaro government’s campaign to enact genocide against Brazil’s uncontacted tribes for the purpose of advancing business. In addition to these crimes by the hemisphere’s three biggest colonial governments, Bolivia’s U.S.-installed fascist regime has been enacting violence against indigenous people for defending their democracy. Similar horrors have occurred as U.S.-backed Latin American regimes like Chile have responded to the last year’s anti-neoliberal protests by committing widespread atrocities. We’re experiencing an intensification of warfare from the imperialists, one that’s happening in reaction to the surge of immigration, the decline of American power worldwide, and the recent rise of revolutionary mobilization from the have-nots. In these respects, the system is getting more vulnerable, especially as economic collapse now envelops the United States. Amid this great 21st century crisis of capitalism, where the bourgeoisie are suddenly experiencing falling profit rates while the living standards of the masses are quickly in decline, we can advance the next goal of our movement: rallying poor and working people towards trying to overthrow their capitalist governments. Perhaps the next Cuba-esque socialist revolution will happen in Bolivia, where many of the country’s disenfranchised indigenous proletarians have been demonstrating and gathering in militias since last year’s coup. Given how Bolivia’s fascist government has been working to rig the currently delayed upcoming election, the revolutionaries will only be able to realistically win by building up institutions like the Marxist-Leninist Maoist Communist Party of Bolivia, while sustaining a civil disobedience movement and a potential armed struggle amid violent state repression. The more the class conflict develops around the globe, the clearer it becomes that Bolivia’s situation of dictatorship and violent struggle is going to be the future in many places. Fascism is rising around the capitalist world, from India to Brazil to the United States. The pretenses of democracy are being dropped, and militarized policing, eroded civil liberties, and unfettered corporate pillage are becoming more normalized. To get an idea of where many capitalist countries are headed, look at Honduras, where society has been highly militarized and a right-wing regime has held on through rigged elections since the imperialist coup in 2009. Electoral politics isn’t how we’ll win. Our task will depend on raising support for anti-colonial and socialist revolution, building the communist parties that can facilitate a revolution, and mobilizing the movement’s members towards strikes, blockades, demonstrations, and efforts to defend from state violence. This was roughly how Cuba’s revolutionaries defeated the country’s Batista dictatorship, and it’s how we’ll throw down the remaining tyrannical regimes in the hemisphere. The world we’ll be able to build after the United States is overthrown The struggle for complete Pan-American liberation will be long, and will be especially difficult to win within the imperial core. But those in the U.S. can take comfort from Che Guevara’s words: “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all — you live in the belly of the beast.” Every step we take to weaken the authority of the U.S. government, as well as every step we take to weaken Washington’s control over its proxy states, renders all the imperialists and settler-colonialists of the world less able to operate. The military powers and covert operations networks of the imperialist NATO alliance are concentrated in the United States. Israel’s settler-colonial project wouldn’t likely be able to survive for long without support from Washington, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be able to continue its genocide against the Yemeni people without U.S. aid, and NATO would be rendered largely ineffectual if the U.S. were to leave it. The U.S. has also long been the center for global capitalist economic power, meaning that if the U.S. or the countries that it economically depends upon are turned socialist, it will destroy the power balance which Michael Parenti describes in his book Dirty Truths: “A socialist Cuba or a socialist North Korea, as such, are not a threat to the survival of world capitalism. The danger is not socialism in any one country but a socialism that might spread to many countries. Multinational corporations, as their name implies, need the entire world, or a very large part of it, to exploit and to invest and expand in. There can be no such thing as ‘capitalism in one country.’” If a socialist anti-colonial revolution were to happen in the U.S., the capitalist oligarchs would lose much of their wealth and most of their former economic leverage, even if they were to all successfully move their assets out of the country. The remaining capitalist powers would survive only through intense internal repression and militarism, and the collapse of their economic systems amid climate change and the decline of corporate profits would motivate their people to work towards revolution. Palestine would be decolonized amid the defeat of Israel. The collapse of Western economic dominance would leave all of the African and South American countries that have suffered under neo-colonialism freer to pursue their own destinies. The extinction of imperialism itself would be in sight, to be replaced by a paradigm where socialism dominates the globe. Most immediately, such a revolution would rectify the injustice that’s led to all of the evils committed by U.S. imperialism: the colonization of the region’s indigenous lands and the creation of the United States of America. In this future, the land would collectively no longer be called the “United States,” nor “America.” It would predominantly take on the name that many indigenous people still use for it: Turtle Island."
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Post by Admin on Aug 25, 2020 10:27:49 GMT
REFORMS ARE WON WHEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INFLICT REAL COSTS ON THE ECONOMIC ELITE By Justin Vassallo, Truthout. August 24, 2020 | STRATEGIZE! There’s a tendency in US progressive politics to focus on rehabilitating capitalism for working people. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for president had the patina of an “anti-corruption” crusade, giving a populist spin to technocratic fixes that would update the embedded liberalism of the postwar era for the twenty-first century. Think tanks and public intellectuals likewise emphasize antitrust as a means to improve the welfare of consumers and workers while giving smaller firms a better chance to succeed. Even during a global pandemic, the underlying concern is that neoliberal governance has become dysfunctional, but that it can be replaced with something akin to social democracy without losing American capitalism’s purported dynamism. This tendency is a response, in part, to the Trump administration, whose pursuit of tax cuts, corporate bailouts, and deregulation exemplifies not so much artful subterfuge but a brazen contempt for proper oversight of industry. While the progressive wing of the Democratic Party reasserts its voice, its arsenal of proposed reforms ultimately promises to mend a grossly inequitable system, not challenge it outright. The problem with the reformist approach, as Levers of Power, by Kevin A. Young, Tarun Banerjee, and Michael Schwartz, shows, is that it doesn’t admit the deeper, fundamental structure of policymaking in capitalist societies, and the intrinsic control economic elites wield over it. With principal case studies from the Obama era, Levers of Power illustrates the degree of institutionalized policy capture within Congress, federal agencies, and the White House itself. Even in the throes of an economic emergency, elites maintain several ways to impede reform. These include capital strikes, or disinvestment; narrowly-defined cost-benefit analyses that exclude measures of public well-being; the culture of the “corporate compromise” and attendant political pressures to maintain it; and legal challenges by business to sabotage or at least curtail the reach of reforms during their implementation phase if they manage to survive the “sausage-making” of congressional legislation. The effect is to both preclude ambitious, change-seeking insurgents from leading the Democratic Party and compel the potential reformers that do win election to greatly constrict their goals. In an interview over email, co-author Kevin A. Young discussed the limits of electoral politics to advance a more egalitarian social contract and the strategies today’s social movements can employ to fight injustice. The challenges are formidable, especially given the Trump administration’s exercise of a new and despotic federal police power in reaction to nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police violence. As Levers of Power demonstrates through examples from the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement, the path to enduring change requires mobilization that inflicts real costs on capitalists and disrupts the nexus of elite interests. This means that while progressive political allies are instrumental when it comes to implementing reform, they are never its true locus. Justin H. Vassallo: In Levers of Power, the process of policy capture doesn’t come across the way corruption is popularly conceived. Instead, it’s depicted as a negotiated circumscription of policy choices between elites that then limits what the public believes to be politically possible. How does this differ from the relationship between the state, business, and labor during mid-twentieth century capitalism? Kevin A. Young: The common usage of the term “corruption” is far too limited for understanding how political power operates. Rarely is the process a directly transactional one in which economic elites bribe policymakers to obtain a specific end. The more typical function of campaign contributions is to purchase access to the policymaking process – that is, a guarantee that their interests will be prioritized, and that they’ll be consulted before any policy changes are made. My sense is that the relationship between the state, business and labor has not fundamentally changed since the mid-20th century: Even at the height of labor’s political power, business was deeply involved in policymaking discussions and the key sectors typically had to give their consent prior to major changes. There is a difference from that period, but it’s one of degree: Wealth has become even more concentrated, the floodgates have been thrown (further) open to corporate campaign donations, and labor has been greatly weakened. If the working class was sometimes able to force changes on business and government, now there are fewer countervailing forces that policymakers have to take into account. popularresistance.org/reforms-are-won-when-social-movements-inflict-real-costs-on-the-economic-elite/
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Post by Admin on Aug 25, 2020 16:03:21 GMT
Is revolution possible in the twenty-first century? – explainer August 25, 2020 Written by Katherine Connelly Published in Opinion www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/21552-is-revolution-possible-in-the-twenty-first-century-explainerIn the ninth part of our explainer series, Katherine Connelly looks at the continuing possibility of revolution for transforming society today Part One: What is socialism? Part Two: Does human nature make socialism impossible? Part Three: Can economic planning work? Part Four: Does a biased media make change impossible? Part Five: Why class matters Part Six: Can socialism come through parliament? Part Seven: Is a society without oppression possible? Part Eight: What went wrong in Russia? Yes. We know this is true because there have been revolutions in the twenty-first century, for example the revolutions of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 that overthrew dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. The assumption behind this question is that the nineteenth-century world the famous revolutionary Karl Marx knew, of smoky factories where large groups of workers produce commodities, has been replaced by “tech” and a service sector economy – at this point someone usually mentions that some people even get to play ping pong or sit on beanbags at work! And, therefore, Marxist ideas are no longer relevant. This argument is very superficial. It doesn’t really describe the world of work today. When Marx was writing, the working-class was only a tiny proportion of the world’s population – even in a capitalist country like France the majority of the population were peasants living in the countryside. Now the working-class is global and big multinational companies (maybe even with beanbags in their offices) run sweatshops across the global South. In Britain and the US, as the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed, working people still work together in large numbers – think of the outbreaks in meat packing factories and indeed Amazon warehouses. That the nature of much work has changed is nevertheless undoubtedly true, but this would have been the least surprising aspect of capitalism to Marx, who identified that it was an essentially and uniquely revolutionary economic system. It cannot be static, it needs to constantly find new markets, to “increase productivity” (meaning profits), to reduce “costs” (meaning our wages), and find new technological innovations to drive other capitalists out of the market and grab more for themselves. Such innovations make capitalism a hugely productive system. This means that no one need go without a home, or healthcare, or food. But because capitalism is organised around profit and not human need, hundreds of millions of people do. For all its productive capacity, capitalism is also an essentially destructive system: wars and climate change are two devastating symptoms. So, not only is there a need for a revolution in the twenty-first century in order to reorganise society to meet human needs, capitalism has also created the possibility for those needs to be met. Capitalism is inherently unstable because it cannot get away from the contradiction at its heart: that it relies on the exploitation of the vast majority of people (workers) who are not paid the value of what they produce. Instead, a proportion is expropriated as profits before we even see our wage slip. This mechanism, essential to the survival of capitalism, is reliant upon the work of those who have no interest in perpetuating this system. Although the establishment invest a lot of effort to make us feel disempowered and atomised there are times when people overwhelmingly reject reactionary ideas. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, there were a series of insurgent, mass struggles across the globe: in Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, Colombia, Chile and Ecuador. Today, with a huge public health crisis intensified by the relentless drive for profit and in the face of an imminent severe economic crisis people are taking to the streets and organising to demand a different kind of society. In these circumstances, revolutionary change looks more, not less, likely. Revolutions have happened and will happen in the twenty-first century. The key question is whether they can be successful. That depends how well organised we are and upon the strength of socialist ideas that show how another world, organised by and for human beings, can be won.
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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2020 19:39:59 GMT
AUGUST 1, 2020 BY DANDELIONSALAD Revolt or Burn, by Eric Schechter dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2020/08/01/revolt-or-burn-by-eric-schechter/Burn, most likely. Global warming is about to speed up abruptly, due to feedback loops and tipping points that most climate activists overlook or understate. I expect worldwide famine by 2030 and human extinction by 2040 if we stay on our present course. Or sooner, if our mad rulers use their nuclear weapons. Some climatologists say it’s already too late. I’m not so sure. We don’t know, and can’t know, what discovery is just around the corner. Of course, if we don’t try, then we are doomed. Our rulers are doing far too little about climate. They can’t bring the great change we need, because any capitalist concerned with anything but his own short-term profits will fall behind his rivals and cease to be a Player. Thus, our only hope for the needed change is by global ecosocialist revolution. For 10,000 years property and hierarchy have caused lies, hate, greed, poverty, plutocracy, war, and all the other evils of the world. We might endure those torments another 10,000 years, but for the recent arrival of science, which changes everything. Used wisely, science could build us a paradise on Earth. Alas, we’ve been clever but not wise: Science has brought us nuclear weapons and global warming, assuring our extinction. We need to wise up quick. We must replace property with caring and sharing. We must replace hierarchy with horizontal cooperative networking — that is, friendship. After 10,000 years, that’s hard for anyone to even imagine, so I’m not confident about our chances. But sociologists say caring is in our nature. The first step is to get more people talking about these things.
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Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2020 1:55:53 GMT
“Even if the socialists unseat the fascists in Bolivia this year, the country’s road to becoming a Marxist-Leninist state of the same vein as Cuba or China will be filled with complications and obstacles. So is the case in every other country that’s currently run by a bourgeois state. If you live in one of these countries and are serious about wanting to build socialism, all you can do is try to better educate yourself and others about revolutionary theory, build the communist organizations that can become the revolutionary vanguard, and equip yourself for potentially violent confrontation with the forces of counter-revolution.” Unless you’re working to create a dictatorship of the proletariat, you won’t defeat capitalism medium.com/@rainershea612/unless-youre-working-to-create-a-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat-you-won-t-defeat-capitalism-406edf9d3521Earlier this month, the people of Bolivia made major progress towards reversing the imperialist coup which ousted their democratically elected socialist president Evo Morales last November. After months of armed struggles and protest blockades, they’ve forced the coup regime to hold a new election on October 18th. Despite the regime’s best efforts to make itself into a bourgeois dictatorship through perpetually delaying elections and unleashing death squads, the indigenous and proletarian resistance movement has subdued it in this way. But because Bolivia is still a bourgeois state, we still can’t be sure whether this will result in the regime’s demise and the restoration of a socialist government. Who knows what the fascists in the Bolivian government and their U.S. imperialist backers will do to try to hold on to power? Rig the election? Stir up more racist violence that intimidates their opponents into surrender? These things are almost unbearable to contemplate after all of the hardships that Bolivia’s poor and indigenous people have endured in this last year, but the strength of the imperialist beast makes them necessary to prepare for. Already, violent pro-regime groups are attacking Bolivia’s Human Rights Ombudsman while the regime’s police look on. Much more bloodshed will stand in the way of Bolivia finally becoming free from imperial control. This reality, along with the fact that so much blood has already had to be shed in the resistance against the coup, should teach us a lesson about how to defeat capitalism and imperialism. It should teach us that when proletarian revolutionaries don’t overthrow the existing, capitalist-run state and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat (also called a proletarian democracy), the capitalists will retain the upper hand even after the socialists have won a country’s highest office. Which will make counter-revolutionary events like Bolivia’s coup all the more possible. Morales wasn’t to blame for the fact that in 2005, when he came into office, material conditions necessitated Bolivia’s socialist party to take power through elections rather than through overthrowing the state. The latter option evidently wasn’t as feasible at the time, and by taking the electoral approach, Morales was able to lift his people’s living standards far faster than if he were to have rejected power before an overthrow could take place. His only fault was in assuming that he would merely have to create an anti-imperialist military school, rather than build a revolutionary militia like the Chavista government has done in Venezuela. But because of the self-reinforcing nature of the bourgeois state, this understandable miscalculation on his part helped lead to the military turning against him in the wake of last year’s wave of right-wing terrorism. Apparently teaching the military personnel to oppose imperialism wasn’t sufficient when the empire could so easily set its thugs upon the country. The factors shifted in favor of the reaction, because the reaction wasn’t held back by the constraints that a dictatorship of the proletariat would have provided. In the five existing communist countries of China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and the DPRK, the dictatorship of the proletariat safeguards against counter-revolutionary forces in ways even more effective than what the Chavistas have been able to do. When the proletariat is fundamentally in control of the state apparatus, the state can prioritize the defense of the country’s borders from reactionary propaganda, terrorism, and other kinds of imperialist subversion. China’s “great firewall” is about stopping people from being bombarded with the anti-Chinese lies and bigotry that the U.S. empire constantly dumps into the internet. The DPRK’s policy of creating a largely separate internet for itself is motivated by the same desire to shield its culture from the poisonous deceptions of the imperialists. Cuba’s online censorship is also motivated not by some kind of top-down tyranny, but by a democratically decided choice to shield people from the empire’s psychological warfare. If Vietnam and Laos were undergoing similar mounts of imperialist attacks, they would put in place the same kinds of information and military defenses that these three other Marxist-Leninist states have. Such extensive protection measures aren’t possible in Venezuela, where much of the media is still controlled by the capitalist class and their allies in Washington. Venezuela’s capitalist class has also managed to blunt the governmental power of the Chavistas by keeping in place a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy-one that helped enable the staged attempt last year to install the imperialist puppet Juan Guaido in place of the democratically elected president Maduro. Chavez himself lamented the counter-revolutionary nature of the state structure that his movement is trying to overcome. In this situation, one where an anti-imperialist government is trying to build socialism despite existing in a bourgeois state structure, Chavez and Maduro’s ability to keep the military on their side is what’s been crucial in saving them from all of the U.S. coups attempts in Venezuela. In Bolivia, where last year the imperialists could both cause a post-election wave of racist violence and turn the military against the targeted leader, counter-revolution became unstoppable. Our task as proletarian revolutionaries is to work towards Marxist-Leninist revolutions in our respective countries, while learning from the missteps that have caused counter-revolution to triumph in the countries that used to be Marxist-Leninist. The Soviet Union and its most dependent partnered socialist states didn’t fall because the USSR was Marxist-Leninist. It fell because the USSR’s post-Stalin leadership abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat. Khrushchev, in his opportunistic campaign to further the bourgeois vilification of Stalin, dismantled the country’s proletarian-run democracy and opened the state up to political leverage from the capitalist class. The end result of this revisionism was the traitor Gorbachev, who dismantled the Soviet Union itself. Kim Jong Il concluded that socialism collapsed in the USSR and the GDR because “they neglected class education and abandoned the class struggle. After assuming state power, Khrushchev weakened the function of the dictatorship of the state as a weapon of the class struggle. As a result, socialism could not be defended in the Soviet Union.” This summarizes the essence of the line that we must embrace if we want to make any socialist project succeed in the era of imperialism and capitalist reaction. This is a line that consists of overthrowing the capitalist state, and then building a new state that will commit to depriving the bourgeoisie of power over government. Even if the socialists unseat the fascists in Bolivia this year, the country’s road to becoming a Marxist-Leninist state of the same vein as Cuba or China will be filled with complications and obstacles. So is the case in every other country that’s currently run by a bourgeois state. If you live in one of these countries and are serious about wanting to build socialism, all you can do is try to better educate yourself and others about revolutionary theory, build the communist organizations that can become the revolutionary vanguard, and equip yourself for potentially violent confrontation with the forces of counter-revolution.
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Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2020 18:08:11 GMT
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2020 1:59:37 GMT
Yeeeee Haaaaa - At least it will make the news a bit more interesting. “As the country’s transition into a failed state accelerates, so does the chance for a proletarian and anti-colonial revolution, where the disaffected lower classes unite to resolve the contradictions of the capitalist and settler-colonial system which has produced all of this misery. The George Floyd protests are an early part of this backlash from the country’s exploited and oppressed peoples. But before they lead to a movement that can overthrow the system, and that can replace it with a decolonized continent where society is developing towards socialism, their participants and supporters will need to get behind such a revolutionary program. Through this process of uniting the masses behind a revolutionary line, we Marxists will be able to build a fighting force which challenges the existence of the capitalist and settler-colonial state.” Economic and social collapse continue as the U.S. drifts ever closer to a class war medium.com/@rainershea612/economic-and-social-collapse-continue-as-the-u-s-drifts-ever-closer-to-a-class-war-f69160ac23a9It was inevitable that things would get to this point. The decision by the U.S. ruling class to make inequality’s growth unlimited through neoliberal policies, the rise and decline of the American imperialist project, and the climatic and ecological crisis have all been leading to the predictable outcome we’re now experiencing. This is an outcome where the imperial core descends into rapid economic dysfunction, violence, and eventually the breakdown of the state. The initial results from this unraveling are beneficial to reactionaries like Kyle Rittenghouse, the high school kid who shot two protesters this last week during a night of unrest in Kenosha. As Ukraine’s descent into economic and social collapse since the 2014 U.S. coup has shown, fascists love a failed state. It lets far-right militias act with more impunity, as has been shown while both Ukraine’s U.S.-backed fascists and America’s armed “patriot” groups have exploited the recent chaos in their respective countries. But the descent into social collapse in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world is one that’s come from the collapse of global capitalism, as was foretold by the predictions from Marx about how capitalism will eventually consume itself. And this opens up the potential for the chaos to lead to the triumph of proletarian revolution, rather than of reactionary barbarism. Whether or not this will happen depends on how well the people on the side of proletarian revolution mobilize. It will also depend on what kind of political line that the people leading the charge represent. Before taking the steps of becoming organized and equipped for a class-based civil war, it would be wise for you to read Lenin’s The State and Revolution, Mao’s Combat Liberalism, and other works that can help you avoid falling into liberal, idealistic, or adventurist thinking. Because without the right line and political education, we’ll be blindly rushing into this extremely important task. We’ll be at risk of committing ourselves to counterproductive ideologies like anarchism, or of becoming aligned with the Democratic Party, or of otherwise drifting away from the Marxist-Leninist goal of overthrowing the capitalist state and replacing it with a proletarian-run state. Our responsibilities are to seek out the education that can help us avoid these ideological pitfalls, and then equip ourselves for confrontation with the forces of capitalist reaction. Three months ago, the communist YouTuber and leader Hakim assessed what we’ll need to do before we can carry out this confrontation: “State repression will only get worse. The people not only should, but need, to fight back. Do not let fascism take hold, the U.S. is only a step away. Arm yourselves. Establish armed wings of revolutionary organizations. Start coordinating armed actions across the country with as many organizations as you can. Remember, never terrorist activity-only military and state targets. Establish Red bases around the country, and begin building dual power. People’s war is the solution.” Our revolutionary crisis has since moved closer to the point where these tactics will be doable on a widespread scale. Millions of this year’s newly jobless people have had their unemployment benefits cut. Unemployment is still dropping, with mid-August unemployment claims having topped one million. In this year’s second quarter, U.S. GDP dropped by 32.9%. The austerity policies that the government is responding to the downturn with are sure to lead to a multiplier effect, where spending cuts bring about falling incomes which lead to further spending cuts. And so the process of capitalist contraction will continue in the coming months and years, with ever more people finding themselves left behind and willing to join a revolutionary movement. If it sounds like wishful thinking that more people will join these kinds of militant revolutionary strains, consider that the U.S. military has openly expressed fears that the poverty and unemployment of the 2020s will lead to them having to deal with a class war. A 2016 U.S. Army War College document about the future of warfare warned that deteriorating living conditions for the lower classes will create: A surplus of unemployed males with little to do but join gangs or engage in crime as a source of income. Joining extremist or terrorist organizations might also appear attractive as a way out. At the very least, in the event of some kind of conflict, these young men would provide a pool of potential recruits for those opposing the United States.” This fearful anticipation was paralleled by a 2018 Pentagon war game that included a scenario where the military and intelligence agencies would have to counter a rebellion by the youngest generation of adults, who launch an attempt at revolution in 2025 for these reasons that the war game describes: Many found themselves stuck with excessive college debt when they discovered employment options did not meet their expectations. Gen Z are often described as seeking independence and opportunity but are also among the least likely to believe there is such a thing as the “American Dream,” and that the “system is rigged” against them. As the country’s transition into a failed state accelerates, so does the chance for a proletarian and anti-colonial revolution, where the disaffected lower classes unite to resolve the contradictions of the capitalist and settler-colonial system which has produced all of this misery. The George Floyd protests are an early part of this backlash from the country’s exploited and oppressed peoples. But before they lead to a movement that can overthrow the system, and that can replace it with a decolonized continent where society is developing towards socialism, their participants and supporters will need to get behind such a revolutionary program. Through this process of uniting the masses behind a revolutionary line, we Marxists will be able to build a fighting force which challenges the existence of the capitalist and settler-colonial state. It’s this prospect, one where poor and colonized peoples work together to militantly carry out the Marxist-Leninist goals which have liberated countries like Cuba and China, that scares the ruling class. The police enabled Rittenhouse to commit his crimes because just like is the case in post-coup Bolivia, the capitalist state is in a united front with those who are willing to carry out fascist vigilante violence. They’ll try to use fascist paramilitaries, the military, and their militarized police to crush an attempt at revolution. We’ll need to be prepared for when they come after us.
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2020 10:08:34 GMT
HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM By Cory Doctorow, One Zero. August 30, 2020 | STRATEGIZE! popularresistance.org/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/Editor’s Note: Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. But it’s not the result of some wrong turn or a rogue abuse of corporate power — it’s the system working as intended. This is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s new book, which we’re thrilled to publish in whole here on OneZero. This is how to destroy surveillance capitalism. The Net Of A Thousand Lies. The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature might come to the commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat. But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is flat. Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, “race science” has never been easier to refute. We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight. When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us. The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are being pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting facts. Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, and they have a much harder job. So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the basis of superior arguments? Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with A.I.-refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn everyday people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the RAND Corporation blames Facebook for “radicalization” and when Facebook’s role in spreading coronavirus misinformation is blamed on its algorithm, the implicit message is that machine learning and surveillance are causing the changes in our consensus about what’s true. After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, something must be afoot. But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us — conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as “corruption”) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories? If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-extreme ideas and communities. Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics kicked off by vaccine denial to genocides kicked off by racist conspiracies to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by. But firefighting is reactive. We need fire prevention. We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to play. There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s Terrorist Content Regulation, which requires platforms to police and remove “extremist” content, to the U.S. proposals to force tech companies to spy on their users and hold them liable for their users’ bad speech, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they created. There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The “solutions” on the table today require Big Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the systems these laws demand. Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose. I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism. Digital Rights Activism, A Quarter-Century On Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when Finland declared broadband a human right in 2010), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s contempt for “clicktivism”). But as tech has grown more central to our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to accusations of insincerity (“You only care about tech because you’re shilling for tech companies”) to accusations of negligence (“Why didn’t you foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?”). But digital rights activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a world where tech is inexorably taking over.
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2020 17:02:47 GMT
It is time to revive a multiracial network of revolutionary groups to confront capitalism... The Black Panther Party’s multiracial anti-fascism August 27, 2020 roarmag.org/essays/black-panther-multiracial-antifascism/In the late 60s and 70s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) embodied the vanguard of the revolution and anti-fascist, anti-racist action in the United States. The BPP formed an inclusionary, class-based manifesto, promoted armed self-defense and created an array of community survival programs and services, which included a sophisticated educational platform, free health clinics, breakfast for schoolchildren, teach-ins and more. Further, the BPP utilized art and music, via its newspaper and band, to spread its revolutionary agenda.
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2020 20:35:02 GMT
Whether protests work depends on who is doing the protesting. workers have been key agents of democratization and, if anything, are even more important than the urban middle classes. When workers mobilize mass opposition against a dictatorship, democratization is very likely to follow...workers have been crucial to the historical progress of democracy. We checked 100 years of protests in 150 countries. Here’s what we learned about the working class and democracy. The success of mass protests depends on who is doing the protesting. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/24/we-checked-years-protests-countries-heres-what-we-learned-about-working-class-democracy/Many observers fear that democracy is currently at risk — including in the United States and some European countries. Some commentators blame less-educated members of the working classes for the democratic backlash. According to the stereotype, these voters tend to be skeptical of economic globalization and immigration — and perhaps more inclined to support authoritarian populist politicians and parties. Political analysts tend to see the more educated urban middle classes, in contrast, as staunch defenders of democratic values and principles. But are industrial workers really an anti-democratic force? In a new study, we systematically examine how citizens have sought to promote democracy in about 150 countries. Here’s what we find: Industrial workers have been key agents of democratization and, if anything, are even more important than the urban middle classes. When industrial workers mobilize mass opposition against a dictatorship, democratization is very likely to follow.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 19:24:33 GMT
"No surprise that radicals from the colonised world–such as Ho Chi Minh and José Carlos Mariategui–found Leninism to be the heart and soul of their political outlook. It was this anti-colonial Marxism that drew radical nationalists from the Dutch colonies of Indonesia to the French colonies of West Africa, and it was this strong theory of anti-colonial national self-determination that forged ties for the Marxist left across these worlds." September 2, 2020 THE INTERNATIONALIST LENIN: SELF-DETERMINATION AND ANTI-COLONIALISM www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-internationalist-lenin-self-determination-and-anti-colonialismMarxist Studies, Social Movement Studies, Politics & Government, Social Economics, Labor Issues, Geopolitics, Decolonization By Vijay Prashad Republished from Monthly Review. In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.(1) The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled. The character of advancement and backwardness for Lenin does not only rest on the question of technological and economic development; it rests, essentially, on the nature of the mass struggle. In Europe, Lenin wrote, the bourgeoisie was exhausted. It no longer had any of the revolutionary capacity with which it once fought off the feudal order; although even here, the bourgeoisie was pushed along reluctantly by the rising of the masses–as in the French Revolution of 1789–and it was the bourgeoisie that betrayed the mass struggle and opted for the return of authoritarian power as long as its class interests were upheld. By 1913, the European bourgeoisie had been corrupted by the gains of imperialism; the rule of the European bourgeoisie had to be overthrown by the workers. In Asia, meanwhile, Lenin identified the dynamism of the national liberation movements. ‘Everywhere in Asia’, he wrote, ‘a mighty democratic movement is growing, spreading, and gaining in strength…Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light, and freedom’. Until this period, Lenin had focused his attention on the revolutionary developments in Russia, with a detailed study of agrarian conditions and capitalism in his country and with debates over the nature of organisation in the revolutionary camp. The breakthroughs in 1911 that took place in China, Iran, and Mexico with their variegated and complex revolutionary processes, nonetheless struck him. In 1912, Lenin would write on numerous occasions of the peoples of Asia–such as Persia and Mongolia–who ‘are waging a revolutionary struggle for freedom’, and he would push his party to condemn Tsarist imperialist attacks on Persia and the ‘revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people, which is bringing emancipation to Asia and is undermining the rule of the European bourgeoisie’.(2) Lenin had tracked developed in eastern Asia ever since the Tsarist empire opened hostilities against China by invading Manchuria in 1900 and then against Japan in 1904-05 in Manchuria and Korea. In 1900, Lenin took a strong anti-war position, arguing that even though the Tsar had not declared war in 1900, ‘war is being waged nonetheless’.(3) ‘The autocratic tsarist government’, Lenin wrote, ‘has proved itself to be a government of irresponsible bureaucrats serviley cringing before the capitalist magnates and nobles’; meanwhile, the war resulted in ‘thousands of ruined families, whose breadwinners have been sent to war; an enormous increase in the national debt and the national expenditure; mounting taxation; greater power for the capitalists, the exploiters of the workers; worse conditions for the workers; still greater mortality among the peasantry; famine in Siberia’. ‘The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer’, argued Lenin in an early demonstration of his internationalism. The Tsarist empire, along with the European imperialists, had developed a ‘counterrevolutionary coalition’, Lenin wrote in 1908 in his reflection on the Balkans, Turkey, and Persia. How should the socialists react to this policy of imperialism? ‘The very essence of proletarian policy at this stage’, he wrote in Proletary, ‘should be to tear the mask from these bourgeois hypocrites and to reveal to the broadest masses of the people the reactionary character of the European governments who, out of fear of the proletarian struggle at home, are playing, and helping others play, the part of gendarme in relation to the revolution in Asia’.(4) Within Europe, the oppressed nationalities–such as the Polish and the Irish–demonstrated the important spirit of democracy that Lenin had detected from Mexico to China. Unlike many other Marxists–such as Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky–Lenin fully supported the Easter Rising in English-occupied Ireland in 1916. It was in this context that Lenin wrote in July 1916, ‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.’(5) As he studied these movements with more care, the national liberation struggles no longer were seen as mere ‘bacilli’ and not ‘real’, but these movements were themselves partners in a global struggle. Lenin began to conceptualise a strategic unity between the nationalism of the oppressed and the proletariat in the imperialist states. ‘The social revolution’, he wrote in October 1916, ‘can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movements in the underdeveloped, backward, oppressed nations’.(6) Lenin’s great advance over Second International Marxism is clarified by the centrality he placed of anti-colonial national liberation, of the struggles of oppressed nationalities by the jackboot of imperialism. For Lenin, the democratic struggles of anti-colonialism were lifted to parity with the proletariat struggles inside the advanced industrial states; it was the international cognate of his theory of the worker-peasant alliance.(7) In 1914, Lenin published a long series of articles on the theme of ‘national self-determination’ in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment).(8) These were his longest statements on the topic, even though Lenin was to return to the idea over the next decade. Like much of Lenin’s work, this essay was not written to elaborate on the idea of national self-determination in itself; Lenin wrote the article to answer a position initially taken by the Rosa Luxemburg in 1908-09. In that article, ‘The National Question and Autonomy’, published in Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny (Panorama Social Democracy), Luxemburg argued against the right of self-determination for the Polish people.(9) Initially, Stalin responded to Luxemburg (in Prosveshcheniye, March-May 1913), but Stalin’s essay did not directly confront Luxemburg’s theses (he was more content to take on Karl Renner and Otto Bauer).(10) It was left to Lenin, the following year, to offer a full critique of Luxemburg. Lenin argued that an oppressed nation must be allowed its freedom to secede from an oppressor state. Tsarism and colonialism not only crushed the ability of the people of its peripheral states and its colonial dominions to live full lives, but it also contorted the lives of those who seemed to benefit from colonial rule (including workers at the core of the empire). Secession, for Lenin, was a democratic right. If later, because of economic pressures, the proletariat of an independent state would like to freely unite with the proletariat of their previous colonial state that would be acceptable; their unity would now be premised upon freedom not oppression. Over the course of the next decade, Lenin would develop this argument in a series of short essays. Most of the essays, written in German, were translated into Russian in the 1920s by N. K. Krupskaya and published in the Lenin Miscellany volumes, later in the Collected Works. In 1967, Moscow’s Progress Publishers put these essays into a small book under the title, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (it is available in volume 20 of Lenin’s Collected Works). Their appearance in a book, then, was not intentional since Lenin had never written a book on the subject. This was a collection of interventions and articles that had the gist of his analysis on the question.(11) It is these interventions, however, that allow us to see the richness of Lenin’s argument about anti-colonialism and self-determination.(12)
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Post by Admin on Sept 4, 2020 16:34:06 GMT
50 Years ago today Salvador Allende came to power in Chile. Three years later, thanks to a US-backed Military coup, he was dead. Chile then suffered tens of thousands of deaths through 'disappearing' citizens, rounding up those opposing fascism in football stadiums, and then Chilean people being the victims and sufferers of the first real 'experiment' of neo liberal capitalism. We must never forget that The Labour Party and its members welcomed in so many Chilean exiles fleeing for their life. The Conservative Party-notably after her election, Margaret Thatcher-SUPPORTED this murdering, fascist dictator. Indeed Thatcher tried to prevent Pinochet's arrest here in the UK. As if supporting murdering Apartheid South Africa & Saudi Arabian terrorism (and much more) wasn't enough... El Pueblo Unido James Sera Vencido! Solidarity with the People of Chile! The Rise of Allende An interview with Marian Schlotterbeck Fifty years ago today, socialist leader Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. His government unleashed a wave of hope that a more democratic society was possible – and worth fighting for. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/09/the-rise-of-allende
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