|
Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2020 17:42:10 GMT
“40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists” spencersunshine.com/2020/08/27/fortyways/Exciting news! In conjunction with Portland, Oregon’s PopMob, the new edition of 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists is now out! It is a completely revised and redesigned version of my 2018 guide 40 Ways to Fight Nazis. Inside are 40 completely legal tactics—the majority of which are accessible to people from all different backgrounds, skill sets, and identities—that can be used to counter and contain White Nationalist, fascist, and violent Far Right organizing in your community.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 9, 2020 13:48:02 GMT
The Economic Collapse Is Going To Get A Lot Worse. Don’t Expect Your Life To Return To Normal May 1, 2020 The United States and the other core imperialist countries haven’t had socialist revolutions because the masses within them have been kept complacent. They’ve directly or indirectly benefited from the exploitation of colonized peoples, enjoying relative economic advantages despite their being subordinate to the capitalist class. Even as inequality has increased in the last generation or so, this has let the system keep them from taking action. They’ve been told that they need to be loyal to their country, that they can get ahead if they try, that capitalism gives them a better lifestyle than socialism would. What happens when the comforts of the American people are taken away? As the country passes into the greatest economic unraveling in a century, the system is being confronted with the possibility that a consciousness shift will happen. To create this shift, we’ll need to accept that the system isn’t going to take us out of our hardship. We won’t get back the decades-low official unemployment levels from earlier this year, or the relative prosperity of the 1990s, or the large American middle class of the mid-20th century. Our living standards, which have been declining for decades under neoliberalism, are going to keep going down. This is why the Trump White House is still trying to convince people that things will turn around, claiming that the economy will recover rapidly after the quarantines end. In reality, this is far from the worst that conditions will get, and right now they’re far worse than the government admits they are. Around forty million Americans are unemployed, which is almost double the official figure. This makes the nationwide unemployment rate well over 20%, which represents a tipping point for the death of the economy. In an environment where small businesses are getting rapidly trapped in liquidation and bankruptcy, local business owners are largely not going to revive their operations. And the big companies that have laid off many of their workers largely aren’t going to hire those workers back, simply for the reason that they can greatly cut down on costs by hiring far fewer workers than they did before the virus. If they can keep their operations going now, they’ll be able to continue with this arrangement. The owners of these big corporate monopolies are pretty much the only ones who will come out of this crisis richer. The workers and the growing masses of unemployed people will be left with nothing but a band-aid stimulus check, and whatever social services they can gain will no doubt be cut by a government that’s eager to impose more austerity. The tech companies that have won out from the pandemic need to maintain a relatively tiny workforce to continue functioning, meaning tens of millions of people will remain out of work so that the CEOs of companies like Google and Amazon can maximize profits. The economic collapse is going to get a lot worse. Don’t expect your life to return to normal.medium.com/@rainershea612/the-economic-collapse-is-going-to-get-a-lot-worse-dont-expect-your-life-to-return-to-normal-78d632757f75
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 11, 2020 1:59:58 GMT
“‘Libertarians’ have come to glorify Joe McCarthy because they don’t genuinely care about protecting freedom of thought and expression, things that McCarthy obviously didn’t care about upholding; they only seek to root out class struggle by any means necessary. The Trump supporters who claim to love ‘freedom’ have at the same time supported Trump’s Gestapo-style arrests of protesters based on their political ideologies. As soon as class struggle escalates, the patriots who say they stand for ‘liberty’ will join the effort to dictatorially crush the side of the anti-capitalists.” The hypocrisy of the “libertarian” anti-communists medium.com/@rainershea612/the-hypocrisy-of-the-libertarian-anti-communists-431357518382In On Authority, Engels pointed out the lack of substance behind the arguments about how involving the state in building socialism is wrong because this route would be “authoritarian.” As he observed, any kind of revolution is authoritarian in nature, since it involves the forcible transfer of power. So the anarchists, liberals, and reactionaries who attacked Marxism for endorsing the state as a means to achieve socialism didn’t really care about upholding “liberty.” All of these groups believed in authority as a means for advancing their political goals, after all. They only cared about vindicating their own ideological camps. The same hypocrisy is present in today’s denunciations of socialist countries like China as “authoritarian,” which of course come from the same political groups that decried the revolutionary theory of Marx throughout the 19th century. Since the Russian revolution of 1917, when Marxism started to be applied to the functionings of a large government, anti-communists from both the right and the left have tried to claim that reality has vindicated the “anti-authoritarian” critiques of Marxism. But all of these pronouncements about how Marxism leads to tyranny have depended on two dishonest arguing strategies: distortions of the truth about what socialist states have done, and blanket portrayals of the exercising of authority among socialist states as unjust. Disputing the false claims about what these countries have done is as easy as pointing to the numerous factual holes in anti-communist atrocity propaganda. The Nazi-created lie about how Stalin starved Ukraine in an event called the “Holodomor,” the fabricated claims about how many were held in the gulags and what their conditions were like, and the unscientific estimations of how many Uyghur Muslims are in China’s anti-terrorism educational facilities (as well as the blatantly false claims about the conditions of these facilities) are all easy to point out. The anti-communist argument that’s harder to persuade people against pertains to a philosophical opposition towards the very idea of using the state to achieve socialism. For the “libertarians” of both the right and the left, there’s something innately evil about utilizing the state to try to empower the proletariat. State coercion is viewed as unjust, or as a slippery slope towards tyranny which should be avoided. But when all of the lies behind the “communism killed 100 million” meme are taken out of the conversation, the hollowness of these morality-based denunciations of Marxism becomes apparent. Anarchists have always sought to use authority, including authority that’s imposed through violent revolutionary means, to carry out their goals. And the social democrats and rightists, who are directly helping orchestrate imperialist attacks against socialist countries, support authoritarianism for the benefit of their own goals in even more obvious ways.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2020 6:09:51 GMT
The past three months of social unrest have highlighted the need for broad social change. But we cannot achieve a better society through a reformist approach. A revolutionary alternative is needed. www.leftvoice.org/what-the-current-moment-tells-us-about-the-importance-of-revolutionary-politicsFor years, we have been hearing that anything but the most modest social democratic politics are impractical given the material realities of the present moment. According to this argument, the degree to which capitalism has a stranglehold upon our ways of thinking, the low level of struggle, and the power of the state, all make revolution look like a romantic and impractical goal. But in the past three months, we have seen a nationwide rebellion against the police and racism. By some estimates, it has been the largest protest movement in U.S. history. We have seen ordinary people spontaneously embrace militant tactics with street fighting across the country. Police stations have been raided and, in some cases, burned to the ground. The early days may have been the most militant, with 10,000 being arrested in the first ten days, but that militancy has sparked up again periodically, most recently in Kenosha. What does this development say about the view that we should focus on building socialism through social democratic strategy and elections within the Democratic Party? The System is not Static The primary issue with socialist arguments that caution against a revolutionary approach is that they forget that capitalism is not static, but is constantly throwing society forward in fits and convulsions. As Marx said in 1848, the first law of its relation to society is that “all that is solid melts into air.” Capitalism is extremely dynamic, but it is its anarchic tendencies that give it this dynamism. This creates all sorts of contradictions that over the long term are incredibly destructive. The system breeds crises, and the destruction these crises leave behind brings people into active opposition. When we think about the threats from capitalism that people are going to face this century — climate change, environmental collapse, mass migration, deepening systemic racism, and a sluggish economy — it becomes difficult to imagine a century where revolutionary politics could be more relevant. The present system is putting the entire world, human and non-human alike, into deep crisis. As these crises deepen, our societies will begin to look toward solutions that really go to the roots of the problem. All we have to do to see this development is to take a look at the past few months. The Limits of the Reformist Approach There are two reasons why revolutionaries reject the social democratic strategy of trying to achieve socialism through elections. The first is that revolutionaries recognize that the state under capitalism is not a neutral space for debate where various positions are respected, and decisions are determined by reason alone. Marxists understand that the state is a tool of class oppression, a hammer which one class uses to crush the aspirations of other classes. It would be incredible if all we had to do to achieve a socialist society was vote for the right people. But if that is all that building a world beyond capitalism would require, we would certainly be there by now. The reality, however, is that even when reformist socialists have ascended to the height of state power, they have at best been able to become the semi-benevolent stewards of capital and win short-term reforms for the working class. Given the long-term logic of capitalism, however, these gains, and the opportunity to advance further reforms, have mostly disappeared at this point anyway. The second limitation of electoralism, is the relation of reformist politics to the long-term destructive dynamic of capitalism. Reformist socialists argue against the revolutionary approach and counsel that revolution is an unrealistic dream. Instead, they say we need to be hard realists and adapt our strategy to meet people where they are at. While it is undoubtedly true that we should adjust our strategy so that it becomes relevant to ordinary workers, it is equally important that we are intransigent in linking this to the need for a fundamental break with capitalism, i.e. that we maintain a revolutionary politics. If we were to give up our revolutionary positions then when the long-term destructive dynamic of capitalism pulls workers toward radical conclusions, we would be left behind the movement and become irrelevant. We can see this dynamic at work on a smaller scale in the way that some socialists supported police and police unions since they believed that in this way they could appeal to ordinary people. Now that the movement has moved dramatically to the left, calling for defunding the police or outright abolition, their position begins to look ridiculous, and they are forced to either backpedal or maintain an increasingly unpopular position, both of which result in their losing credibility. The 21st Century — a Revolutionary Century The past year has been one of enormous social upheaval worldwide. The remarkable uprisings in the second half of 2019 spanned the world, from Chile to Lebanon, France, Ecuador, Iran, and beyond. 2020 has been defined by the inequity of the impact of the pandemic along race and class lines, both in terms of the disease itself and the accompanying economic meltdown. Since May it has been shaped by the Black Lives Matter protests coming out of the United States and sweeping across the world. But this past year is only a small taste of the revolutionary upheavals that this century has in store. The level of workers struggle is still relatively low in historical terms, but there are signs that this is changing. 2018 saw a wave of teachers’ strikes sweep across the country. The struggles in France, Iran, and Chile at the end of 2019 all involved large sections of organized labor. The uprising after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor saw some impressive shows of solidarity from unions and union members. The Global Climate Strikes of 2019 saw not just students, but workers as well, on strike to demand renewable energy jobs for former fossil fuel workers. Revolutionaries need to organize in unions to deepen this agitation, pushing against the union bureaucracy so that unions become a force truly representing working class interests. As the logic of capitalism puts further pressure on the living standards of the rank and file, this will become more and more of a common sense demand among union members, especially if revolutionaries are there to offer alternatives to the status quo. There is no mechanism through which capitalism can reform itself from within. That the system is driving us at full speed toward immiseration and possible extinction is becoming increasingly clear to many people. The combination of these two facts is pushing people toward revolutionary politics and will do so increasingly the worse these crises get. The past year has been a demonstration of what Lenin, in “Letters from Afar” calls “miracles of proletarian heroism.” Of this, there will be no shortage in the present century. That is beyond question. Whether or not this heroism leads to the creation of a better system is dependent upon what Lenin calls “miracles of proletarian organization.” What is certain is that capitalists will not allow us to achieve these miracles within their organizations. We may as well try to raise chickens in a den of foxes. The entire purpose of the capitalist parties, whether Democrat or Republican, is to maintain capitalist power, and to subordinate the interests of the working class beneath the needs of capital accumulation. Any attempt to build working class organization within these parties is therefore critically limited by that structure. Our class therefore needs to build its own party — a party that represents working class interests and is revolutionary in character. This revolutionary party is the vehicle through which “miracles of proletarian organization” can be realized. Achieving a sustainable society will require that working class heroism and organization extend beyond the streets and reach into our workplaces where we can build the kind of power that can change the system. Revolutionaries need to be meeting these heroic movements, arming them with the historical knowledge and methods of past struggles, and channeling their discontent into the recreation of a force capable of overthrowing capitalism. The destruction capitalism is unleashing this century is going to make this historical perspective, and the willingness to translate it into action, increasingly important as time goes on. Revolution is on the agenda for the 21st century. We need to adjust our politics accordingly.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2020 6:57:14 GMT
How to prepare for the prospect of guerrilla warfare in the U.S.? September 12, 2020|Capitalism, Fascism, Repression, Socialism, War rainershea.com/f/how-to-prepare-for-the-prospect-of-guerrilla-warfare-in-the-usCapitalism in the imperial core is speeding towards collapse. While imperial decline makes the country more and more isolated from the rising economic power of China, U.S. unemployment continues to fall, signaling a depression which is sure to last for at least the rest of the decade. The increasingly poor and desperate masses are flooding the streets to demand an end to the ever worsening police brutality, austerity, and inequality. But as long as the capitalist state retains its dominance over exercising violence, this and all future revolts will be crushed, and the transition into fascism will only continue. Which is why if you live in the U.S.-or in the other core imperialist countries which are undergoing similar crises-and you’ve committed yourself to studying Marxist revolutionary theory, your responsibility is to help prepare yourself and other communists for guerrilla warfare against the state. We must work towards fulfilling the mandate for guerrilla warfare that was described by Che Guevara: “Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.” To become sufficiently knowledgeable to take on this task, it’s necessary to read Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, to read Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, and to read Mao Tse-tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare. But in the present conditions in the U.S., which exact actions should you take that will best bring the Marxist-Leninist movement towards having the power to successfully wage guerrilla warfare? The first thing you should do, aside from the obviously needed work of getting yourself and your group members armed and trained, is review these seven sins of the urban guerrilla, as listed by Carlos Marighella: Inexperience. Marighella writes about this sin that “The urban guerrilla, blinded by this sin, thinks the enemy is stupid, underestimates the enemy's intelligence, thinks everything is easy and, as a result, leaves evidence that can lead to disaster. Because of his inexperience, the urban guerrilla may also overestimate the forces of the enemy, believing them to be stronger than they really are. Allowing himself to be fooled by this presumption, the urban guerrilla becomes intimidated and remains insecure and indecisive, paralyzed and lacking in audacity.” Marighella continues that “The second sin of the urban guerrilla is to boast about the actions he has undertaken and to broadcast them to the four winds.” If you make any progress, don’t post about it on social media, and maintain a security culture within your organizations. “The third sin of the urban guerrilla,” writes Marighella, “is vanity. The guerrilla who suffers from this sin tries to solve the problems of the revolution by actions in the city, but without bothering about the beginnings and survival of other guerrillas in other areas. Blinded by success, he winds up organizing an action that he considers decisive and that puts into play the entire resources of the organization. Since we cannot afford to break the guerrilla struggle in the cities while rural guerrilla warfare has not yet erupted, we always run the risk of allowing the enemy to attack us with decisive blows.” The urban guerilla’s fourth sin is “to exaggerate his strength and to undertake actions for which he, as yet, lacks sufficient forces and the required infrastructure.” As you prepare for your first action, weigh the strength of your group’s forces over the forces of the capitalist state forces that you plan to go up against. Until you’ve gained enough strength to make an honest tactical military analysis where you have real potential for victory, hold back. The fifth sin is “rash action. The guerrilla who commits this sin loses patience, suffers an attack of nerves, does not wait for anything, and impetuously throws himself into action, suffering untold defeats.” See my advice regarding the fourth sin. The sixth sin “to attack the enemy when they are most angry.” If the state has the will and the resources to set the maximum amount of its military power against your group, make a tactical retreat or abstain from attacking. The seventh sin is “to fail to plan things, and to act spontaneously.” Any action must be preceded by a plan that can work according to an honest military analysis. Avoid these pitfalls, and you’ll have a far better idea of what to do. Utilizing these types of pragmatic assessments of our movement’s military prospects in this country, the Marxist-Leninist YouTuber Hakim recently gave his audience the following instructions on how to proceed with armed struggle: “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.” In addition to following these guidelines, you can gain awareness of what to do and what not to do by reading the guerrilla warfare texts I’ve listed. By taking all of these preparatory measures-thoroughly studying texts on guerrilla tactics, recognizing fatal mistakes before we make them, getting physically fit and trained for combat, building armed organizations-we can be ready for the moment when the situation calls upon us to enter into action. When will this moment come when the class war within the U.S. escalates to armed struggle? The beginning of the armed struggle in Cuba which led to the country’s socialist revolution helps give us a hint of how an equivalent conflict in the U.S. will start. Cuba’s revolutionary war began in 1953, when the communists attacked several of the Batista dictatorship’s military installations. This first attempt was defeated. But in the following years, as unemployment and repression increased, a 1957 general strike would start skirmishes with police that lasted days. After that year, the revolutionary forces would start to almost consistently make Batista’s forces have to retreat after battles, despite the revolutionary forces having been vastly outnumbered. By the end of 1958, the rebels had overcome the regime’s forces, and Batista had to flee the country before the guerrillas captured Cuba’s capital. Our war for liberation will look very different, since the U.S. military is much stronger than Batista’s military was (Batista’s forces became weakened partly by a U.S. weapons embargo, whereas the U.S. military will no doubt receive help from other imperialist powers in the event of a civil war). But every country’s war for socialist and anti-colonial liberation looks different. The most immediately relevant lesson we can take from Cuba’s guerrilla war is that when a guerrilla conflict starts here, it will be preceded both by years of guerrilla warfare preparations from the revolutionaries, and by the emergence of conditions which can bring much of the population to support the communists. Such conditions are on their way to becoming present here. It’s our job to become personally and organizationally equipped to use these conditions as a catalyst for the fight which will free this continent. ———————————————————————————
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2020 15:13:14 GMT
The Revolution is Now Join Peter Joseph every Tuesday for a new train of thought. www.revolutionnow.live/About: Revolution Now! Is a 30 min. weekly podcast hosted by author/filmmaker Peter Joseph. The purpose of the show is to highlight the urgency of what civilization faces todays, coming from the perspective of sociology. In what could also be called a “structuralist” approach, Joseph’s 2017 book The New Human Rights Movement serves as a kind of framework. In this book, which is the inspiration for the podcast, the subjects of bigotry, ecological decline and the systemic public health crisis of socioeconomic inequality are addressed. However, in contrast to other programs dealing with social issues, the goal is to realize a bigger picture, seeking to uncover the deepest roots of our social woes. A cursory glance at the activist and political climate today shows great confusion and frustration. Ideological polarization has in-turn generated a kind of “post-truth” era where society’s lack of scientific understanding has created a web of unproductive noise. As each year goes on, so do the problems, despite enormous amounts of time, energy and resources spent in trying to turn the tide. The world today is now seeing a decrease in lifespan in many regions, rising racism and authoritarian, along with the on-going destruction of our habitat through pollution and biodiversity loss. We exist today in a global existential crisis and it is no doubt time for new understandings and approaches. Revolution Now! hopes to assist in finding such resolution, realizing that the time for change is Now.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 14:03:37 GMT
Class Struggle and the New Deal ERIC GOODMAN SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 We are living through a time in which many people have lost all hope in the future. For the average worker, the only certain thing is continued uncertainty. Tens of millions have lost their livelihoods, while the capitalist-party duopoly deprives them of a voice and climate change and the pandemic loom over everything. It has been nearly 100 years since the capitalist system went into a crisis this deep, and only the bloodbath of World War II “saved” the system at that time—at the cost of 80 million dead. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president. He would manage the crisis of capitalism and attempt to save the system from itself over the next decade. There are many lessons for socialists to learn from the Great Depression and how the FDR administration presided over it. “The Great Crash”—then and now On “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929, the stock market imploded, and the Dow lost nearly a quarter of its value in just two days. In March of this year, we saw several “black” days as the market spiraled downward. Both of these crashes had similar roots. Capitalism requires profit to survive. It makes profits through the exploitation of labor, whereby the workers produce more value for the bosses than they receive back in wages and benefits. The goods workers produce are then sold on the market to be purchased by other workers, but as they are paid less than the value of the goods produced, they cannot buy back everything they make. This, combined with the unplanned nature of capitalism, eventually leads to a glut of unsold goods—a crisis of overproduction—causing prices to collapse and a knock-on effect throughout the economy. socialistrevolution.org/class-struggle-and-the-new-deal/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 14, 2020 9:29:21 GMT
Book Review – Revolutionary Yiddishland. A history of Jewish Radicalism. Posted by LETS GET ROOTED4th Sep 2020Posted in Uncategorized letsgetrooted.wordpress.com/2020/09/04/book-review-revolutionary-yiddishland-a-history-of-jewish-radicalism/By Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klinsberg. Published by Verso This is an amazing book and in my review I don’t want to try and summarise it but hopefully to inspire you to read it yourself. At the beginning of the 20th century of the 11 million Jews world wide, 5 million were living in Russia and with the rise of capitalist industry most of these were proletarians, living and working in appalling conditions. This book traces the development up to the 1950s of the Yiddish speaking working class and particularly its main socialist and revolutionary movements. But in doing this it really gives a vivid picture of the entire European class struggle in this period. “In more than one respect, the fate of the Yiddishland working class concentrates the fate of the revolutionary workers’ movement of the 20th century, in both its brightest and its darkest colours. Is it accidental that we discover these Yiddishland fighters everywhere that the revolutions brilliantly flared, from the barricades of Lodz to the St |Petersburg soviet of 1905: in Berlin in November 1918, Munich and Budapest in 1919, Poland between the two wars, in the Resistance in France and Belgium and Yugoslavia, and again in the struggle within the concentration camps, from Auschwitz to Vorkuta.” The authors make clear that this is not the usual history of the Jew as victim, the story promoted by Israel, it is the story of hundreds and thousands of people who dedicated their whole lives to the struggle for socialism and millions more who followed them. It is also a history that is almost invisible because the writers of the USSR empire and of Israel wanted to bury it. The book is based around interviews the authors conducted in Israel in the 1980s with people who had participated in the three main political trends that existed within the Yiddish working class – the Bund, Poale Zion and the communist movement, all fighting for the emancipation of the working class. Of course over time people switched between these movements that themselves underwent great changes. In particular they all split as a result of the 1917 revolution when people from all the movements joined the barricades and the Bolsheviks. In talking about the conditions that they grew up in the old militants paint a vivid picture of why Yiddishland was the real catalyst of the eastern European workers movement, both in terms of trade unions and socialist parties as well as things like mutual aid groups, solidarity networks and self defence squads. The interviewees also reject any idea of a ‘community’, making it clear that most of the Yiddish workers toiled in semi-slavery for Jewish bosses who were the first people to establish things like cigarette factories and garment production in Russia. This theme is continued right through. In France in 1945 native French Jews and refugees from the rest of Eastern Europe filled the ranks of the resistance while wealthy Jews collaborated with the Vichy Government. A great strength of this book is that the authors, while they clearly have an anti-Stalinist, communist outlook, allow all of the voices of the people they interviewed to be heard and understood. Regardless of whether you agree or not with a particular perspective the book makes it possible for you to understand the reasoning and conditions and experiences that led to that perspective. And the three trends – one inclined towards social democracy, one to socialism with the dream of a Jewish homeland and one to the revolutionary overthrow of capital and an international workers emancipation – are at the heart of all the arguments within the Yiddish working class about how to realise their dreams. From the establishment of the Bund at the end of the 19th century right through to the collapse of the Nazi empire, Yiddish militants were in almost constant situations of uprisings, mass workers struggles, revolutions and inter-imperialists wars and throughout, for this section of the working class, there were also the constant waves of anti-Semitic pogroms and state persecution. ( My great grandparents with my two year old grandmother arrived in Glasgow fleeing the pogroms in Krakow) I think one of the great values of this book for today’s militants is that it looks at a world which was in constant upheaval and in which great political decisions were having to be made every day. How to deal with such conditions that are going to confront us all as capital reduces the world to ruins is a question for us all The book traces the evolution of the three movements. The differences between them were never straightforward. The question of a Jewish homeland was always under discussion. For some of the communists this was just a utopia left over from old cultural dreams. This whole period saw many Jews assimilating into the broader working class. Not assimilation as the present Zionists like to portray it – an assimilation in the hope that it would hide you from anti-Semitism – but an assimilation that was a natural process for workers who no longer had religious beliefs or any affinity to the ancient cultural practices that went with it. But thousands of Yiddish speakers – religious and non religious – took part in the two revolutions of 1917, won over not just as workers seeking emancipation but enthused by the Bolshevik’s opposition to chauvinism and a promise of freedom for the small nations of the empire. Lenin and other Bolsheviks discussed at length the problems of the Yiddish workers and agreed that they should be treated as a nation. Initially land was set aside for them in Ukraine and then a Jewish autonomous region was established in the far east of Russia. (later abolished by Stalin) The rise of Stalin, the resurrection of the Great Russian state saw the crushing not just of the Jewish dream of a homeland but equally the aspirations of many of the other small nations. A large part of the book necessarily deals with the impact on the Yiddishland people from the degeneration of the revolution. Hundreds of leading Jewish militants were summoned to Moscow and sent to the camps or executed. Here is another important warning for today’s readers. Loyalty to parties, blind belief in leaders, unquestioning acceptance of theories and policies, all this led millions of workers, including the militant Yiddish workers, marching down roads to their own destruction. For example in 1939 the Polish communist workers, with Yiddish speakers making up half the party leadership had to accept the dissolution of their party on the orders of Stalin. They were told a spy ring had been discovered in the leadership of their party. What they didn’t know was that Stalin had just secretly done a deal with Hitler for the invasion and partition of Poland between Russia and Germany. Stalin didn’t want a communist party there that could mobilise against this invasion. This was at a time when hundreds of Polish Jews had been fighting against fascism in Spain but here too Stalin’s policies led to their deaths. Stalinist led troops were turned against the Spanish workers occupying factories etc using the argument that the working class was too weak to take power and could only act to support the democratic bourgeoisie, ie the factory owners. Yiddish speakers were on both sides of this battle. Again it was part of Stalin’s global manoeuvring. He had just made pacts with the UK and France and wanted to demonstrate to them that they had nothing to fear – he would not allow revolution anywhere. Many of the interviewees struggled to understand the source of the defeat in Spain. Some accepted Stalin’s analysis but others began to question their loyalties. What they all knew was that this defeat was to be followed by a bigger war. A constant feature of the Yiddish workers was that they tended to be far more internationalist, far more global in their outlooks, far less attached to a national conservatism. All across Europe they spoke a common language hich made it far easier to spread news and views. In Spain at one point the only way a Spanish commander can talk to some US volunteers is via a Yiddish soldier. Fascism, war, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution – from all sides the European militants were being crushed. The story tellers and the authors go to great lengths to talk about this period not in the usual terms of Jews lining up and silently climbing aboard the trains taking them to the concentration camps, but in terms of the continuous resistance they put up. Jewish young women in the Paris resistance who would try to strike up discussion with German soldiers to see if they could be ‘turned’. The Yiddish fighters who went from Spain to fight with the Partisans in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The people who organised revolts in the extermination camps themselves. And of course in the Warsaw ghetto. Here several hundred militants met to discuss what to do. They knew that death was only days away and the only thing they had left was their own life. How to use it? They discussed three options – to set the ghetto on fire and die in the flames, to walk out of the ghetto and be machine gunned or to go down fighting with the few weapons they had. The only question was what method of dying might make the greatest impact on the world. They went down fighting. The representative of the Polish Jews in London committed suicide in the street in the West End to add his life to their stand. Then finally the aftermath of the war. Primo Levi in his book ‘If not now, when’, about Yiddish communist resistance fighters in Belorussia, fighting behind German lines, paints a picture of the terrible dilemma of the socialist Jew at the end of the war and this book allows the speakers to make it even clearer. Where could they go? Western Europe closed its doors to them. Anti-semitism had risen anew in the USSR. Their dreams of workers emancipation and within that their own freedom and security – all of this lay in ruins. The defeat of the Nazis did not mean ‘victory’ for them. They had nowhere to go. Some of the interviewees, fighters in the French Resistance, or internees in Spain, did make their way home to Russia or Poland only to find themselves accused of being foreign spies and sent to the gulags. Others, more aware that this was their likely fate had little choice but to head for Palestine. Some went enthusiastically, still thinking that this was to be their ‘socialist’ homeland. The authors rightly say that they ended up in a society that was the polar opposite of what they had all spent their lives fighting for, but as the book says, who can condemn them for that decision in those circumstances. Between Stalin and Hitler, Yiddishland was obliterated. In Poland, Ukraine and Russia what was left of their old buildings were destroyed and all trace of this people who had been the backbone of the Eastern European workers movement vanished I can’t begin to do justice to this amazing book. Anyone who is thinking about the problems of building a communist movement today will gain a great deal from reading it.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 19, 2020 21:56:18 GMT
Temporary autonomous zone The problems we face cannot be fixed by a third political party but rather the challenge is to build a mass movement of the well-informed. The autonomous zone can be a useful tool for building movements, though some complain that they fail because the state always crushes them. This thinking is misled by the claim that all autonomous zones should be permanent or else they are failures. This thinking fails to comprehend the revolutionary function of temporary autonomous zones which enter the public mind, striking curiosity while expanding the realm of possibilities before being crushed. Being crushed is itself another message to the broad public in that questions arise as to why the government would use force against peaceful exuberance for cooperation. It's difficult for the state to characterize community autonomous zones as criminal. beautifultrouble.org/theory/temporary-autonomous-zone/Coined in 1990 by poet, anarcho-immediatist and Sufi scholar Hakim Bey, the term temporary autonomous zone (T.A.Z.) seeks to preserve the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of autonomous uprisings without replicating the inevitable betrayal and violence that has been the reaction to most revolutions throughout history. The answer, according to Bey, lies in refusing to wait for a revolutionary moment, and instead create spaces of freedom in the immediate present whilst avoiding direct confrontation with the state. A T.A.Z. is a liberated area “of land, time or imagination” where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with. Locating itself in the cracks and fault lines in the global grid of control and alienation, a T.A.Z. is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity. It should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest and we all become the creators of the art of everyday life. The key, suggests Bey, is to remain mobile, relying on stealth and the ability to melt into the darkness at a moment’s notice. Before the T.A.Z is spotted and recognized by the state, which will inevitably seek to crush it, it dissolves and moves on, reappearing in unexpected places to celebrate once again the wonders of conviviality and life outside the law. It might last hours, days, years even, depending on how quickly it is noticed by authorities. Bey claims that T.A.Z.s have always existed. He sees their ancestry in the numerous liberated zones that pepper history: from the secret “state” of the medieval Persian Assassins to the eighteenth century pirate utopias — islands where buccaneers, escaped slaves and convicts lived outside the law, sharing goods and property. From the radical communes of Paris and Munich to the dissatisfied colonizers of North America who deserted their enclave to join Native American communities, leaving the infamous sign behind them, “Gone to Croatan.” Bey maintains, however, that the T.A.Z. cannot be defined; it is simply a “suggestion…a poetic fancy,” not “political dogma,” and that “if the phrase became current it would be understood without difficulty…understood in action.” Twenty years on, the notion of T.A.Z has inspired movements and actions across the world, from the creative play of Reclaim the Streets parties see CASE to the autonomy of protest encampments, the Anonymous hacker movement to the Burning Man festival and secret rainbow gatherings. When Bey first came up with the concept, the web was in its infancy, yet he already imagined a future world where a multitude of autonomous zones could be linked by dispersed networks of communication freed from political control. The web would not be an end in itself, he wrote, but a weapon without which autonomous zones would perish. At the time, he dismissed his own theory as pure speculative science fiction, but the future always arrives faster than one can imagine. MOST FAMOUS APPLICATION: If we wrote it down here the authorities would soon learn about it and it would have to dissolve. Keep your senses open; the nearest T.A.Z. is nearer than you think. IMPORTANT BUT LITTLE-KNOWN APPLICATION: The 1920–24 free state of Fiume (now the city of Rijeka, Croatia), whose constitution was written by poets and anarchists. John Jordan was co-founder of Reclaim the Streets (1995-2001) and now works with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, a collective that merges art, activism and permaculture. He loves to apply creativity to social movements such as Climate Camps and has invented various new direct action methodologies such as the Rebel Clown Army. Co-author of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-capitalism (Verso), he has just brought out a new book-film with Isabelle Fremeaux exploring Europe’s utopian communities, Les sentiers de l’utopie (Editions Zones/La Découverte). Balancing on the tightrope between art and activism, creativity and resistance, is where he’s most at home. The Project - beautifultrouble.org/faqs/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 20, 2020 19:55:04 GMT
The history of the New Anticapitalist Party in France, which coincides with a decade-long period of intense class struggle in the country, is instructive for revolutionaries in the United States seeking a path forward to building an independent working-class party that will fight for socialism. So too are the nature of the current crisis of the NPA and the crisis of leadership that Leon Trotsky wrote about in 1938. France’s New Anticapitalist Party: Some Lessons for Revolutionaries Post on: September 20, 2020 Scott Cooper Jimena Vergara www.leftvoice.org/frances-new-anticapitalist-party-some-lessons-for-revolutionaries“The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” With those words, Leon Trotsky began what has come to be known as the Transitional Program — the founding document of the Fourth International. Today, that statement is as true as when it was first written in 1938. At that time, it reflected the bankruptcy of the Third International, which had fully adapted to Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and was largely abandoning the fight for revolution around the world. Over the past 82 years, this crisis has been demonstrated many times, in many countries. In response to this “historical crisis,” Trotskyists seek to build revolutionary parties that can fill the leadership vacuum. It is this approach that establishes Trotskyists as the heirs to, and Trotskyism as the revolutionary continuity of, Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Sometimes it is a lonely road. Other times, big opportunities present themselves to unite with other forces and work to move them in a revolutionary direction independent of the ruling class. France offers us two compelling illustrations of the cost of failing to resolve the crisis of leadership. Both are tremendously instructive for revolutionary socialists, including in the United States. In May 1968, France began a two-month odyssey into a semi-insurrectionary prerevolutionary situation that brought the economy to a virtual standstill. It began with student protests against capitalism, consumerism, and the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam, which the French bourgeoisie supported. As police violently repressed the students, large sectors of the trade union movement in France called for sympathy strikes, which widened beyond anyone’s imagination at the time. Some 11 million workers went on strike, representing nearly a quarter of the entire population of the country. The government ceased to function, and government leaders feared a revolution. At a moment in late May, President Charles de Gaulle even secretly fled to Germany for a short period. While a full history of the May–June 1968 events in France are beyond the scope of this article, it can be said that the central reason a social and political uprising of such magnitude did not become a revolution lies precisely in Trotsky’s words quoted above. Over the next decades, especially beginning in the early 1980s, the Keynesian economic paradigm that had ruled most of the world during the “30 glorious years” immediately after World War II — influencing economies through activist government stabilization and economic intervention policies — was rapidly supplanted by neoliberalism, with its focus on transferring as many economic factors from the public to the private sector. It was a period of intense attacks against the working class, in the form of privatizations, assaults on union rights, and the ripping apart of social safety nets, against which the proletariat proved largely impotent — another reflection of the crisis of leadership.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2020 10:03:40 GMT
CHRIS HEDGES: THE COST OF RESISTANCE By Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.com. September 22, 2020 | EDUCATE! popularresistance.org/chris-hedges-the-cost-of-resistance/You Can Measure The Effectiveness Of Resistance By The Fury Of The Response By Ruling Elites. Two of the rebels I admire most, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher, and Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, are in jail in Britain. That should not be surprising. You can measure the effectiveness of resistance by the fury of the response. Julian courageously exposed the lies, deceit, war crimes and corruption of the ruling imperial elites. Roger has helped organized the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in British history, shutting down parts of London for weeks, in a bid to wrest power from a ruling class that has done nothing, and will do nothing, to halt the climate emergency and our death march to mass extinction. The governing elites, when truly threatened, turn the rule of law into farce. Dissent becomes treason. They use the state mechanisms of control – intelligence agencies, police, courts, black propaganda and a compliant press that acts as their echo chamber, along with the jails and prisons, not only to marginalize and isolate rebels, but to psychologically and physically destroy them. The list of rebels silenced or killed by ruling elites runs in a direct line from Socrates to the Haitian resistance leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the only successful slave revolt in human history and died in a frigid French prison cell of malnutrition and exhaustion, to the imprisonment of the socialist Eugene V. Debs, whose health was also broken in a federal prison. Rebel leaders from the 1960s, including Mumia Abu Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Kojo Bomani Sababu, Mutulu Shakur and Leonard Peltier, remain, decades later, in U.S. prisons. Muslim activists, including those who led the charity The Holy Land Foundation and Syed Fahad Hashmi, were arrested, often at the request of Israel, after the hysteria following 9/11, and given tawdry show trials. They also remain incarcerated. Resistance, genuine resistance, exacts a very, very high price. Those in power drop even the pretense of justice when they face an existential threat. Most rebels, like Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the tens of thousands of rebels the U.S. has had kidnapped, disappeared and brutally tortured and killed throughout American history end up as martyrs. Once a rebel is caged the state uses its absolute control and array of dark arts to break them. Julian, whose extradition hearing is underway in London, and who spent seven years trapped as a political prisoner in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, is taken from his cell in the high security Belmarsh Prison at 5:00 am. He is handcuffed, put in holding cells, stripped naked and X-rayed. He is transported an hour and a half each way to court in a police van that resembles a dog cage on wheels. He is held in a glass box at the back of court during the proceedings, often unable to consult with his lawyers. He has difficulty hearing the proceedings. He is routinely denied access to the documents in his case and is openly taunted in court by the judge. It does not matter that Julian, being prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act, is not a U.S. citizen. It does not matter that WikiLeaks, which he founded and publishes, is not a U.S.-based publication. The ominous message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the U.S. to be tried as a spy and imprisoned for life. The empire intends to be unaccountable, untouchable and unexamined. he U.S. created in the so-called “war on terror” parallel legal and penal codes to railroad dissidents and rebels into prison. These rebels are held in prolonged solitary confinement, creating deep psychological distress. They are prosecuted under special administrative measures, known as SAMs, to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. They are denied access to the news and other reading material. They are barred from participating in educational and religious activities in the prison. They are subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. They must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. They are permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of their family, but cannot use more than three pieces of paper. They often have no access to fresh air and must take the one hour of recreation in a cage that looks like a giant hamster wheel. The U.S. has set up a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists. Their sentences are arbitrarily lengthened by “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.” All calls and mail – although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials – are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level “terrorists” are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation. It is Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather. Julian is already very fragile. His psychological and physical distress include dramatic weight loss, severe respiratory problems, joint problems, dental decay, chronic anxiety, intense, constant stress resulting in an inability to relax or focus, and episodes of mental confusion. These symptoms indicate, as Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture who met and examined Julian in prison has stated, that he is suffering from prolonged psychological torture. If Julian is extradited to the U.S. to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act, each carrying a potential 10 years, which appears likely, he will continue to be psychologically and physically abused to break him. He will be tried in the burlesque of a kangaroo court with “secret” evidence, familiar to Black and Muslim radicals as well as rebels such as Jeremy Hammond, sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers and making public the emails of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. Roger is being held in Pentonville Prison in London which was built in 1842 and is in disrepair. He is charged with breaking bail conditions over an action that saw activists throw paint on the walls of the four major political parties, as well as conspiracy to cause criminal damage. A Green Party member leaked to the British police a recorded Zoom discussion Roger was having with three other members of Burning Pink, an anti-political party organized to create citizen assemblies to replace ruling governing bodies, as they discussed upcoming actions. The homes of the four activists on the Zoom meeting – Roger Hallam, Blyth Brentnall, Diana Warner, Ferhat Ulusu and Anglican priest Steven Nunn – were raided on August 25. Their electronic devises were confiscated by police and they were arrested. Roger is housed in a dirty, vermin-infested cell and denied books and visitors. A vegan, he is forced to live on a diet of cold cereal and bread. On many days there is no hot food served in the prison. Violent altercations within the prison are commonplace. The overcrowded cells often lack lighting and heat. He has no change of clothes and has been unable to wash the clothes he is wearing for weeks. He stuffs bed sheets and paper in the cracks of the door to block mice and cockroaches. The toilet in his cell has no seat, is covered in excrement and does not flush properly. He goes days without access to the outside. His reading glasses are broken. He is waiting on a request for tape to fix them. The COVID-19 pandemic is in the prison. Two of the staff have died from the virus. Roger could be imprisoned in these conditions until February if he is denied bail in a hearing scheduled for Tuesday. Roger’s arrest came as Extinction Rebellion was planning the blockade of the printing presses of News Corps Printworks, which prints the newspapers The Times, Sun on Sunday, Sunday Times, The Daily Mail and The London Evening Standard. The blockade took place on September 4 to protest the failure of the news outlets to accurately report on the climate and ecological emergency. The blockade delayed distribution of the papers by several hours. “The days of standing up to tyranny have long faded,” Roger writes from prison. “The life-and-death struggle against Hitler and fascism is consigned to the history books. Today’s liberal classes believe only in one thing: maintaining their privilege. Their one priority is power. The number one rule is: preserve our careers, our institutions at all cost. The historical rule number one of fighting evil is the willingness to lose your career and to risk the closing down of your institution. The prospect of death and destruction is lost in a postmodernist haze. Leadership has decayed into sitting behind a desk, following public relations protocols (otherwise known as lying). Leading from the front, the first to go to prison Martin Luther King-style died with the passing of the World War II generation.” “The game is up,” Roger continued. “The old alliance with the liberal classes is dead. New forms of revolutionary initiative and leadership are rising up. Members of the new political party Burning Pink have thrown paint at the doors of the NGOs and political parties calling for open dialogue and public debate. The response, true to form, has been a lethal and deafening silence. We are now in prison from where I write this article after a Green Party member recorded a Zoom call and passed it to the police. We have not been let out for exercise for the first five days. We have no kettle, no pillows, no visits. But we don’t give a shit. We are doing something about Evil.” Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2020 19:04:11 GMT
Albert Camus on What It Means to Be a Rebel and to Be in Solidarity with Justice “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/17/albert-camus-the-rebel/“You say you want a revolution,” the Beatles sang in 1968 as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was erecting the pillars of nonviolence on the other side of the Atlantic, “Well, you know / We all want to change the world… But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out… If you want money for people with minds that hate / All I can tell you is brother you have to wait.” Perhaps such is the curse of our species: Only in violent times do we remember, in our bones and our sinews, that hate is not a weapon of rebellion but of cowardice; that no true revolution is achieved through destruction and nihilism; that the only way to change the world is through constructive and life-affirming action. No one has made this point more persuasively and elegantly than Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) in his sublime and sublimely timely 1951 book The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (public library).
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 27, 2020 11:04:34 GMT
THROW SAND IN THE GEARS OF THE MACHINE By Caitlin Johnstone. September 26, 2020 | STRATEGIZE! Humanity will continue along its self-destructive trajectory until the masses use the power of their numbers to force real change. Humanity will not use the power of its numbers to force real change as long as it’s being successfully propagandized not to do so. The oligarchic propaganda machine is therefore the primary barrier to our transition from our self-destructive patterns into a healthy collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem. So throw sand in the gears of the machine. If enough of us throw enough sand, we can cause the whole thing to break down. Kill public trust in the mass media by exposing their lies at every opportunity, from whatever platform you can gain access to. Anywhere you can find an audience, whether it’s an audience of one or ten thousand, kill public trust in the establishment propaganda engine. Amplify solid voices, arguments, narratives and facts that those in power don’t want amplified. Wherever you see something healthy that makes them squirm, give your energy to it and help it get as much traction as possible. Make them uncomfortable. Push the powerful until they’re forced to push back, exposing themselves. Get the machine to overextend itself into the light where it can be seen by everyone. Create movement, and when that movement opens up gaps in the matrix, do everything you can to shove as much truth as possible through those gaps. Improvise. Move, pivot and circle with the ever-shifting narrative matrix in real time. Don’t attack in the same place for too long. When the narrative managers start pouring their energy into protecting a given story, move to another location like a boxer who strikes the body to get the opponent to drop their hands, leaving them open to a knockout blow. Find weak points in the armor of the machine, and focus your firepower there. If there’s a narrative the propagandists are guarding against especially aggressively and effectively, don’t waste your energy bashing your head against it. All you have to do is wake the public up to the fact that the plutocratic media are not trustworthy; it doesn’t matter which of their lies you expose to do that, so just grab what’s available. Be creative. Propagandists are motivated by base desires like power, money and esteem, so they have no access to their own creative depths like we do. They have no inspiration, and people will naturally find them far less interesting than those who do. The more we can force the battle to be contested on this ground, the more wins we’ll rack up. Be funny. Humor always works best when it’s punching up and exposing the powerful, not opposing change and protecting power. This is why narrative managers are not funny. We are. Use that. Always be attacking. Don’t wait for the establishment to do something gross and then react defensively to its offensive maneuvers, proactively attack it and put the bastards on the back foot. Constantly seek out things to mock, criticize, highlight and remind people of that the manipulators want unseen. The more you can force them to play defense the less energy they’ll have to attack, and the more openings they’ll leave as they try to get you off of them. Make a constant study of how they fool people, so you can draw people’s attention to how they’re being fooled. Make a constant study of how you fool yourself, so you can understand how psychological manipulation really works. Keep working on yourself. The more psychologically healthy and lucid you are, the more useful you are in this fight. The more inner spaciousness you have, the more creativity and spontaneity you’ll have to fight the manipulators in a free-form improvisational way. The more lucid you are, the more clearly you can see the machine. Keep fighting. Don’t stop. Why would you stop? We either win this fight or resign ourselves to extinction/dystopia (whichever comes first). Fight like any other organism whose life is being threatened by any other predator. If you need to lay down and give up, lay down and give up. Then once you’ve felt the ground beneath you and how there’s nowhere to fall, get back up and keep fighting. We have so very, very much untapped potential, and there is so very, very much going on that we do not yet understand. Despair is an irrational position on a battlefield of unknown surprises with an army of unknown power. Keep fighting, and watch and see. Humanity will either awaken from its propaganda-induced trance or it won’t. When you have a loved one who won’t leave an abusive relationship, all you can do is show them what you’re seeing as tactfully as possible and then give them the freedom to find their own way out. When you have a species that is being pushed along a self-destructive trajectory by plutocratic propaganda built in service of plutocratic agendas, all you can do is show them they’re being lied to and give them the opportunity to transcend the lies. Keep fighting, keep pushing, and watch and see. We absolutely have the freedom to pass this test. Whether we pass it or not remains to be seen. All we can do is keep throwing sand in the gears. popularresistance.org/throw-sand-in-the-gears-of-the-machine/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2020 21:29:04 GMT
Hollow Resistance Obama, Trump and the Politics of Appeasement By Paul Street store.counterpunch.org/product/hollow-resistance/“Paul Street’s courageous truth-telling is the pre-condition for a massive radical democratic movement.” – Cornel West The horror is all around us. It proliferates our daily news. It dominates social media. The economy is in shambles. The COVID pandemic is spreading like wildfire while we face the strangest US election in modern history. If you want to make sense of it all, Hollow Resistance is required reading. In CounterPunch’s latest book, radical historian Paul Street recounts the Democrats’ culpability in the rise of Trump and explains how his neofascist horrors took root during the Obama years, and will live on even if Joe Biden is victorious in November. Paul Street is a historian, journalist, and political commentator in Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Routledge, 2008). The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Routledge, 2010), and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014). Street writes regularly for CounterPunch and Black Agenda Report. Paperback – 184 pages – Published by CounterPunch, 2020
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 1, 2020 20:37:18 GMT
Rebellious History Annette Gordon-ReedOCTOBER 22, 2020 ISSUE Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/22/saidiya-hartman-rebellious-history/The archive can be maddening. Historians encounter interesting people there whose lives appear in mere snippets, spurring curiosity that can never be entirely satiated. Scholars of American slavery are particularly familiar with this phenomenon. The people who could give the best account of day-to-day life before emancipation were the people most directly affected by the institution: the enslaved. Yet the nature of slavery was such that these individuals were, with few exceptions, silenced. The vast majority of them could not write and were thus unable to leave letters; their marriages, unrecognized by law, produced no licenses to be maintained as part of an official record. Owning no property, they produced no deeds, evidence of land transfers, or wills to be probated. Instead, what can be known of their lives comes from the people who enslaved them—self-interested and unreliable witnesses on the question of the inner lives of the people they held captive. It is those inner lives that many historians would most like to explore and make a part of the historical record. If we could only know and tell those stories, we would learn much about the subtleties of the culture in which they lived. These narratives are the missing pieces of an incomplete puzzle that for too many years historians have treated as solved by focusing on the lives of the people in power who did leave written records. In fairness to historians, the now decades-long push for a more wide-ranging historiography of slavery has led them to move beyond the methods they normally employ, or may have been trained to employ, in order to piece together what they can to defeat the archives’ silence. The discipline of history is, for the most part, wedded to the documentary record; how scholars engage with it is one way judgments are made about the quality of their work. What did they find? How persuasive are their interpretations of the documents? Is there evidence of moving too far beyond what the record suggests? Most people understand that it is impossible to reproduce the reality of a time passed, no matter how many documents exist about a person or an event. The general aim, however—the expectation—is that the historian will try as hard as he or she can to come as close as possible to reconstructing that reality. There are, of course, creative ways of knowing about people who did not make written records. Families can keep their ancestors’ histories alive by passing down stories by word of mouth (though oral history is considered most reliable when corroborated by at least some documentary evidence). Archaeology gives insight into material culture that can reveal much about an individual. Excavations at Monticello, for example, have yielded valuable information about Elizabeth Hemings, the matriarch of the Hemings family and the mother of Sally Hemings—not only about the nature of her living space but her possession of consumer goods (including a tea set adorned with Chinese imagery that she most likely bought from traveling peddlers). One instantly imagines the enslaved woman—who knew Thomas Jefferson and all the people most associated with Monticello—in her small cabin at the foot of the mountain drinking tea with her numerous offspring and grandchildren, talking about the strange man who held power over their lives and their strange relationship to him. Though it would be entirely reasonable to assume that such scenes took place, we cannot know for certain. There are limits to how far the historian can go. What are those limits? Does the lack of certainty mean that no attempt should be made to reconstruct the lives of people who were deliberately forced to the margins in their own time? There is an urgent moral dimension to this question that goes beyond the stories of the enslaved. One can argue that historians have a duty—for the sake of historical writing itself—to look beyond the presentations of people who deliberately forced obscurity upon others and portrayed the oppressed in a way that justified their rule over them. Privileging their documents has historians playing along with a rigged system, producing history that is indelibly marked by prejudice, a form of fantasy written in fact. Exactly what is to be done, then? How should historians construct a more complete and truthful version of the past? Shall we change our understanding of what constitutes “evidence,” how it is obtained and how it is read? Although literature shows us that there are some persistent themes in human life, we must have a degree of humility when facing the fact that our present-day categories, responses, and feelings cannot be simply grafted onto people of the past. It is the art of history to know which pieces fit and which do not. What threshold of evidence must exist before a valid attempt can be made to rescue individuals from historical erasure?
|
|