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Post by Admin on Feb 21, 2021 19:30:45 GMT
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
-Malcolm X, May 19, 1925-February 21, 1965
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2021 13:47:56 GMT
Excerpt from "The People Haven't Risen Up For The Same Reason Abuse Victims Don't Leave Their Abusers": This is why people stay in abusive relationships, whether it's abusive relationships with significant others or abusive relationships with empires. As a collective, we remain in our current relationship with abusive power structures because we are collectively kept confused, off-balance, insecure and unsure of ourselves, as a critical element of our collective abuse is mass-scale psychological manipulation. Vast fortunes are poured into keeping us from realizing that we are being exploited by powerful wealth hoarders while our nation's resources are sent to fight wars of planetary domination. That our ecosystem is being destroyed for profit with no real plan for what to do when it's gone. That we are being increasingly oppressed and impoverished to keep us from having enough awareness and wealth to dethrone our rulers. And that it doesn't have to be this way at all. And make no mistake, it absolutely does not have to be this way. The difference between our relationship with the oligarchic empire and FKA twigs' relationship with Shia LaBeouf is that we are far, far bigger and far, far stronger than our abusers. This isn't Shia LaBeouf abusing a small female pop star, this is Shia LaBeouf abusing a great giantess the size of a planet. They work so hard to keep us confused and manipulated because they know the second they cease to do so we can crush them like a mosquito. The People Haven't Risen Up For The Same Reason Abuse Victims Don't Leave Their Abuserscaitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-people-havent-risen-up-for-theThere was a great exchange in a recent interview with singer-songwriter FKA twigs regarding her relationship with actor Shia LaBeouf, who she is currently suing for "relentless abuse" including assault and sexual battery. From The Independent: In a CBS This Morning interview on Thursday (18 February), King asked the musician: “Nobody who’s been in this position likes this question, and I often wonder if it’s even appropriate to ask… why didn’t you leave?” Twigs replied: “I know that you’re asking it out of love, but like, I’m just going to make a stance and say I’m not going to answer that question anymore because the question should really be to the abuser, ‘Why are you holding someone hostage with abuse?’” She continued: “People say, ‘Oh, it can’t have been that bad, because she would’ve left.’ And it’s like, no, because it was that bad, I couldn’t leave.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2021 9:51:02 GMT
A Rosa Luxemburg Bookshelf40% off all our Rosa Luxemburg reading to mark the 150th anniversary of her birth. www.versobooks.com/blogs/4196-a-rosa-luxemburg-bookshelfMarch 5th 2021 marks the 150th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg's birth, a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist movement. An activist in Germany and Poland, and the author of numerous classic works, she participated in the founding of the German Communist Party and the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919. To celebrate her life and legacy we have 40% off all our Rosa Luxemburg reading until March 10 (at 23.59 EST).
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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2021 10:09:20 GMT
The G7 is coming to Cornwall. But so is resistance to it.www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/03/04/the-g7-is-coming-to-cornwall-but-so-is-resistance-to-it/You may have already heard that the G7 is being hosted at a luxury beach resort in Cornwall this June. The G7 is made up of some of the world’s richest and most powerful industrialised countries: “the UK, US, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, and Japan”. The bloc was previously the G8, before Russia was booted out. The annual meeting is designed to maintain our unequal global capitalist system, where a handful of leaders in the Global North dominate the Global South – as well as the rest of us. But while UK mainstream media and NGOs are gushing about the opportunities that the summit will bring, a coalition of activists has launched to oppose the G7 and everything that it stands for. Resist G7 Coalition The Resist G7 Coalition, made up of various groups and communities, is calling for international days of action, from 11-13 June. It’s also calling for a real – or virtual – big day of action on 12 June, although exact plans will depend upon the coronavirus (Covid-19) situation. The coalition respects a diversity of tactics.
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Post by wynona on Mar 5, 2021 11:11:53 GMT
After COVID-19, We Must Choose www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/after_covid-19_we_must_choose/When the government takes away your ability to make money, and you still have bills to pay, they just create money out of thin air and give it to you. But, the nation is now much more deeply enslaved by debt. To whom? Why did we need money in the first place? Look what the existence of money has done to our species and our planet. Our culture’s perceived need for profit in order to survive has ironically and tragically superseded the well-being of the very people and planet upon which our lives depend. Our species is now at a uniquely pivotal point in what will be recorded as our history. Never before have our leaders so quickly surrendered the rights and privileges of the citizen in the name of public safety. In our acceptance of these drastic restrictions, communities worldwide demonstrate that money was never the thing which holds our civilization together. Money is the thing which so effectively divides us, on a most primal level. Now that we see and fully realize that the concept of money never was the catalyst in the solution to any of Humanity’s problems, it is time that we all reach a level of maturity high enough to choose another path for our species. A coherent path: one devoid of corrupt political construct, in absence of the currently ubiquitous motive to profit. We MUST choose the Life Sequence of Value over the Monetary Sequence of Value. In the face of overwhelming planetary abundance, combined with our ability to automate, the decision to rid ourselves of this childishly dysfunctional paradigm, which has plagued Humankind for millennia, is simply obvious. #choice #newsystem #covid19 #timeforchange #actiontime #ResourceBasedEconomy #RBE #capitalism #TheVenusProject #TVP #RoxanneMeadows #JacqueFresco The Venus Project website also says that resources should be declared the common heritage of people. Im wondering exactly how that works practically. Who delegates the resources and decides how much everyone needs? Does ownership of resources disappear? Is it like a committee of scientists and tech people who get to decide?
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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2021 11:13:22 GMT
After COVID-19, We Must Choose www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/after_covid-19_we_must_choose/When the government takes away your ability to make money, and you still have bills to pay, they just create money out of thin air and give it to you. But, the nation is now much more deeply enslaved by debt. To whom? Why did we need money in the first place? Look what the existence of money has done to our species and our planet. Our culture’s perceived need for profit in order to survive has ironically and tragically superseded the well-being of the very people and planet upon which our lives depend. Our species is now at a uniquely pivotal point in what will be recorded as our history. Never before have our leaders so quickly surrendered the rights and privileges of the citizen in the name of public safety. In our acceptance of these drastic restrictions, communities worldwide demonstrate that money was never the thing which holds our civilization together. Money is the thing which so effectively divides us, on a most primal level. Now that we see and fully realize that the concept of money never was the catalyst in the solution to any of Humanity’s problems, it is time that we all reach a level of maturity high enough to choose another path for our species. A coherent path: one devoid of corrupt political construct, in absence of the currently ubiquitous motive to profit. We MUST choose the Life Sequence of Value over the Monetary Sequence of Value. In the face of overwhelming planetary abundance, combined with our ability to automate, the decision to rid ourselves of this childishly dysfunctional paradigm, which has plagued Humankind for millennia, is simply obvious. #choice #newsystem #covid19 #timeforchange #actiontime #ResourceBasedEconomy #RBE #capitalism #TheVenusProject #TVP #RoxanneMeadows #JacqueFresco The Venus Project website also says that resources should be declared the common heritage of people. Im wondering exactly how that works practically. Who delegates the resources and decides how much everyone needs? Does ownership of resources disappear? Is it like a committee of scientists and tech people who get to decide? There are extensive answers to these questions / areas on the RBE web sites.
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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2021 11:15:06 GMT
DEFENDING STANDING ROCK, COMBATING STATE REPRESSIONBy Ryan Fatica, Perilous Chronicle. March 4, 2021 | RESIST! An Interview With Lauren Regan. popularresistance.org/defending-standing-rock-combating-state-repression/On February 3, Standing Rock protester Steve Martinez appeared before a grand jury in North Dakota. The US Attorney’s Office had subpoenaed Steve in an ongoing investigation into a 2016 incident in which another protester, Sophia Wilansky, was gravely injured. After refusing to testify, the Magistrate Judge overseeing the grand jury held Steve in contempt of court and ordered him imprisoned. After nearly three weeks in jail, Steve was released, but the government’s attack on him continues. In order to learn more about his case and the broader climate of repression against activists and protestors, I spoke with Lauren Regan, executive director and lead attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Oregon. The Civil Liberties Defense Center is an organization founded to give legal, educational, and strategic support to social movements that seek to dismantle the political and economic structures at the root of social and environmental destruction. Ryan Fatica: We’re here today to talk about the case of Steve Martinez. Steve is a former Standing Rock protestor, and he was recently subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in North Dakota. He’s refusing to testify and he’s being held in custody. Tell us a little more about his case. Lauren Regan: Yeah, so this is actually the second time that Steve has been subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in North Dakota. The first time was back in December of 2017. At that time he showed up and, consistent with his ethical and moral beliefs regarding non-cooperation with the federal government, he asserted his First and Fifth Amendment rights to not testify at that grand jury. And the US Attorney’s office at that time, basically, just let him go and appeared to shut down the federal grand jury. In the three years since then, we have really heard nothing about this grand jury or about any kind of alleged investigation. And, a few months ago, the federal court, in the case of Sophia Wilansky versus Morton County et al, the federal judge finally, after a couple of years, ruled that her case was allowed to move forward and that discovery was allowed to begin against Morton County. Soon thereafter Mr. Martinez received a federal grand jury subpoena for February 3rd. Right around that same time period, Morton County served a civil deposition subpoena on him for the very next day. So he had a federal subpoena to appear to a grand jury on one day, and then a civil subpoena to appear on behalf of these defendants in Sophia’s case the next day. All along, we’ve had our suspicions that Morton County and the federal government, the FBI in particular, have been colluding with each other to withhold evidence and information in their possession with regard to the injuries that Sophia sustained on the Backwater bridge. Ryan Fatica: Lauren, let me interrupt you there and take us back a little bit for our listeners. Perhaps we should have begun the discussion with the case of Sophia Wilansky. Sophia is a young woman who was injured during a protest at Standing Rock in November of 2016. And in response to her injuries, she’s filed a federal civil suit against the Morton County Sheriff’s Office and various other law enforcement bodies and individuals. You’re representing Sophia in that civil suit. That case is linked in some way to the federal grand jury that’s now holding Steve Martinez in custody, is that correct? Lauren Regan: Yes, which of course the government is entirely denying, but that we believe is undeniable. So, yeah, Sophia had traveled to Standing Rock to be in solidarity with the Indigenous-led water protectors. She was there for a couple of weeks to be present and to be part of history and to support the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. And, one night, there was a call for water protectors to go out to the bridge. And, she went out with others and sort of witnessed law enforcement using “less lethal munitions,” like rubber bullets and tear gas and pepper spray and water cannons on the water protectors. This is November 20th of 2016. And then things kind of died down and she left and went back to camp, and got some food and warmed up and got dry, warm clothes on. Around four o’clock in the morning, hours later, she decided to go back up on the bridge to see what was going on. And when she went back up on the bridge, everything was kind of wrapping up, water protectors were cleaning up trash and stuff from the bridge. People were sledding because the water cannons had kind of caused an icy situation. Everything was pretty mellow at that time, and Sophia basically took a turn holding vigil on the bridge. She replaced a couple of other water protectors that had been standing behind this makeshift shield. And at some point, the cops that had been eating donuts and hanging out by themselves behind the barricade made an announcement that was something like “get out from underneath the truck” and Sophia was not under the truck so she did not think that this address was directed at her. And all of a sudden law enforcement began shooting munitions toward her location. And at one point she was struck in one of her arms and suffers a painful injury that she still has a scar from today. And she basically decides that she can’t stay there any longer, so she yells to the police, “please don’t shoot me, I’m leaving.” She starts to leave from behind this truck when all of a sudden law enforcement launches an explosive device, most likely a flash bang grenade, at her and it explodes on her arm and basically blows her arm off. She thought she had lost her hand and she immediately falls down and is screaming and a handful of water protectors rushed to her, pick her up and rush her to a vehicle that had been cleaning up stuff on the bridge. Steve Martinez had been assisting that vehicle. The person that owned the vehicle had locked the keys accidentally inside it, so Steve was helping that person to try to get into the vehicle so they could move it off the bridge. They get the vehicle open and here comes these people, carrying this woman who is in danger of dying, she is bleeding very badly, and is going into shock. So Steve drives this vehicle with Sophia and another person who’s rendering aid to her, and drive them off the bridge. And as he’s driving, he is calling the BIA and an ambulance to meet them at the casino so that she can be attended to by trauma medics. And so he drives the car that ultimately is responsible for saving her life. They get to this ambulance, the BIA medics ended up having to put a tourniquet on her arm. She’s ultimately taken in a helicopter to a trauma center in Minnesota, and they are able to reattach her arm to the rest of her body. But even to this day, after dozens of surgeries trying to rebuild the arm, she still really has very little use of the arm. So a very, very serious permanent injury caused by law enforcement. And the only role that Steve had in it was literally in trying to save her life in driving this car. As a result of being a good Samaritan, he has now been facing two federal grand jury subpoenas. The second one, like I mentioned was for February 3rd, and when he showed up that day, there were a number of legal procedural problems with this grand jury and the subpoena that he received for it. There’s two kinds of federal judges: an Article III Judge and a Magistrate Judge–and certain types of court procedures can only be conducted by an Article III Judge. Trials are the most common example, unless the parties consent to letting a magistrate judge preside over the trial. In these instances, normally it is an Article III Judge that conducts a potential contempt of court hearing along these lines. But in this case, Steve only had a Magistrate Judge, and the Magistrate Judge rushed through the civil contempt proceeding. Contempt hearings are supposed to be public but the public was not allowed into this hearing, and she quickly finds him in contempt of court, and he is ushered off to a jail in Bismarck where he remains today. [In what appears to be an acknowledgement that the contempt process was improper, Steve was subsequently released from jail on February 22, 2021, but was served an additional grand jury subpoena for March 3rd where it assumed that this process will repeat itself with an Article 3 judge this time]. There are a multitude of appeals going on right now, and requests to let him out of jail, which of course there is a massive surge of a COVID-19 global pandemic going on, particularly in jails. And so to put a Native American person with other health vulnerabilities into a jail for civil contempt of court, for refusing to testify to a grand jury that has a total illegitimate purpose to begin with, is incredibly problematic. And the reason I say that it’s illegitimate is that grand juries are only allowed to investigate federal crimes or, in limited circumstances, they can be convened in order to seek information about a fugitive from justice. They’re not allowed to use a grand jury proceeding in order to do civil discovery. They’re not allowed to use a grand jury to try to bolster their B.S. narrative that somehow Sophia is responsible for her own injuries, which is some of the drivel that the feds and the defendants in the case are using to try to justify the almost deadly police misconduct that occurred in the early morning hours of November 21st. Ryan Fatica: And just to be more specific, the government is alleging that protestors on the bridge that night were using what they’re calling “improvised explosive devices” or “IEDs” constructed from propane cylinders. And so they’re alleging that Sophia was not shot by a flash bang or other police munition, but that an IED exploded and that’s what caused her injuries. And so the FBI, if I understand it correctly, came to the hospital where Sophia was being treated and they seized some shrapnel that had been removed by doctors from her arm. And so that shrapnel is either part of a munition that law enforcement are known to use, or it’s part of a propane cylinder, but they’re refusing to say what it is, or to release any information about it. Is that correct? Lauren Regan: That is correct. In February of 2018, we filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI trying to force them to either turn over that piece of shrapnel to our forensic experts at a big, well-known lab in Michigan, or to force them to use their forensic experts and test this piece of shrapnel and provide the report, one way or the other. They have adamantly refused to do so for this entire time period. In fact, really recently we again requested that our expert be able to test the shrapnel or see their test results of the shrapnel. And they’re continuing to refuse. In one of the recent discovery orders, the federal judge in Sophia’s case basically agreed that the test results of this piece of shrapnel could conclusively determine the outcome of this civil case. And like you said, if it’s a propane canister, then it would be a difficult argument to establish that it was shot by law enforcement behind the barricades. If it is anything but this Coleman propane canister, then the government has an uphill battle. Also, just note that Sophia’s injuries are in no way consistent with something that would have had flames or heat. Her medical records and the other evidence basically demonstrates that if a propane canister had exploded, she’d probably be dead right now, but she would also have burns, that a propane canister would have heat and flame involved in it. And there were no injuries to her clothing or to her body that would be consistent with that. So it does seem much more like a munition that basically shattered and pieces of it actually went through her arm and out the other side. Although the government claims that on the 21st the cops found a used propane canister on the bridge, they apparently were unable to find the fragments of metal with flesh hanging from them that would have been on the bridge as well. So, interesting investigative techniques being used in that circumstance. Ryan Fatica: And so we don’t know exactly why this grand jury is being conducted because these are shadowy secretive proceedings–lawyers are not allowed to be in the room with their clients during the procedures, judges aren’t even present. But it appears that the grand jury is being convened to investigate this incident on the bridge. And ostensibly, they’re trying to get some information from Steve. Or perhaps like many grand juries are, it’s just a fishing expedition in which they’re casting around, hoping to see if they can get any information that they can use to do further damage to this movement or to target any other activists. Lauren Regan: My understanding from other attorneys working on the case is that they were flat out told that the grand jury was investigating Sophia. It’s unclear why they took so long to subpoena Steve again. At one point they tried to say that they couldn’t find Steve to serve him with a subpoena, even though he’s lived in the same location in Bismarck right under their noses for many years openly, with a residence, an address, with a job, et cetera. I think there’s a couple of points to kind of circle around to: number one, Steve has a cultural and moral compass that strongly instructs that you do not cooperate with grand jury witch hunts like this. And he fits into a long, long history of both indigenous and political activists who have held those convictions. And so Steve stands in a long line of movement heroes that have resisted grand juries in the past. Another important thing to just keep in mind is that Steve has done nothing wrong. Steve has not been charged with a crime. But he is standing up on behalf of the movement and water protectors, which is important not only for himself, but for the movement as a whole. Steve was first grand jury subpoenaed a couple of years ago and nothing new has happened between then and now–they haven’t tested the shrapnels there hasn’t been any kind of informants that we know of. The only thing that has changed between the first time he was subpoenaed and now the second time is that Sophia’s civil lawsuit against them has been given the green light to move forward. So that is certainly, on its face, concerning. The other thing that I would say is that history repeats itself. And as I have worked on this case over the years with many other lawyers, and co-counsel, and awesome movement organizers, I keep remembering the case of Judi Bari. Judi Bari was a forest defender from Northern California who bridged the gap between forest activism and labor activism. And back in the nineties, she was driving with another activist to a rally that she was going to be performing at, when her car blew up. There had been a car bomb, a pipe bomb, planted under the driver’s seat of her car. And she was gravely injured. And within minutes, FBI and other law enforcement swept in and started claiming that she blew herself up–that she had been carrying this bomb and it went off and she blew it up. Fast forward 10 years later. She had filed a lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland police. She ends up getting cancer and ultimately dies while the case is still making its way through, but they actually go to trial against the FBI and Oakland Police Department. And ultimately, it ends up that the two law enforcement agencies were colluding with each other to basically cover up the fact that they were responsible for the bomb under her seat. And so we’ve seen, historically, activists, especially activist women, being blamed for their injuries caused by the state, and the FBI working with local law enforcement to cover up those crimes. There’s a documentary that was made about her and her case. It’s actually really illustrative and appropriate for folks to try to find that. Dennis Cunningham, who is a famous civil rights lawyer was Judi Bari’s lawyer in that case, and his daughter is a filmmaker and made the documentary. Ryan Fatica: Wow, yeah. Thank you for drawing that connection for us. So Steve’s case is not the only case that has come out of the Standing Rock protests. There’s been years of legal battles and all sorts of repressive tactics that law enforcement has used to respond to and to shut down the movement that emerged in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline. You’ve been involved in much of those efforts. Can you help us understand better what kind of tactics law enforcement used there and what the outcome of some of those cases have been? Lauren Regan: Yeah, I think it’s actually kind of timely and important to be having these conversations as things in Minnesota begin to also heat up, because like I just said: history does repeat itself. And especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry–they have a limited playbook that they continue to repeat over and over again. And so what happened in Standing Rock is important for activists to learn about and consider so that we do not repeat the same situations the next time around and so that we can be better prepared and more aware to strategically dance around the obstacles that we know the state will–once again–put in our way. When I used the word “the state,” I am referring to government, including law enforcement, but also corporations, especially fossil fuel corporations. And so with Standing Rock, the first thing that I will say is that the whole playbook of standard activist repression was present. CLDC actually does really lengthy trainings on what is repression and how can you resist it. But one thing that’s important to know is that every social justice movement has faced repression and will face repression. Repression is nothing new. It is expected that when we challenge the status quo, when we push against capitalism and the profit sharing mechanisms of the state, that they’re going to come at us with everything they’ve got, and they’ve got quite an arsenal to fight back against us. We have people power, we have the mass movement, we have passion and commitment and all of those good things, and they have things like guns and prisons–that whole litany of stuff. So, with Standing Rock, first what we know is that large amounts of money were invested in surveillance, both infiltrators, as well as the ability to spy using things like sting rays and cameras and other things. We know that a huge amount of money was put into trying to map the movement, trying to study and psychologically profile this movement. How do you pick targets? What’s the leadership structure, what’s the funding structure? All of those things, our adversaries are keenly studying and aware of. And so when people are telling me it’s okay for them to put all this crap on Facebook, “I’m not doing anything wrong,” what they don’t recognize is that a lot of that information is not necessarily relevant to whether you committed a crime or whether you’re going to be prosecuted or you’re going to go to jail, but it is being sucked up and used by our adversaries to make our jobs harder as movement activists. And so surveillance, right off the bat. The next thing we saw is that hundreds and hundreds of water protectors were falsely arrested. Ultimately, their charges were dismissed, but they were still arrested and they went to jail and often, with the caravans of cars, their vehicles would also be impounded at that time. So, false charges and trumped up charges are also a standard part of repression, but also there was a money suck that was happening there because, at Standing Rock, every water protector that was arrested was cash bailed out. And the State was able to keep a percentage of all of that bail, even for the charges that were dismissed and that literally had no lawful basis to result in arrest to begin with. So, they made a ton of money off of falsely arresting water protectors, where if people had not been cash bailed out, which obviously some people do need to be cash bailed out for varying reasons…but if they hadn’t been cash bailed out, and if solidarity tactics had been used, the jails would not have been able to hold everyone. Eventually, people may have been released on their own recognizance and the state wouldn’t have profited off of those false arrests in that same way. The state would have had to make some charging decisions. And then, of course, you have these tow companies, who made a mint off of towing away those vehicles and impound fees and all of this other stuff. So false arrests, trumped up charges: also part of state repression. The Water Protector Legal Collective–on their website–has the statistics of the outcomes of all of those cases. And it’s a tiny fraction–I can’t remember the exact numbers–but it was a very, very small fraction of the total number of arrests that actually resulted in convictions after trials. A ton of them got dismissed. A lot of water protectors ended up taking slap on the hand plea bargains because they just couldn’t and didn’t want to return to North Dakota so long after the fact. A number of them resulted in minor plea bargains. And then, as you mentioned, a very small handful of, I think almost entirely indigenous water protectors, were prosecuted at the federal level for economic sabotage and ultimately took plea bargains and were convicted of those crimes. But, literally, it’s like five of those cases. We’re talking about Red Fawn Fallis, the only woman indigenous water protector who basically ended up taking a deal to being a felon in possession of a firearm. And the firearm was owned by this person that she thought was her boyfriend, but actually was an FBI agent posing as her boyfriend. So that’s a whole can of worms in and of itself. The other individuals that had federal charges were basically charged with economic sabotage for using arson as a tactic to damage Dakota Access Pipeline property in desperate attempts to try and stop that pipeline from doing irreparable harm. And, of course, we all know now that the federal civil courts have ruled that the pipeline was, in fact, illegal, it should never have actually been constructed, but there’s no way to take back the damage and harm that this illegal corporation has caused, not only to the landscape and to the environment and to the climate, but also to these extremely valuable sacred sites: graves, cultural resources, et cetera. Then, of course, we also had the form of state repression that is excessive force and police violence. So many different examples of police, police working with security, using illegal excessive force, sicking dogs on water protectors, shooting them up using tear gas and water cannons for the first time since the 1960s. And, of course, using explosive devices. They shot the eye out of a water protector. Dozens of non-violent water protectors were indiscriminately, permanently, and seriously injured as a result of police violence being used against them for the exercise of their constitutional rights. Ryan Fatica: Yeah, you’ve been doing anti-repression movement defense lawyering for a long time now, and you obviously have a lot of this history in your mind. Let’s bring the discussion up to the present moment. This summer, there were nationwide protests, huge historic protests and uprisings, and that wave of rebellion has resulted now in this winter and in the fall in this huge wave of repression. Do you have a sense of how the current climate of repression compares to other moments in history that you’ve seen? And what can we say about this repression, and what do you expect? Lauren Regan: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is still unfolding and there are a lot of people doing really amazing analysis and statistics and data are coming out more and more. But what I would say, as a member of the Mass Defense Committee in the U.S., who is looking at this, these nationwide trends… Ryan Fatica:That’s the Mass Defense Committee with the National Lawyers Guild? Lauren Regan: Yeah. A couple of things that I would observe, at least at this point, is number one: the use of curfews to shut down protests is pretty unprecedented. We don’t see that in a lot of white-led movements very often. Number two, we saw overt police brutality and excessive force used against protestors. And my personal belief is that it is largely because those particular protestors were: a) of color, and b) chanting things like “ACAB,” and these “professional police officers” completely lost all professionalism and retaliated against the speech, the content of the protest, rather than responding to actual things that would justify that level of use of force. The other thing that I would say that is pretty unprecedented in my more than two decades of defending activists around the country is the use of felony riot charges. I think I could count on one hand in the last 20 years activists that were charged with riot that I have defended, and that is thousands and thousands of cases at this point. But now we have dozens and dozens, hundreds around the country or more of people facing these felony riot charges. And the definition of riot is three more or five or more people who are engaged in tumultuous or “violent conduct.” And that happens all the time in activist-land where three or five or more people are doing some kind of mass action that could be described as tumultuous and/or result in property damage, but they are not charged with riot. But now we have this Black or POC led movement that’s engaged in very similar tactics that we saw in the WTO or in other anticapitalist actions or movements, and they were not charged with those crimes. So, it’s interesting that the state and the police are basically proving our point that the police and the justice system as a whole suffer from overt systemic racism and the disparate impacts on activists of color compared to non people of color has been incredibly obvious and overt. It’s almost like they’re proving our point for us. And yet they are so tone deaf. They don’t actually realize what that looks like to the rest of us. Ryan Fatica: Lauren, what advice would you give to activists today? Particularly young people who may have gotten involved in social movements for the first time this summer. A lot of people may have seen these protests as very powerful, as they were, and were very enamored and are now dealing with some disillusionment with all the repression that we’re facing. What advice do you have for them? Lauren Regan: The first thing I would say is: if you are going to engage in direct action, you have to take yourself seriously. And that means knowing what you’re getting into before you get into it. That’s not only regarding knowing your rights, which I do think are important. On our website since the pandemic started, we’ve been doing these weekly webinars for activists on all sorts of topics, including security culture, state repression, police misconduct, “know your rights” for climate activists, digital security, all these different topics. If you’re going to engage in activism that involves property damage, for instance, you are basically offering yourself up to the state if you are not prepared for that level of risk. The amount of discovery that I have had to watch of people wearing very distinct costumes and clothing, breaking windows, walking into stores, that are obviously filming, and have video cameras everywhere, and they’re not masked up or they’re in very distinct clothing. And, even in Eugene, where I am, the cops just posted like 60 pages worth of screenshot photos of people who were breaking windows and walking into stores and taking things or just walking around. And now there’s warrants out for their arrest and the state is hunting them. We actually need to take responsibility for making their jobs so easy and just making ourselves such easy targets. So, the first thing I would say is: take yourself seriously. Know what you’re getting into and at least attempt to mitigate risk before you end up looking around and wonder why there’s a warrant out for your arrest and then being shocked and appalled that you’re being dragged into the state and prosecuted. We’re going to defend those people like crazy. But, I think people sometimes get caught up in the moment maybe, and their brain kind of turns off for a hot minute and they end up in water that they were not prepared to swim in. Ryan Fatica: I can empathize, I imagine it’s hard to be always on the receiving end of that discovery and seeing video after video. Lauren Regan: Yeah, it is. The other thing I would say is that although live streaming and citizens videography has been monumental with regard to holding police accountable for misconduct and abuse, it is also overwhelmingly being used by police and the state to incriminate and prosecute our side of the equation. People live streaming from actions and uprisings and showing the faces of people who are committing alleged crimes is working with the state. Because there’s cops sitting behind computers and their job is to screen capture and record your live stream. In fact, in one of the BLM cases we have going on right now, one of the pieces of discovery received from the cops is a cop using his cell phone to record a computer screen of an activist live stream, showing people allegedly breaking the law. And that is discovery being used against those activists. So people need to get a little more savvy about how they’re using their phones and recording things on the streets. Way more savvy, fast, and then they also need to be much more aware of how social media is being used against them and the movements because the state is getting warrants and sending letters to Facebook and Instagram. In many cases, they don’t even need search warrants in order for these social media companies to voluntarily hand over all your stuff, including your private Facebook chats and other things like that. So anything you put online, you should ask yourself, “how is this going to look as an exhibit being used against me at trial?” Because it’s possible that that is going to happen. So those are a few things that I would say that we really need to get a handle on really sooner than later, because there is vast damage being done to our movements by a failure to address these changes in technology and the way the state is capturing and using them against us. Ryan Fatica: Thanks Lauren, for explaining all that, it’s all really important. So let’s circle back around to Steve Martinez. He’s sitting in jail right now in Bismarck, North Dakota. Is there an end in sight? How long is he going to be held? [Steve was released from jail February 22, 2021]. Lauren Regan: Well, technically, a contemnor, a person who is refusing to testify to a grand jury, holds the keys to their jail cell. Meaning: at any time they could say, okay, I’ll testify and they would be released from civil contempt of court and they would be brought to the grand jury room and once they testified they could go home. I have no indication that Steve Martinez is going to cooperate with this grand jury. And so in that alternative, number one, his lawyers are going to appeal all of the unusual shenanigans that landed him in jail to begin with. Number two, there’s something called a Grumbles Motion. The purpose of civil contempt is to coerce you into testifying. And if you can prove that you will not be coerced, that instead of being coercive, your confinement is punitive or punishment, then you should be released from civil contempt of court and that’s called a Grumbles Motion. And I would expect sooner or later that that kind of motion would be made on Steve’s behalf, that he’s not going to testify and so it’s not coercive, it’s punitive and he should be purged from his civil contempt. Ryan Fatica: How do you go about proving such a thing? Lauren Regan: Well, normally you have to sit in jail for a while to basically establish that jail is not going to scare you into testifying. And then sometimes, your community will testify and say, “I know that this person has very strongly held ethical beliefs, and I don’t believe that they will ever testify.” We can also attempt to say that the purposes of the grand jury itself are illegitimate and he should be purged because the grand jury itself is not lawful–that could be a basis. And then, finally, the federal grand juries have a maximum term of 18 months. And, unfortunately, it’s my understanding that this particular federal grand jury had been convened shortly before Steve was brought before it. So there are still 16 months left to go in this grand jury term, meaning that he could serve 16 or 17 months in jail for doing nothing illegal, for doing nothing wrong. He could sit in a prison cell for doing nothing other than refusing to participate in this illegitimate witch hunt of a federal grand jury. Ryan Fatica: I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of economic damage, among other kinds of damage, being done to him and his family right now. Do you have any idea about Steve, about his life, and the kind of impact his incarceration is having on him and others? Lauren Regan: I know that he’s probably gonna lose his job. He had a good job during a pandemic. If he hasn’t already lost it. I assume that he will lose all source of income…I don’t know a lot about his partner, but I do know that they have created a gofundme in order to try to help defray costs and expenses that will be incurred as a result of his resistance stance. Ryan Fatica: And we’ll put a link to that in our show notes. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you want to add or anything that you want people to know before we let you go? Lauren Regan: I guess I would say that the intent of state repression is to scare the people into submission. And so if you become so afraid that you sit on the couch and click the “like” button and do nothing more about all of the problems in our world right now, then the state wins without even having to do anything. Paranoia is two steps behind, and awareness is two steps ahead. And one of the best ways to combat state repression is by proving to the state that their tactics will not silence us, will not make us inactive, and that it’s not an effective way for them to try and control society or protect the profits of corporations. So I would just encourage people to figure out a way that they can contribute to a better planet, a better society, and then do it–whether that’s feeding people or doing free legal work or standing on a pipeline route in resistance–there are so many different ways to contribute. You don’t have to get arrested in order to be an effective activist, but you do need to be doing something right now because, otherwise, it may be too late. Ryan Fatica: Wow, Lauren, thank you so much for your time and for the work that you do really appreciate it. Lauren Regan: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate your time too. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Ryan Fatica is a member of the Perilous Editorial Collective and a founding member of Perilous Chronicle. He is based in Arizona.
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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2021 18:58:04 GMT
The Commune at 150: Socialists and the StatePost on: March 7, 2021 Nathaniel Flakin www.leftvoice.org/the-commune-at-150-socialists-and-the-stateChris Maisano praises “Marxist reformism.” But for Marx himself, the Paris Commune of 1871 showed the need for revolution. On March 18, 1871, workers raised the red flag over the Paris City Hall and proclaimed the Commune. The working class took up the traditions of the great French Revolution of 1789: “Citizens, to arms!” They set up a revolutionary government, elected directly by working people. They established the eight-hour day and introduced public education that was free in secular. In 1789, the sans-culottes had been pushing their bourgeois leaders to the left. Even in its most revolutionary phase, the Convention had defended bourgeois private property. That is why the revolution could never achieve the goal of “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” In 1871, however, the workers had seen that they could accomplish their goals only by breaking with the bourgeoisie and taking power for themselves.1 The Paris Commune represented a new era in the history of revolutions — but it also implied a breakthrough in Marxist theory. Marxism is, at the end of the day, nothing more than a “a summing up of experience [of revolutions], illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history.”2 Put another way: Marxism is the science of working-class revolution. Before the Commune, socialists had understood that the working class was the force that could take power and create a new society. Marx and Engels proposed that after overthrowing the bourgeoisie, workers would create a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the transition to socialism. Looking back at the Commune 20 years later, Engels stated clearly what that meant: “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” One-hundred and fifty years after the Commune, some socialists are trying to push a theory of “Marxist reformism.”3 In an editorial in the latest issue of Jacobin, Chris Maisano argues that running in elections as part of the Democratic Party is the central task for socialists. We will look at his arguments at the end of this article, after surveying the history of the Marxist position on the state. But Maisano does not — and could not — provide a single reference to Marx’s thinking or to the history of the workers’ movement that would justify what makes his reformism “Marxist.” In fact, “Marxist reformism” makes about as much sense as “atheist Catholicism” — it’s just not a thing. Earlier Socialist Thought The founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote their Communist Manifesto on the eve of a wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. Yet their immediate program at the end of their pamphlet remains rather vague. Their vision was that the working class would fight alongside the bourgeoisie to topple absolutism, while maintaining a critical attitude and preparing to fight the bourgeoisie after democracy had been won. Yet this perspective failed. In 1848, the bourgeoisie did not allow itself to be pushed to the left. The working class was much larger and more powerful than it had been in 1789. The bourgeoisie was scared that any serious revolutionary mobilization would turn against the interests of private property. So while the bourgeoisie in 1789 had taken the kings to the guillotine, the bourgeoisie in 1848 preferred to make compromises with the old order. Marx and Engels drew the necessary lessons from this shift. Speaking to the Communist League in 1850, they said, While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible … it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power. In other words, the working class would need to constitute itself as an independent political force, opposed to all wings of the bourgeoisie: Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election, the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. Marx and Engels adopted a program of permanent revolution. Yet this program found no immediate application: after the defeat of the Springtime of the Peoples in 1848, reaction held sway in Europe for the next two decades. Marx wrote in 1852 that one of his main contributions to political thought was the idea that “the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Yet there was still no scientific answer to the question: What would such a revolutionary dictatorship look like? Above all: What would the proletariat do with the state apparatus that the bourgeoisie had inherited from feudalism and then perfected for its own ends? The Form When the working class of Paris established the Commune, they showed what workers’ power would look like. Workers could create their own state, composed of delegates elected directly by the rank and file. These delegates could be recalled at any time, creating a far more profound democracy than any bourgeois parliament can offer. The Commune would have both legislative and executive functions — not only passing laws but also implementing them. And instead of a bureaucracy separate from the working population, this workers’ government relied on the self-organized people to maintain order. For Marx, the Commune was “the political form at last discovered.” This model would appear in every future workers’ revolution. In Russia in 1917, such delegate bodies were called “soviets”; in Germany in 1918, they were called “Räte.” Other revolutionary processes have used different names. But the key is that such bodies of working-class self-organization are central to a Marxist theory of revolution. Workers’ councils start out as centers of resistance to capitalist rule, but in the course of a revolution, they become the basis of a workers’ government. The Commune did not attempt to take over the existing state apparatus and issue new instructions to the officers, police, judges, and bureaucrats. The state apparatus is designed to serve the interests of a particular class. The bourgeois state guarantees the exploitation of the workers. Therefore, the workers must smash it. In Marx’s words, “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Thus, the Commune got rid of the standing army and police, and replaced them with the National Guard, which was nothing more than the citizens in arms. Theoretical Retreat The Paris Commune suffered a bloody defeat, and 30,000 workers were massacred. This established another period of reaction in Europe. In the following three decades, capitalism grew enormously and entered the imperialist era. Massive social democratic parties emerged in different European countries — the largest of them, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), counted up to a million members. These parties formally adhered to Marxism, but they were built in a time without revolutions, and many believed that workers’ living standards and democratic rights would strengthen only slowly and continuously. It is no wonder, then, that socialist thinkers like Eduard Bernstein soon declared that the old ideas about revolution were no longer relevant. In Bernstein’s view, capitalism was becoming more harmonious, and the capitalist state was becoming more democratic — such developments would lead to “evolutionary socialism.” The “Marxist center” of the SPD opposed Bernstein and hung on to Marxist orthodoxy. Karl Kautsky defended the idea of revolution — but only after social democracy had won a majority in parliament. Kautsky’s view was that a socialist party could slowly accumulate forces, waiting passively for revolution to fall into its lap: “It is no part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it.” Kautsky believed that a workers’ government would take over the existing state bureaucracies: “Our programme does not demand the abolition of state officials, but that they be elected by the people.”4 Even a revolutionary leader like V. I. Lenin long fell victim to this opportunist distortion of Marxism. Even as late as 1915, Lenin believed the working class could make use of the bourgeois state: Socialists are in favour of utilising the present state and its institutions in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, maintaining also that the state should be used for a specific form of transition from capitalism to socialism. It was only in the midst of a world war, on the eve of a new wave of proletarian revolutions, that Lenin could rediscover Marx’s ideas. The working class needs to follow the model of the Commune, smashing the bourgeois state and creating its own workers’ state. But these two kinds of states are qualitatively different. As Engels put it, the Commune had “ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term,” since it was no longer a privileged bureaucracy designed to maintain the rule of a minority — it was the majority of society, the working class, governing itself. A state is always an instrument of one class to oppress others — but a state like the Commune, in which the working-class majority oppresses the minority made up of former exploiters, is a state well on its way to becoming superfluous. Bernstein’s idea that capitalism would become more peaceful was refuted in the most dramatic way possible. Just 15 years after he published his treatise, capitalist states around the world launched history’s greatest massacre. Kautsky was proved wrong as well. He had promised that on the “big day” when revolution arrived, he would switch to a “strategy of overthrow” — yet the revolution did arrive, and Kautsky positioned himself with the reformists trying to save capitalism. Lenin’s positions were confirmed when the working class in Russia built soviets in 1917. These councils became the basis for a workers’ government on the model of the Commune. Twentieth-Century Reformism Inspired by the Russian Revolution, the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin were taken up by revolutionaries around the world. Yet reformism did not disappear. It reflected the interests of better-situated workers in the imperialist countries, and especially of the massive bureaucracies built on top of the workers’ movements, in the unions and social democratic parties. Reformism got another big boost when Stalin — the “gravedigger of the revolution,” as Trotsky correctly characterized him — declared that communists were to aim for a peaceful transformation of society by aligning with the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie and forming Popular Fronts. Stalin’s lackeys, over the years, became more and more reformist. The so-called “Eurocommunists” of the 1970s were indistinguishable from social democrats.5 This kind of late-Stalinist reformism was theorized by Nicos Poulantzas, who postulated that the state was not an organ of class rule but rather a “condensation of class relations.” Thus, just as the working class can fight for hegemony in bourgeois society, Poulantzas postulated, it can also fight for hegemony within the state apparatus. This was all presented as an “innovation” in Marxist thought. But it is really just a reformulation of Bernstein’s ideas about socialists joining the bourgeois state. This idea was first attempted in 1899 when Alexandre Millerand — the first socialist in history with a ministerial post — joined the French cabinet. Rosa Luxemburg, whose birthday was also 150 years ago, rejected this kind of “ministerialism” in principle: The role of Social-Democracy6, in bourgeois society, is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on the scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society. Eighty years later, the Stalinists of the French Communist Party joined a social democratic government under François Mitterrand. In both cases, the results were the same: socialist ministers offered left window dressing for a government that attacked the working class. During the 20th century, the reformist thesis was put to the test again and again. There were social democratic governments in imperialist countries, such as those of Olaf Palme in Sweden or Mitterrand in France, that offered minor concessions to their working-class voters. But such reforms were possible only because the capitalists were making huge profits — when the economic situation got worse, these governments switched to “counter-reforms” and austerity. Despite all the talk about “structural reforms” that would transform private ownership to public, governments like those of Palme and Mitterrand never took even the smallest step in that direction — something that confounds reformists today. There have also been examples of reformist governments that attempted to improve the lives of working people in a situation when the capitalists did not have enormous wealth available to redistribute. The social democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile, for example, was convinced that it could use its electoral majority to implement real reforms, such as nationalizing certain sectors of the economy. Allende discovered, far too late, just how “democratic” that state is when a section of the military led by General Augusto Pinochet carried out a military coup with the help of the CIA, and imposed a brutal neoliberal dictatorship lasting decades. This is about as close as humanity has ever gotten to the “reformist road to socialism.” Reformism Made in the USA And that brings us to the United States today. Politicians and media across the political spectrum say that we are living in “the greatest democracy in the world.” But as the country’s organic crisis deepens, more and more people are realizing that the United States is not very democratic at all. Representative democracy is hobbled at every step by an aristocratic Senate, an unelected Supreme Court, and an executive far removed from democratic control. Would anyone claim that the U.S. state apparatus is subject to democratic control by the people? The United States maintains a gargantuan military armed with the deadliest weapons ever constructed; police forces that are also equipped with weapons of war; a prison system that keeps millions of people trapped like slaves; giant corporations that surveil every single person around the clock; and state bureaucracies run by lobbyists from the corporations they are supposed to regulate. Does anyone seriously think that such apparatuses will be fundamentally changed by voting? Quite the opposite: several decades of attempts at “police reform” and “community control” have proved, very clearly, that these apparatuses cannot be reformed. This is the context in which Chris Maisano, writing in the latest issue of Jacobin, celebrates the successes of “Marxist reformism.” The Democratic Socialists of America have indeed experienced spectacular growth. The DSA was once a tiny sect trying to act as a pressure group in the Democratic Party, following the ideas of Michael Harrington, the chief theoretician of social democratic reformism in the U.S. Now the DSA has 100,000 members on paper, and Maisano can gush that “socialists have been elected to hundreds of offices around the country.” This, he claims, shows the correctness of “Marxist reformism.” It has been a century since the United States had a mass socialist party. Maisano is convinced that the U.S. working class will become a political subject “largely (though not exclusively) through electoral politics.” The problem here is not just that Maisano uses the term “electoral politics” to refer to supporting candidates of a capitalist party, as if it were inconceivable for socialists to participate in elections as representatives of the working class. No, this claim is particularly strange in the context of the largest protest movement in U.S. history. While millions of people were on the streets, Jacobin dedicated its cover to the failed campaign of a reformist politician who hoped to become the presidential candidate of an imperialist party. Sanders, the great hope of this “Marxist reformism,” recently came out against raising the minimum wage to $15 anytime soon. “It was never my intention to increase the minimum wage to $15 immediately and during the pandemic,” Sanders said, according to The Hill. Apparently the country simply cannot afford that right now. Sanders does, however, consistently vote to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. military. Reformism was never a realistic strategy for abolishing capitalism. But there were certain moments in history, such as the decades before World War I or the decades after World War II, when capitalism grew rapidly in the imperialist centers and reformism could at least offer minor reforms. Today, however, reformism appears like a terrible anachronism from a long-gone time. In 2019, Jacobin’s editor Bhaskar Sunkara published a book that he opened with a vision of how capitalism could develop peacefully toward socialism until 2038. Less than a year after the boon appears, the U.S. is experiencing a deadly pandemic, an unprecedented economic crisis, and a mass uprising against police violence that has radicalized a generation. Jacobin’s strategic vision requires at least 20 to 30 years of peaceful development:7 electing more and more Democratic Party politicians who identify as socialists, waiting for them to pass legislation so we can get some semblance of a capitalist welfare state, and then hoping that they attempt to make more structural reforms to the U.S. economy. But can anyone look at the world right now and assume that capitalism will allow for even a few decades of harmonious evolution? This faith in capitalism’s supposedly peaceful nature informs the reformists’ view of the kind of party we need today. Sunkara talks about a kind of pre-1914 SPD, in which revolutionaries and reformists could be united without a common strategy. The condition for such a party to flourish, of course, is that capitalism have no major crises. It was precisely when a mass socialist party was most needed, when capitalism’s crises exploded in the form of war, that the SPD‘s model up to 1914 failed. Reformism Ain’t What It Used to Be Before 1914, not a single member of the SPD in Congress ever voted for the government’s budget. “Not one man and not one penny” was their motto. But when Maisano talks about hundreds of socialist officeholders, he fails to mention that the most prominent ones are voting to fund the Pentagon and ICE. Jacobin might make an occasional nod to anti-imperialism — yet its chosen representatives support imperialist policies pretty consistently. Even Bernstein, the trailblazer of opportunism, was only ever talking about a working-class party forming alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie. Modern U.S. reformists, in contrast, want workers to unite in one party with the liberal bourgeoisie. Just a few short years ago, they talked about a “dirty break” with a capitalist party. Now the task of building a socialist party is now something to be taken up “eventually.” This is, in fact, something they have in common with Kautsky. The leading thinker of centrism promised that the SPD would switch from its reformist policies to a “strategy of overthrow” some day. Today’s neo-Kautskyans similarly promise that they will break with a bourgeois party some day. But Creedence Clearwater Revival has a better grasp of Marxist politics than either Kautsky or Jacobin: “Someday never comes.” This strategy of pushing the liberal bourgeoisie to the left is, at best, a kind of pre-1848 socialism, when the idea of class independence had not yet taken hold in the workers’ movement. As the DSA continues to grow under the new Biden administration, many members will hope that they can pressure the White House to adopt more progressive policies. Just a month in, Biden has continued to deport people and lock children in cages. He has launched a bombing campaign in Syria while entirely surrendering the demand for a $15 minimum wage. If reformists cannot get the capitalist government to make even minor concessions, does it seem realistic to expect the capitalists to let their power slowly slip away until their very rule collapses? When Maisano claims that the DSA’s growth proves the correctness of its “Marxist reformism,” it is worth remembering that less than a decade ago, Jacobin was offering the same praise for the reformist party Syriza in Greece. That party also experienced meteoric growth — so much so that this “coalition of the radical Left” ended up forming a government. This “government of the Left” submitted to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, applying the very austerity measures it had once promised to fight. Syriza and their supporters discovered, as if any proof were needed, that even under a “left government,” the state remains tied to the needs of capital. This is the same warning that Luxemburg issued the very first time a socialist tried to join a government. Does this mean the Left should not aspire to govern? The workers of Paris showed the way 150 years ago: the working class can govern — not by taking over the capitalists’ state, but by smashing it and crating a workers’ state. An Alternative Maisano’s strategic hypothesis is based on the idea that we are living “after the Age of Revolutions.” Therefore, he writes, revolutionary politics are “incompatible with the political and social conditions of advanced, welfare-state capitalism and bourgeois democracy.” Again, a strange claim. How many people in the U.S. believe that either their democracy or their welfare state are “advanced”? Any working person would offer a better assessment of the situation than this leading theorist of “democratic socialism.” The U.S. Constitution, once revered as an almost holy document, is recognized by millions of people as a charter written by enslavers. It is absolutely normal for young people to express hatred of capitalism. An empiricist from Jacobin’s editorial board might say that there is no interest in revolutionary politics in the United States today. This is a reflection of our times: the world has not seen a successful revolution in several decades. And the most profound revolutionary processes of recent times, that of Egypt in 2011, led to bloody defeats. Yet discontent and despair are growing everywhere. And it’s not like capitalism can promise anything for the future except for even greater crises. Revolutions do not happen because a lot of people suddenly sign up for a Marxist party. Capitalism’s contradictions develop in a molecular process, beneath the surface — until they finally explode and sweep away the existing order. And when 54 percent of people in the United States support the burning of a police station in Minneapolis, is it that hard to imagine how the forces of revolution will emerge? Had we asked a liberal in Paris in the year 1870 about revolution, they would have similarly scoffed: A revolution? Had not Paris been under the tight grip of a buffoonish (one might almost say “Trumpian”) dictator for two decades? Had not the last revolution in 1848 ended in bloody defeat, never to raise its head again? And yet the revolution was being prepared. Marx compared revolution to a “mole,” undermining the foundations of class society. Social explosions and revolts are inevitable. But as we saw last summer, they will not necessarily beat the existing order. We need to build up a party that can transform an elemental revolt into a socialist revolution. In the face of such revolts, “socialists” inside a ruling-class party will stick to their progressive electoral campaigns. (This might sound like an exaggeration, but leading DSA members were campaigning for an imperialist politician while millions of people of color and young people were in the streets!) There is a radicalization underway in the United States. The ongoing, multiple crises of capitalism will ensure that this radicalization continues. “Marxist reformism” is nothing more than a step of this radicalization, on the path to a new workers’ party that fights for socialism. Such a party will base its program on the brave example of the Communards from 150 years ago. They tried to “storm heaven,” and while they were defeated, they marked the road for later socialists to follow. Notes ↑1 Left Voice will begin publishing a three-part history of the Paris Commune by historian Doug Enaa Greene on March 11. Stay tuned! ↑2 V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, marxists.org. ↑3 Chris Maisano, “A Left That Matters,” Jacobin, No. 40, Winter 2021, 10–14. ↑4 Quoted in Lenin, State and Revolution. ↑5 Ernest Mandel, “The PCF and the State,” in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One Country (London: Verso, 1978). ↑6 Luxemburg was referring to the revolutionary socialist movement of her day, not today’s reformist social democracy. ↑7 As Jacobin’s Connor Kilpatrick put it: “Even at my most pessimistic, I’d say we’re looking at no more than twenty or thirty years max for a decent social-democratic project to truly take hold of American life.” Connor Kilpatrick, “We Lost the Battle, but We’ll Win the War,” Jacobin, April 8, 2020.
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Post by Admin on Mar 8, 2021 14:36:12 GMT
“The more dysfunctional the economy grows, and the more our society becomes destabilized by natural disasters, the more the capitalist power structure becomes top-heavy. Top-heavy both in terms of wealth (U.S. billionaires have collectively grown well over a trillion dollars richer in this last year while tens of millions have lost their jobs), and more importantly in terms of the tools the state has for preventing revolution. In this rotting society, the state increasingly has to rely on physical force to control the population, since the ruling class ideology of neoliberalism became discredited in the public’s mind at least as long ago as 2008 and is now more popularly reviled than ever. Lacking the cultural support of the masses, capital has to resort to violence more and more to survive.” The capitalist state looks strong, but it’s growing ever more vulnerable to collapse & revolutionrainershea612.medium.com/the-capitalist-state-looks-strong-but-its-growing-ever-more-vulnerable-to-collapse-revolution-48ebbede280c
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2021 19:28:36 GMT
Nathan Shields No. 56 March 2021 Wagnermania The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner thebaffler.com/salvos/wagnermania-shieldsWagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross. Macmillan, 784 pages. WHEN THE REVOLUTION CAME TO DRESDEN in 1849, Richard Wagner greeted it with unhinged ecstasy. “Whatever stands, must fall,” the thirty-five-year-old court conductor wrote that April in the radical periodical Volksblätter. “I will break the power of the mighty, of law, of property . . . I will destroy all rulership of one over other.” As Dresden’s radicals rose up in May, Wagner swung into action, acting as a lookout and helping secure weapons. Accompanying him in these duties was the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, later cited by George Bernard Shaw as the model for Siegfried, anarchic Übermensch of the Ring cycle. In the wake of the uprising’s suppression, Wagner evaded a probable death sentence by fleeing to Switzerland, where he lived in exile for a decade—composing, polemicizing, and sponging off wealthy acquaintances. There he embarked on the sixteen-hour operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, at once timeless mythic cosmology and biting commentary on unfolding political events. The Ring cycle narrates the history of the world from the primal fall, through the age of the gods, to the apocalyptic conflagration that will one day consume them. But its primal fall is a transparent allegory for the birth of capitalism; its gods are the European aristocracy; and its apocalypse is the revolution Wagner gleefully imagines sweeping them away. Twenty-five years later, Wagner cut a very different figure. By 1874, when he completed the Ring, the former exile was back home in Germany, a celebrity nicknamed “the Meister” for his oracular authority. That year he moved into a villa in the provincial town of Bayreuth, where King Ludwig II of Bavaria funded a festival dedicated entirely to his work. Wagner envisioned the new theater there—with its egalitarian seating arrangement, concealed orchestra pit, and immersive dim lighting—as a democratic temple of art, open to anyone willing to make the pilgrimage. King Ludwig and Kaiser Wilhelm I were in attendance when Bayreuth opened in 1876, with a premiere of the completed Ring. By the time Wagner died in 1883, it had become a luxury destination for the upper classes he’d once fantasized about sending to the tumbrils.
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2021 10:07:15 GMT
BOOK REVIEW: THE REVOLUTION WON’T BE STOPPED popularresistance.org/book-review-the-revolution-wont-be-stopped/Republican strategist Karl Rove often advised his clients to attack not the enemy’s weaknesses but its strengths. The bipartisan US foreign policy disinformation machine has taken Rove’s advice with tedious devotion. So, to attack Nicaragua, the machine’s fabrications and propaganda have targeted some of that country’s strengths: gender equity, Indigenous rights and autonomy, democracy, sovereignty, and a successful response to the pandemic, as well as the Sandinista government’s great popularity. This should not surprise. It’s the same Rovian method used against Nicaragua’s friends and allies and countries the US designates enemies. For example, to attack Venezuela, the machine ignores the country’s electoral hyper-democracy and dubs the popular government “dictatorial.” To attack Cuba, the machine calls Cuba’s doctors and nurses working in the most medically underserved corners of the world and fighting the pandemic in dozens of other countries, “victims of human trafficking,” or else it calls them “spies.” To attack China, the machine smears China’s lightening-speed discovery and successful suppression of COVID-19. To attack Russia, the machine assails the overwhelmingly popular Crimean referendum as an invasion and undemocratic annexation, and it calls the East Ukraine resistance to the US-implanted coup government in Kiev as Russian aggression by proxy. To attack Syria, the machine disparages as aggressive the popular national defense against the West’s brutal proxy invasion and occupation, while delegitimizing the efforts of allies Russia and Iran to assist Syria. And so on. By now, this Rovian practice should be an imperial “tell,” which in poker (I’m told) is key to beating a bluffer. The peoples of the world now read these tells like neon signs. Not so North Americans, at least not yet. This new compendium of essays could not more thoroughly expose the imperial bluff against Nicaragua. The Revolution Won’t Be Stopped: Nicaragua Advances Despite U.S. Unconventional Warfare (Alliance for Global Justice, July 2020, 247 pp.) is a well-organized collection of essays, paragraph-length news briefs, and reference lists, covering recent Nicaraguan history, including the electoral return of the Sandinistas in 2007, through the 2018 counter-revolutionary, US-authored putsch, its aftermath, and the country’s recovery and response to COVID-19 in 2020. It is a compelling and useful collection, like the earlier collection published in 2019 by the Alliance for Global Justice, Live From Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup? The dozen-plus authors include scholars, reporters and activists well-known in solidarity circles for their deep knowledge of Nicaraguan politics, history and society and their ability to present it with clarity and eloquence. The story of Nicaragua’s remarkable social, political and economic progress under Sandinista government will be familiar to readers of the alternative press, despite the hostility and neglect of Nicaragua found in faux-alternative media (e.g., Democracy Now). Essays throughout the volume detail this progress, but it can be quickly gleaned from the Introduction by Magda Lanuza and the opening essay, “Economic and Social Progress Continues,” by Nan McCurdy and Katherine Hoyt. The country’s more dramatic achievements include the reduction of poverty and extreme poverty, each by half or more, free basic healthcare and education, virtually zero illiteracy, near doubling of electrification to reach virtually the entire population, and production of about 90% of its own food consumption (“food sovereignty”). Less well-known achievements include Nicaragua’s internationally recognized humane community policing system (ordinary Nicaraguans simply don’t fear their police), and the country’s ranking of fifth in the world in gender equity, just behind four Scandinavian countries (“Nicaraguan Women Take Their Rightful Place,” by Rita Jill Clark-Gollub). Despite recognition of these social and economic achievements, and many more, by international organizations including United Nations agencies, you wouldn’t know any of this if you follow only US corporate and government-sponsored media. Perhaps the most fascinating essays are those that describe the unique politics that may be behind Nicaragua’s ability to survive and progress despite the US hybrid war of subversion, sanctions, disinformation, and the putsch of 2018. “Peace and Reconciliation in Nicaragua,” by Susan Lagos, explains the non-punitive treatment of members of Somoza’s National Guard after the 1979 revolution, the Contras after the war of the 1980s, and the putschists after 2018. This, along with the decision of the government to keep the national police off the streets during most of the very violent 2018 putsch, may strike one as excessively generous, forgiving and even pacifist to North American readers (including this one). But this piece shows how these practices may be effective in turning enemies into allies, such as when many former Contra sometimes became allies in opposition to the neoliberal policies of the rightist governments in power between 1990 and 2007. Further, these unusual military, policing and juridical policies, while certainly generous and forgiving, may also be good tactics, perhaps analogous to techniques used in martial arts to deflect the attack of a foe without using force, especially a much more powerful and determined foe like the US, the persistent author of assaults on Nicaragua from the 19th century to the present. “Nicaragua’s Popular Economy: The Face of Five Centuries of People’s Resistance,” by Yorlis Luna, “Tourism in Nicaragua: Breaking with the Defunct Idea of Development,” by Daniel McCurdy, and the Afterword, “Nicaragua Puts People First in Pandemic Response,” by Nan McCurdy, all describe Nicaragua’s unique and successful economic and public health strategies. The Yorlis Luna and Daniel McCurdy pieces explain the theory and practice of Nicaragua’s “popular economy,” emphasizing the informal and smaller business sector, providing much of Nicaragua’s food, clothing and housing. It is a “self-managed, associative and solidarity-based economy,” based in pre-capitalist and pre-Hispanic economics, and which now provides “70% of employment, 42.3% of value added and 59.3% of income, excluding remittances.” It also generates most of the nation’s wealth. (See also, Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup? A Reader, 2019, “The Popular Economy: Nicaragua’s Anti-Shock Therapy,” by Nils McCune and “A Creative, Enterprising and Victorious Economy to Defeat the Coup,” by Jorge Capelán afgj.org/nicanotes-live-from-nicaragua-uprising-or-coup)Nan McCurdy’s “Afterward” describes Nicaragua’s successful pandemic response. Lockdown would have been a luxury that Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the hemisphere, simply could not afford. But what it could do was mobilize health workers and brigadistas to make health check visits to most homes in the nation and give advice, set up COVID-19 hotlines, control entry points at borders and airports, urge 14-day self-quarantine to visitors, and rely on its public health system, which is the best in the region, even better than that of Mexico, a much richer country. As a result, Nicaragua has had fewer than 200 deaths from the disease as of this writing. Other essays cover Nicaragua’s excellent progress in conservation and environmental policy, including significant conversion from fossil fuels to renewables (Stephen Sefton, Paul Oquist). Chuck Kaufman reviews the data showing the consistent popularity of the Sandinista party and leadership. Jorge Capelán summarizes a week of Nicaraguan news in September 2019, including the little-known but highly significant replacement of COSEP, the 2018 putschist business organization, with CONIMPYMES, an organization of small- and medium-size businesses, as Nicaragua’s representative at the Central American Business Council. The politics and imperial instrumentalization of the Sandinista’s opposition is dissected in a series of short essays by Barbara Larcom, Chuck Kaufman, Ben Norton, and Carlos Fonseca Terán. Essays by Colleen Littlejohn and Adolfo Pastrán Arancibia outline the post-revolutionary history of the autonomous regions of the Caribbean coast, which cover nearly half of Nicaraguan territory. It’s a story of material and social progress, increasing communal land rights for Indigenous and Afro-descendant people, and the success and popularity of the Sandinista party in the regions. It’s also a story of relative neglect under the neoliberal governments of 1990 to 2007, the interregnum between the periods of Sandinista governance. All this will surprise those who in recent months have read various reports of government indifference toward the lives and rights of its minority populations, but it will not surprise those who have followed the thorough debunking of these tales in the (actually) alternative press. (See: “Nicaragua Rebuffs Attacks at Human Rights Hearing,” by John Perry, 3/20/21; “Dismissing the Truth: Why Amnesty International is Wrong about Nicaragua,” by AFGJ, 2/26/19; and “Nicaragua’s Indigenous Peoples – Neocolonial Lies, Autonomous Reality,” by Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal, 3/5/21) The collection includes several essays exposing and refuting media and human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI), which promote false, misleading and demonizing narratives about Nicaragua. (Brian Willson, Camilo Mejía, John Perry, Chuck Kaufman, Stephen Sefton, Nan McCurdy, and Nora Mitchell McCurdy) It’s curious that these organizations fail to recognize human rights as a social, political and mass project, the kind of project Nicaragua is engaged in. When HRW, AI and others present North Americans with falsified and mischaracterized incidents as salient examples of Nicaraguan society and government, they willfully and disingenuously misunderstand the very idea of human rights, and fuel narratives that support deadly and destructive US sanctions and hybrid warfare. Indeed, this anthology reports Human Rights Watch’s explicit endorsement of US sanctions against Nicaragua (passed, by the way, by a unanimous consent voice vote Congress in 2018 and later expanded by presidential executive order in 2020). If these organizations really cared about human rights, they would celebrate Nicaragua’s unprecedented human rights accomplishments and compare them to the horrific abuse of human rights in some of Nicaragua’s Latin American neighbors, such as Honduras or Colombia, whose governments would not last a minute without US support. It is a testament to Nicaragua’s exemplary success in being “the threat of a good example” that the US is hell-bent on destroying Nicaragua’s humane, liberatory, sovereign and democratic project. This book will help defend that example for the good of Nicaragua and all humanity.
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2021 10:08:33 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2021 17:24:22 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 23, 2021 12:43:33 GMT
An English Revolutionary By E. P. Thompson On St. George's Day, we republish E. P. Thompson's essay on the life and politics of William Morris – an English revolutionary and the greatest moral critic of capitalism of his age. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/04/an-english-revolutionaryIhave in no way altered my opinion that if we are to acknowledge William Morris as one of the greatest of Englishmen it is not because he was, by fits and starts, a good poet; nor because of his influence upon typography; nor because of his high craftsmanship in the decorative arts; nor because he was a practical socialist pioneer; nor, indeed, because he was all these; but because of a quality which permeates all these activities and which gives to them a certain unity. I have tried to describe this quality by saying that Morris was a great moralist, a great moral teacher. It is in his moral criticism of society (and which of his actions in the decorative arts, or in Anti-Scrape, or the renewal of interest in Icelandic Saga, was not informed by a fundamental criticism of the way of life of his own time?) – and in the crucial position which this criticism occupies in our cultural history at the point of transition from an old tradition to a new – that his greatness is to be found. And this greatness comes to its full maturity in the political writing and example of his later years. I have gained the feeling that perhaps through fear of controversy and out of respect for admirers of William Morris who do not share his political convictions – this Society has tended to be reticent on this matter. But Morris was one of our greatest men, because he was a great revolutionary, a profoundly cultured and humane revolutionary, but not the less a revolutionary for this reason. Moreover, he was a man working for practical revolution. It is this which brings the whole man together. It is this which will make his reputation grow as the years advance English revolutionaries in the past hundred years have been men without a Revolution. At times they have convinced themselves of the Revolution’s imminence. H.M. Hyndman when he founded the Social Democratic Federation in 1882 looked forward to 1889 as the probable date of its commencement. For a time Morris (whose thinking was greatly influenced by the Paris Commune) shared this cataclysmic outlook. But when he founded the Socialist League in 1884 he had already grown more reticent ‘our immediate aim should be chiefly educational … with a view to dealing with the crisis if it should come in our day, or of handing on the tradition of our hope to others if we should die before it comes’. Five years later again, when writing News from Nowhere, Morris postponed the commencement of the Revolution to 1952. In the sixty years that would intervene he foresaw much ‘troublesome wearisome action’ leading to the triumph of ‘demi-semi-Socialism’, which would improve the condition of the working-class while leaving its position unchanged. At the end of this vista of reform he still saw an ultimate revolutionary confrontation: and in one of his last lectures – delivered in 1895, the year before his death – he avowed: I have thought the matter up and down, and in and out, and I cannot for the life of me see how the great change which we long for can come otherwise than by disturbance and suffering of some kind We are living in an epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense. Can that combat be fought out … without loss and suffering? Plainly speaking I know that it cannot. He was a revolutionary without a Revolution, more than that, he knew that he did not live within a revolutionary context. He did not, like Cromwell, have Revolution thrust upon him: nor did he, like Lenin, build a dedicated party within a society whose revolutionary potential was apparent. In the eyes of his opponents was the very type of the socialist ‘trouble-maker’ or (as they would phrase it today) the maladjusted intellectual. He wanted to stir up revolt where no revolt was. He wanted to make contented men discontented, and discontented men into agitators of discontent. It ‘it is to stir you up not to be content with a little that I am here tonight’. And he spent his energy recklessly during the last fifteen years of his life, with the aim of creating a revolutionary tradition – both intellectual and practical – within a society unripe for Revolution. This is, of course the role for which the romantic poet is cast, and many have been content to dismiss Morris, the revolutionary, with this platitude. The late romantic poet, author of The Earthly Paradise, and the Utopian dreamer, author of News from Nowhere, are confused in the same sentimental – or irritable – portrait of baffled unpractical idealism. The portrait is false. For one thing, the convention supposes an effervescent iconoclastic youth. succeeded by premature death or by a respectable and pedestrian middle-age. This was not the course of Morris’ life. Certainly, he rebelled in his youth. It was a moral rebellion, stemming from the romantic tradition, nourished by Carlyle and Ruskin. The enemy was ‘bourgeoisdom and philistinism’. The tilting-grounds in his ‘holy warfare against the age’ were the visual arts. The battle was joined with fervour, but it had scarcely started when – as happened with more than one Victorian rebel – the enemy opened its ranks to receive him with acclaim. Morris, in his late thirties, seemed doomed to enter the family album of Victorian men of letters. That tedious poem, The Earthly Paradise, was taken into the bosom of that very ‘bourgeoisdom and philistinism’ against which Morris had risen in revolt. So costly were the products of the Firm in the decorative arts that it was forced to depend upon the custom of the wealthy. And while the Morris fashions began to penetrate the drawing-rooms of the select, the Railway Age and the architects of Restoration continued to desecrate the outside world. This was the first time that success spelt failure to Morris: he savoured the futility of his revolt like gall. ‘Am I doing nothing but make-belief then, something like Louis XVI’s lock-making?’ he asked. And – when supervising work in the house of the Northern iron-master, Sir Lowthian Bell – he turned suddenly upon his patron ‘like a wild animal’ and declared: ‘I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.’ He repudiated success as other men repudiate calumny. He plunged into more intricate problems of craftsmanship at the Firm. He sustained his hatred of modern civilisation by translating Icelandic saga. He deliberately sat on his top hat. He launched his great campaign for the protection of ancient buildings. He opened his morning paper and was astonished to find that Britain was on the eve of a major war, on behalf of the Turkish Empire. His response was to become an agitator. This agitation was to carry him, by way of an acute personal and intellectual crisis, into the embryonic socialist movement, which he joined in his fiftieth year. From this time forward he was to see war – whether overt, imperialist and bloody, or stealthy, respectable and bloodless – as the authentic expression of the Victorian ethos. It was from the circumstances of war that he was to draw one of his most evocative images of capitalist society. Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our plutocratic society. It fares with it as it does with the older norms of war, that there is an outside look of quite wonderful order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of the regiment; how quiet and respectable the sergeants look; how clean the polished cannon … the looks of adjutant and sergeant as innocent-looking as may be, nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, and mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home. This second rebellion was at one and the same time the consummation of his youthful revolt and the genesis of a new revolutionary impulse within our culture. This time there was to be no reconciliation. The Victorian middle-class, which dearly loved an idealist reformer, was shocked not so much by his rebellion as by practical form of expression. ‘Mr Morris is not content to be heard merely as a voice crying in the wilderness,’ complained one aggrieved leader-writer, ‘he would disturb the foundations of society in order that a higher artistic value may be given to our carpets’. For Morris broke with the conventional picture of the rebellious romantic in another respect. In everything to which he turned his hand he demanded of himself practical mastery. As he turned to the dye-vat and to the loom, so he turned his hands to the work of making a Revolution. There is no work which he did not take upon himself. He spoke on open-air pitches, Sunday after Sunday, until his health broke down. He addressed demonstrations of miners and of the unemployed. He attended innumerable committee meetings. He edited Commonweal and sold it in the streets. He appeared as a prisoner and as witness, in the police courts. ‘I can’t help it,’ he answered a reproof from his closest friend, Georgie Burne-Jones. ‘The ideas which have taken hold of me will not let me rest … One must turn to hope, and only in one direction do I see it – on the road to Revolution: everything else is gone …’ And yet, for all this evidence of practical personal commitment cannot the charge of misguided romanticism still be sustained? While Morris accepted almost in toto the economic and historical analysis of Marx he always avowed that his ‘special leading motive’ in becoming a revolutionary socialist was ‘hatred of modern civilisation’. ‘It is a shoddy age’, he roared at a Clarion reporter. ‘Shoddy is King. From the statesman to the shoemaker all is shoddy!’ The reporter concealed his boots further beneath the table. ‘Then you do not admire the common-sense John Bull, Mr Morris? ‘John Bull is a stupid unpractical oaf’ was the reply. Nothing infuriated Morris more than the complacent philistinism of the ‘practical man’, unless it was the complacent philistinism of the unpractical one ‘That’s an impossible dream of yours, Mr Morris,’ a clergyman once declared, ‘such a society would need God Almighty Himself to manage it.’ Morris shook his fist in reply: ‘Well damn it, man, you catch your God Almighty – we’ll have Him.’ But as we draw further from his time, it is Morris, and not his critics, who appears as a realist. He was a healthy man, living in a neurotic society. I speak of moral realism, not the realism of the practical revolutionary. As leader of the Socialist League he made blunders enough – Engels had justification for his irritable characterisation of him, in private letters, as a ‘settled sentimental socialist’. But, Engels underestimated the vigour of that long tradition of moral criticism which was Morris’ inheritance. With his rich historical experience and his concrete response to social reality, Morris had astonishing insight into the lines of growth, the elements of decay, within his culture. In lectures, speeches, passing notes in Commonweal, he cast his eyes forward to our time. He foresaw (in 1887) that the opening up of Africa would lead to the ending of the Great Depression, followed by ‘a great European war, perhaps lengthened out into a regular epoch of war.’ He foresaw Fascism. He foresaw (and regretted) the Welfare State. The enemy, as in his youth, was still ‘bourgeoisdom and philistinism.’ But now he stood appalled before the destructive urges which he sensed within the Victorian middle-classes, whom he said – ‘in spite of their individual good nature and banality. I look upon as a most terrible and implacable force’: The most refined and cultured people have a sort of Manichean hatred of the world (I use the word in its proper sense the home of man). Such people must be both the enemies of beauty and the slaves of necessity… The utilitarian, competitive ethic he now saw as the ethic of Cain; he always known that it murdered art, he had come to understand that it murdered man’s dignity as a creator in his daily labour, he now discovered that it could murder mankind. He spoke in a lecture of ‘the strength of that tremendous organisation under which we live …. Rather than lose anything which really is its essence, it will pull the roof of the world down upon its head.’ He was consumed with the urgency of the socialist propaganda. If capitalism were not to be displaced by a clear-sighted constructive revolutionary movement, if it were to end in mere deadlock and blind insurrection, then ‘the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.’ In this tormented century such insights are worth more than a pedantic sneer. It is as if Morris had cast his eye over Gallipoli and Passchendaele, over purge and counter-purge, over concentration camps and scorched earth, over the tragedy of Africa and the other tragedies to come. At times one feels, indeed, that he deduced from the acquisitive ethic within class-divided society an Iron Law of Morality no less rigid than Lassalle’s Iron Law of Wages. Into the maw of the Age of Commerce ‘honour, justice, beauty, pleasure, hope, all must be cast … to stave off the end awhile; and yet at last the end must come.’ He might have found the proof the culminating logic, of such a Law in our own ingenious devices for annihilation. Morris was sceptical – especially in his last years – as to the tendency towards the immiseration of the masses within capitalism. But he was convinced of the tendency towards the moral immiseration of the dominant classes. Whence was this terrible diagnosis derived? It came, by one road, from Carlyle’s denunciation of a society where cash-payment is the sole nexus of man with man; by another road, from his own study of the conditions of nineteenth century labour and productive relations; by yet another, from Marx’s moral indignation, and its foundation in the manuscripts of the early 1840s. Morris did not use the term ‘alienation,’ which has regained currency today; but he was – and remains – our greatest diagnostician of alienation, in terms of the concrete perception of the moralist, and within the context of a particular English cultural tradition. From those economic and social relationships, this moral logic must ensue. And this logic demanded that the ethic of atomised, acquisitive society be opposed by the ethic of community. As between these two there could be no shadow of compromise. It was this logic which drove Morris to the street-corners, to play the fool’s part as revolutionary agitator in the complacent streets of Gladstone’s England. And here we meet with the second great irony of Morris’ career. For a second time his rebellion met with success; and for a second time success was flavoured with gall. This is not to say that Morris’ section of the movement – the Socialist League – was successful. It petered out into anarchist tomfoolery, leaving Morris stranded in his Hammersmith Socialist Society, But, indirectly, the propaganda helped to set a mass movement in motion: and, indeed, the direct political influence of Morris is often underrated. By the early 1890s men whom Morris had helped to convert were leading dynamic popular movements: Tom Mann and the new unions; Blatchford and Clarion; the Socialist Leaguers, Jowett and Maguire, who were architects of the Yorkshire ILP. And yet this was not the success for which Morris had looked. Here lies the dilemma of the revolutionary within a society unripe for revolution. If he stands aside from the main currents of social change, he becomes purist, sectarian, without influence. If he swims with the current, he is swept downward by the flow of reformism and compromise. In the 1880s Morris had hoped that the propaganda would ‘make Socialists … cover the country with a network of associations composed of men who feel their antagonism to the dominant classes, and have no temptation to waste their time in the thousand follies of party politics.’ At that time he was an uncompromising anti-parliamentarian. A parliamentary socialist party would, he thought, enter into a path of compromise and opportunism: it would ‘fall into the error of moving earth and sea to fill the ballot boxes with Socialist votes which will not represent Socialist men.’ The ‘rollicking opportunism’ of the Fabians, and especially of Sidney Webb, met with his absolute opposition. Webb’s mistake (declared Morris) was ‘to over-estimate the importance of the mechanism of a system of society apart from the end towards which it may be used.’ The end he himself always described as Communism. When, in the nineties, the whole movement set in the direction of piecemeal reform, eight-hour agitation and parliamentary action, he welcomed this as a necessary process in awakening the aspirations of the worker, But, in his last lectures, he asked repeatedly ‘how far the betterment of the working people might go and yet stop short at last without having made any progress on the direct road to Communism’? Whether … the tremendous organization of civilized commercial society, is not playing the cat and mouse game with us socialists. Whether the Society of Inequality might not accept the equasi-socialist machinery … and work it for the purpose of upholding that society in a somewhat shorn condition, maybe, but a same one … The workers better treated, better organized, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich … than they have now. Herein lies his realism, overlapping his own circumstances, and searching the dilemmas of our own time with a moral insight so intense that it can be mistaken as callous. When the prospect of ‘the capitalist public service brought to perfection’ was put before him, he remarked that he ‘would not walk across the street for the realisation of such an ideal.’ The nub of the question lies in the concept of community. Webb and the Fabians looked forward to Equality of Opportunity, within a competitive society. Morris looked forward to a Society of Equals, a socialist community. It is not a small difference that divides these concepts. In one – however modified – the ethic of competition, the energies of war. In the other, the ethic of co-operation, the energies of love. These two ethics Morris contrasted again and again by the names of False and True Society: False Society, or Commercial War: and ‘that true society of loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend which exists by its own inherent right and reason, in spite of what is usually thought to be the cement of society, arbitrary authority.’ It was the greatest achievement of Morris, in his full maturity, to bring this concept of community to the point of expression: to place it in the sharpest antagonism to his own society: and to embody it in imaginative terms and in the ‘exalted brotherhood and hope’ of the socialist propaganda. To this he summoned all his resources – his knowledge of medieval and of Icelandic society, his craftsman’s insight into the processes of labour, his robust historical imagination. He had no time for noble savages, and even less for the Fabian nostrum of State bureaucracy. No amount of mechanical manipulation from above could engender the ethic of community; ‘individual men’ (he said) ‘cannot shuffle off the business of life onto the shoulders of an abstraction called the State.’ Contrary to the prevalent opinion, Morris welcomed all machinery which reduced the pain and drudgery of labour; but decentralisation both of production and of administration he believed essential. In True Society, the unit of administration must be small enough for every citizen to feel a personal responsibility. The community of Communism must be an organic growth of mutual obligations, of personal and social bonds, arising from a condition of practical equality. And between False and True Society there lay, like a ‘river of fire,’ the Revolution. It was the work of a realist to indicate where that river ran, and to hand down to us a ‘tradition of hope’ as to the lands beyond those deadly waters. In conclusion, if there is one part of my long study of Morris which – in the light of the political controversies of recent years – would seem to be a fruitful area of re-examination, it is in those passages where I seek to relate the basis of Morris’ moral critique of society to the Marxist tradition. The question is complex, and leads into an intricate succession of definitions. I feel now – as I did then – that Morris’ and Marx’s critique of capitalism are complementary and reinforce each other. There can be no question of disassociating the two. Moreover, I would wish to retract nothing of what I have written of Morris’ profound debt to the writings of Marx; these gave to his own criticism much of their form and some of their force. But I have tended at certain points to suggest that Morris’ moral critique of society is dependent upon Marx’s economic and historical analysis, that the morality is in some ways secondary, the analysis of power and productive relationships primary. That is not way in which I look upon the question now. I see the two as inextricably bound together in the same context of social life. Economic relationships are at the same time moral relationships; relations of production are at the same time relations between people, of oppression or of co-operation; and there is a moral logic as well as an economic logic, which derives from these relationships. The history of the class struggle is at the same time the history of human morality. ‘As I strove to stir up people to this reform,’ Williams Morris wrote in his Preface to Signs of Change: I found that the causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society … This is the phrase – ‘innate moral baseness’. And if capitalist society in Britain today displays fewer of the extreme hardships and oppressions of Morris’ day, the innate moral baseness of the acquisitive ethic, and of exploitive rather than co-operative social relationships, gives rise to new inhumanities, to the atomisation of social life, and to the greater international idiocies. There is nothing here which contradicts Marx’s analysis. What I am insisting on is not only that Morris’ discoveries are complementary to those of Marx, but also that they are a necessary complement, that without this historical understanding of the evolution of man’s moral nature his essential concept of the ‘whole man’ becomes lost, as it has so often been lost in the later Marxist tradition. A generation is now arising to whom the moral critique of society makes a more direct appeal than the traditional analysis of economic causes. For this generation, Morris’ writings have lost, in the passage of years, none of their pungency and force. And as socialists see Marx’s genius in transforming the traditions of English economic theory and of German philosophy, so they should see how Morris transformed a great tradition of liberal and humane criticism of society, and how he brought this into the common revolutionary stream. And if this achievement had been more widely recognised, perhaps fewer Marxists would have been found who could have supposed that the overthrow of capitalist class power and productive relationships could – by itself – lead on to the fruition of a Communist community; that, if the forms of economic ownership were right, the rest would follow. They would have realised – as Morris proclaimed in all his work – that the construction of a Communist community would require a moral revolution as profound as the revolution in economic and social power. It is because William Morris, in imaginative and in day-to-day polemical writing alike, sought to body forth a vision of the actual social and personal relations, the values and attitudes consonant with a Society of Equals, that he remains the greatest moral initiator of Communism within our tradition. A lecture to the Williams Morris Society, 1959.
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Post by Admin on Jun 30, 2021 10:49:11 GMT
PREVENTING A RETURN TO NORMAL AMIDST THE CURRENT CATASTROPHE By A.M. Gittlitz and Matt Peterson, ROAR Magazine. June 29, 2021 | STRATEGIZE! popularresistance.org/preventing-a-return-to-normal-amidst-the-current-catastrophe/Author A.M. Gittlitz Reflects On The Legacy Of Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, Its Relevance For Revolutionary Politics Today And For A Cosmic Socialism Tomorrow. Towards the beginning of our most recent global catastrophe, writer A.M. Gittlitz published I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, the result of his years-long research on the infamous theorist of revolutionary disaster J. Posadas (1912-1981). Combining intellectual biography and cultural analysis, Gittlitz’s book tells the story of Argentine Trotskyist Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli — better known under the pseudonym J. Posadas — and his many dedicated followers, traversing multiple continents across decades. I Want to Believe is a cautionary political tale of a radical post-war tendency marked by zealous fanaticism, an enigmatic insurgent horizon caught between utopia and annihilation and the cruelest of gaps separating sincere revolutionary desire and delusional irrelevance. Matt Peterson spoke with the A.M. Gittlitz about his interviews with ex-Posadists and extensive international archival research uncovering this story, as well as the meaning of its contemporary revival as a meme — where aliens, dolphins and nuclear war become the avatars heralding communism. Together they discuss belief and nihilism, irony and youth culture, commitment and defeat, revolution and millenarianism and the dual popularity today of both socialism and cults. As catastrophe remains ever-present in our lives, what can the Posadists tell us about the moment we’re in? Matt Peterson: Beginning With The Title, Your Book Is Very Much About Belief And Our Present Struggle Between Hope And Despair, Cynicism And Irony. You Trace A History Of The 20th Century Where Despite — Or Even Because Of — Its Brutal And Devastating Horrors Of World Wars, Civil Wars And Cold Wars, There Remained For Many The Certainty That Proletarian Socialist Revolution Was Inevitable. But You Write That Now Mass Action And Communism Are “Ideas Which, Like First Contact With Aliens, Have Been Long-Regarded As Equally Ridiculous, Impossible, Or Insane.” How Did Your Study Of Posadism Help You Reflect On Our Contemporary Conflict With Apathy And Nihilism, Or Our Present Need To Believe? A.M. Gittlitz: In my time in the anarchist milieu we often made fun of Trotskyists for having centralist organization, selling their weird papers, constantly arguing about stuff that happened 100 years ago. But until I began researching for this book, I realized they had something we lacked: a clear vision of what revolution was, a strategy on how to make it happen, and total commitment to move in that direction, no matter how dangerous or cringey it’s likely to be. A few years ago, I attended a panel with four anarchist activists and I asked if they believed in revolution and how it might happen. One said it would be bad security culture to answer, another agreed, alluding to the need to train in firearms, and a third changed the subject to solidarity with Palestine. I think a lot of radicals are reluctant to answer these questions because it’s hard to say the fight is worth it given the unknown barbarity likely to come from seriously challenging state power. Both the classical anarchist and Trotskyist modes of militancy are dependent on the historical workers’ movement for relevance. Posadas’ parents were anarchists and he was a socialist because these were the major political formations in their working class neighborhood at the time. While people might like the idea of anarchism or communism, they don’t see the organizations committed to these ideas being of much use, especially given the horrors that await were we to move towards revolution. So, for many, revolutionary politics has become a joke. In the enthusiasm for Posadism among memesters — mostly teenagers radicalized around the chaos of the 2016 election — I interpreted a reconceptualization of revolutionary socialism via this ironic humor. It wasn’t the aliens, dolphins and nuclear war that people were mocking — but Posadas’ Leninist orthodoxy. Unlike the memes about Stalin and Hitler, no one seriously argued for the refoundation of historical Posadism. They are instead looking to break with the nightmare of past generations by rescuing characters like Posadas for their own purposes — to imagine the catastrophe that we are living through leading somewhere other than continued dystopia. The Book Is A Sober, Generous And Often Fascinating History Of Trotskyism — Of Both The Life Of Trotsky Himself And His Final Decade In Exile, As Well As The Many Entities Which Took Up His Legacy Throughout The 20th Century — In Which Posadas And His Followers Played A Surprisingly Large Role. But Unlike The Devotees Of Lenin, Mao, Or Even Stalin, All Of Whom Represent The Experience Of Victory And Power, Trotsky’s Followers Always Felt Closer To Defeat. Even The Recent Rise In Popularity For The Term “Socialism” Has Seemingly Done Little To Rehabilitate Trotskyism. You Mention The Historical Conditions Have Now Changed, But Like Trotsky We Remain Stuck Between Social Democracy And Stalinism. Coming From An Anarchist Background, What Lessons Did You Take From Your Research On These Questions Of Vision, Strategy, Organization And Commitment? An essential element of Trotsky’s thought is permanent revolution, the idea that popular uprisings like those he witnessed in 1905, and what we are witnessing now, create irreversible changes within society that also reverberate internationally. He writes: “[T]he day and the hour when power will pass into the hands of the working class depends directly not upon the level attained by the productive forces but upon relations in the class struggle, upon the international situation, and, finally, upon a number of subjective factors: the traditions, the initiative and the readiness to fight of the workers.” Analyzing the forms of struggle and lasting impacts of the Gilet Jaunes, Hong Kong, Chile, Sudan, Haiti, Lebanon, Iraq and the George Floyd Uprising, to name just a few, are thus crucial to developing a theory of how our current cycle of struggle will progress. Noticeable in New York has been the proliferation of mutual aid groups and the ubiquity of the slogan “ACAB.” Some orthodox communists who think we should put all efforts into electing a leftist clique or reorganizing the workers’ movement from scratch perceive these things — even BLM and the uprising itself — as juvenile anarchism or radical liberalism. These same critiques were made of the worker councils, or soviets, formed after 1905. Twelve years later, Lenin shocked revolutionary Russia by demanding the transitional government be abolished, all power transferred to the soviets and that the police be abolished and replaced with a peoples’ militia. The irrelevance of revolutionary politics today comes from the perception of the struggles in motion as being impotent if they do not conform to a recognizable historical pattern. Revolutionaries should instead commit to the success of these proletarian offensives on their own terms. In The Book You Write, “Posadas Is The Folkloric Forefather Of Cosmic Socialism, A Patron Saint Of Maniacal Hope Against Rational Hopelessness, Whose Futurist Strain Of Apocalyptic Communism And Radical Xenophilia Represents A Synthesis Of Barbarism And Socialism, Tragedy And Farce.” For Posadas And Others During The Cold War, There Was A Sense That Conditions Of Mutually Assured Destruction Were Providing The True Messianic Opening For Communism. This Idea Of “Apocalyptic Communism” Also Shows Up In Sabu Kohso’s Recent Book Radiation And Revolution, In His Thinking Through The Aftermath Of The 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. You Write That For Posadas, “BEing A Revolutionary Meant Not Turning Away From The Coming Catastrophe But Charging Into It Head-On.” In Our Time Of Generalized Deterioration, If Not Collapse — More Than A Year Into A Pandemic And “Continued Dystopia”, As You Say — How Do You Think A Positive Vision Of Communism Can Be Put Forward? Posadas did not invent the nuclear catastrophism for which he is known today, it comes from the belief of Michel Pablo. As the leader of the postwar Fourth International until 1960, Pablo believed that capitalism was on the brink of collapse and would launch World War III against the Soviet Union and China in a desperate struggle to maintain the world order. The Trotskyists believed that the “workers’ states” would win the war, and with imperialist structures destroyed, the global proletariat could — under leadership of a Fourth International that had prepared for this event — rebuild the world communist. This millenarian conception of a final reckoning can also be found throughout revolutionary socialist history: in the breakdown theory of the Erfurt program, the war-revolution of the Bolsheviks and even in Marx. Posadas took this logic to the extreme, believing in the 1960s we should hasten nuclear war. Their Cuban section protested the denouement of the Cuban missile crisis, for instance. There are a lot of problems with catastrophism, the view that catastrophe is both inevitable and desirable. A major problem for us today is it imagines a sudden event like a mushroom cloud changing reality all at once. Nuclear war is certainly still on the table, and the consequence of it would likely be an unsurvivable nuclear winter, but the catastrophes of pandemic and climate change we are currently experiencing are slow enough for capitalism to manage. It almost seems like nothing has changed. It’s important to take note of what we don’t see: not total resignation, civil war, reversion to a Hobbesian state of nature of war of all against all, but rather neighbors who previously may not have known each other coming together to share their resources and skills. This kind of self-organization can be seen after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the earthquakes in Mexico, within the caravans and camps of refugees in Europe and North America, the pandemic response in New York — basically everywhere. Common people do figure out how to survive without the state or political dogma — and it tends to look more like communism than capitalism. The challenge, then, becomes preventing a return to normal. Part of facing that challenge is recognizing the catastrophe isn’t coming, it’s here, and figuring out what to do right now. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” Finally, On The Question Of Organization, Your Recounting Of The Posadists Becomes The Story Of A Political Cult And You Make A Connection Between Sectarian Groupuscules And New Religious Movements, Referencing Scientology, Peoples Temple And Heaven’s Gate. There’s Been A Revived Interest In Cults, With Popular Films And Television Series On The Branch Davidians, The Manson Family, NXIVM And Rajneesh. They All Point To This Intense Need For Belief, As Well As To Belong To Something Bigger Than Yourself, With A New Narrative Of The World And Our Role In It. But Where Does It All Go Wrong? It’s really fascinating the way these cults are talked about. There’s usually a lot of sympathy for the followers, alongside a narrative about how the group was misunderstood. Often there’s a fantasy of how good things could have been if it weren’t for the abuses of its leaders. Some even declare their envy for the communal lifestyle of Rajneeshpuram, Jonestown or Waco. At the same time, there’s a tendency to suspect that any sort of close-knit community with its own beliefs and initiatives must be an abusive cult. Recently I saw a trending story about a Tennessee commune called “The Garden.” From what I could gather, this group was promoting themselves on TikTok with short interviews of the members and since they were dorky Rainbow Gathering hippies the video went viral. Then came a wave of accusations that it must be a cult, only made worse when they replied,: “we’re not a cult at all!” As far as I could tell there was no real evidence, aside from one member having some awful-but-common new-age beliefs. But a ton of influential TikTok users insisted it was dangerous and now they’re under investigation by law enforcement. Ari Aster’s film Midsommar sums up the tension of these two popular imaginations of cults. The protagonist is simultaneously seduced and horrified by the bizarre, violent rituals of the ancestral commune. When she’s given the choice, the commune wins out over the misery of modern life. This is something I explore in the conclusion of my book. Most revolutionaries believe that something like an international party or mass organization is necessary and there must be someone out there stopping them from building it. In reality, it doesn’t exist largely because no one actually trusts leadership enough to submit themselves to militant discipline. No one really wants to be a cult member or a militant in a revolutionary sect. These are actually desires for the kind of freedom that only comes through a community that coordinates itself for a greater cause, that inserts itself into history. Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle says this “desire for consciousness” is identical to the “consciousness of desire,” which “seeks the abolition of classes, the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity.” Posadas believed the masses were already ready to start living communism, they only needed the “nuclear charco,” the destruction of all bourgeois and bureaucratic institutions in nuclear war. Leninist discipline and Trotskyist catastrophism were his best ideas for what to do until then. Hopefully we can come up with better ideas today.
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