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Post by Admin on Aug 11, 2021 11:06:15 GMT
How Boris can end climate change Retrograde Tories have turned the environment into a culture war BY PETER FRANKLIN unherd.com/2021/08/how-boris-can-save-the-world/The Earth is burning, and from reading Aris Roussinos’s searing account on UnHerd yesterday, it’s all too easy to believe that the world’s leaders are fiddling. Our politicians talk a good game on climate policy, but are they actually doing anything about it? Well, it’s not all mood music — amid the fine words, there is action. Believe it or not, we are changing our ways. Indeed, change is happening at an unprecedented pace. A shift from one energy paradigm to another is usually something that takes several generations. But what we’re seeing now is happening much faster than that. And Britain is leading the way. No country in the G7 — or the G20 for that matter — has done more to decarbonise its economy than we have.
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Post by Admin on Aug 15, 2021 20:19:39 GMT
“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. In the long run, hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty & ignorance”. Orwell, ‘1984’.
‘Without poverty there’s no hierarchy. Without hierarchy there’s no indoctrination. Without indoctrination there’s no ignorance. Without ignorance there’s no British identity’.
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Post by Admin on Aug 16, 2021 8:11:58 GMT
Mutual responsibility must become a way of life for everyone, a constant concern for others, and not just a hurried, stop-gap embrace when someone’s need suddenly catches our attention.
Mutual responsibility is a shared sensation of closeness, where we feel committed and belonging to one another—neighbors, colleagues and people on the street—just like we feel toward our own family. I am speaking of responsibility toward all people, society and the state. It is written in our sources that, “Love your neighbor as yourself—it is a great rule in the Torah.” This is the law that should be at the foundation of our society.
- Rav Michael Laitman (2020), "Coronavirus Ship Is a Lesson in the Need for Mutual Responsibility in Israel"
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Post by Admin on Sept 6, 2021 14:20:16 GMT
Meanwhile, in the UK, the victorious Brexit begins to bear its juicy fruit. Empty shelves, as in Third World countries, to which the raw material shortages for the pharmaceutical industry, the lack of manpower in various sectors, the strange case of milkshakes at McDonald's, and other things with less importance, such as uncertainty about the border situation with the Republic of Ireland and the turmoil in Scotland, wrapped in an arm of verbal iron over the possession of nuclear submarines stationed in Glasgow, with the threat of a referendum on independence hovering in the air. To name a few. What has happened in the United Kingdom, and which will continue to take place for a while - in principle quite a lot - is an excellent lesson that history is giving us live. Brexit is the finished example of how far-right populism 2.0, even representing a minority, managed to contaminate one of the oldest and most solid democracies in history. How it took over the Conservative Party, through the direct and indirect influence of people like Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, or the discreet think thank European Research Group. Not to mention Cambridge Analytica and FSB. Underestimating the power and determination of neo-fascism is one of the great mistakes of our generation. And it will have a high price for all, whether left or right, liberals or conservatives.
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Post by Admin on Sept 9, 2021 12:48:02 GMT
The Rich Should Pay For Social Care By Cat Jenkins The government's National Insurance increase will hit workers and the poor the hardest, while letting billionaires, landlords, and corporations off the hook. The alternative is simple: tax wealth instead. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/09/the-rich-should-pay-for-social-careWe heard it first, as a rumour, a few weeks ago; then, this week, it was confirmed. The government—or at least the prime minister—is proposing to ‘sort out’ social care funding by increasing taxes on workers, through lifting the rate of the National Insurance Contributions they and their employers pay. As I write this, the outcome of today’s Commons sitting isn’t yet known: but the very fact that proposals such as these are being mooted merits comment in itself. That’s because in its current form, National Insurance (NI) is about as regressive as it’s possible for a tax to be. Consider all of these factors: It’s charged on earned income, as opposed to unearned (such as rents, dividends, and interest); It kicks in at an earnings level well below that at which income tax starts to be levied; It tails off on earnings over £50,268 – so the better paid among us end up being charged a significantly lower rate, overall, than the less well paid; For those who can plan their work so as to be self-employed, incorporating a company and charging their working time through it, it’s possible to avoid a large proportion of otherwise-chargeable contributions. That all means that the burden of this increase in taxes falls—both squarely, and unfairly—on the shoulders of those least able to pay. It falls on those who work for someone else, and who aren’t hugely well paid. To cap it all, many of those people are about to suffer the indignity of a £20-per-week reduction (£1,040 a year) in their Universal Credit payments. Let’s not forget, too, that many of these people are the very ones who have kept the country fed, watered, nursed, transported, vaccinated, and cared for throughout the pandemic – those ‘key workers’ often getting by on minimal wages, with precarious job security and sometimes inadequate PPE, while looking after the welfare of a population in lockdown. In this same period, a significant proportion of the better-off have managed to actually increase their net worth. It’s a deeply unfair situation – don’t you think we should be hearing today about proposals to increase key workers’ hourly wages, rather than to burden them with further financial insecurity? It’s not as though this move would be the most efficient way to raise money to fund social care, either. There are so many better, fairer routes to solving this problem that it’s hard to fathom the logic. If increased taxes are to be a part of the solution, they could play a valuable role in helping to reduce the inequities of our messy and complex tax system, spreading the cost of services more fairly, and helping to reduce poverty, rather than exacerbate it. If we’re serious about ‘levelling up’ in this country, and making it a place where all have the chance to thrive, we need to ensure that those most able to are the ones making a fairer contribution to the tax ‘take’. There are a number of options that should be being considered. As far as personal taxation goes, they include the introduction of wealth taxes, and an increase in Capital Gains Taxes so that they’re on a par with income taxes. When it comes to the biggest corporates, including those that have made super-profits from the pandemic (in some cases whilst paying wages so low that their workers rely on a top up of Universal Credit to make ends meet), an end to sweetheart deals and tax planning loopholes could fund the ‘gap’ many times over. A wealth tax, in particular, might be unpopular with a certain group of voters, but it would do much to take the edge off the rising inequality that exists in this country. That in itself would be of benefit to all: there’s good evidence to show that inequality is damaging to all levels of society. Essentially, as they say, ‘we all do better when we all do better.’ My organisation, Church Action for Tax Justice, campaigns for a fairer tax system – both globally, and here on our home turf. That includes using taxes to reduce inequality and injustices, and to relieve poverty. The current proposals do the precise opposite, and for that reason, they must be resisted. About the Author Cat Jenkins is Programme Manager for Church Action for Tax Justice (CATJ). CATJ is a programme of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility.
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Post by Admin on Sept 9, 2021 15:11:11 GMT
WHAT HAPPENED TO ANARCHISM? (A CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN ANTIFA) abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/9/6/antifa-anarchism-and-the-desperate-search-for-an-enemyII. ANOTHER WORLD IS… NEVERMIND. I’ve been politically active now for more than 20 years, though I should probably define what that means. The WTO meetings and protests in Seattle radicalized me, as I think they did for many others my age. I was 22, just turning 23. Before then, though I’d had some exposure to leftist political thinking and a vague understanding of capitalism—by which I mean I didn’t like it because I was poor—I hadn’t yet connected anything I had thought to anything actually happening in the world. At the end of 1999, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) held a meeting in Seattle which was met with massive protests. The protestors who showed up were generally what we would call “leftist,” but not all of them. Many were just union members, out because their leadership had called them to do so. Some were die-hard anarchists (the famed “Eugene Anarchists”), others were part of more organized socialist groups like the now-defunct ISO and smaller groups like the Freedom Socialist Party and Socialist Alternative. Some were there because they were environmentalists, drawn there by NGO organizers. Others came out because they believed there was a conspiracy by the UN and other international groups to take away individual rights and local sovereignty. And some just came out of curiosity, as 40,000 people shutting down the city center of an otherwise sleepy city was something to see. While there had been earlier and much smaller protests, the event in Seattle marked the full beginning of the anti-globalization movement, a mass politics in response to a larger political and economic shift which eventually succeeded in reshaping our world. It also meant a kind of renaissance for anarchist thought, a sudden relevance for a sub-cultural political movement few had taken seriously in the United States since the beginning of World War II. To understand what we were all on about during that time, you need to consider what the world looked like at the end of the 1990’s. Francis Fukuyama had declared “the end of history,” a moment of triumph for Liberal Democracy and capitalism over communism and national isolationism. Before the end of the second millennium, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union and allied client states (like Yugoslavia) had collapsed, and the Third World was now open for pillaging. The term “Third World” is now considered quite pejorative, but only because no one seems to remember what it actually meant. Most probably don’t even know there was also a “Second World” in the equation. In that particular geo-political framing, the world was seen as being divided into three parts: the First World (western capitalist democracies), the Second World (the Soviet bloc and allied communist states), and the Third World (unaligned nations, primarily in what we now call the Global South) over which the First and Second worlds fought. By the end of the 1990’s, the Second World collapsed completely. This meant there was no longer any competition for the capitalists in the First World for the resources of the Third. Before this collapse, international investment and military policy had been crafted with a constant eye towards competing with and limiting the influence of the U.S.S.R., and now all those policies were ready to be re-written. It’s hard to imagine this, maybe, but for decades the competitive pressure from the Second (state communist) world had managed to keep First World capitalists from becoming too extreme in their exploitation of their own laborers and the resources of other nations. As long as the USSR existed and was offering an alternative model of organizing society, Western capitalists had to at least make pretense of giving their own people and the people in the Third World a good deal. With the Communists gone, there was no longer such a need because there was no longer any alternative. Thus, in the late 1990’s, governments, capitalists, and a new breed of technocrat theorist scrambled to create new policies and frameworks that would allow them to take as much advantage as possible of this political void. Importantly, they also needed a new moral framework to justify these policies: “fighting communism” was no longer a believable excuse since there were no more communists to fight. That’s how globalization was born. Globalization meant many things, depending on who you asked, but ultimately it meant the globalization of western capitalist modes of production, financing, development, and the western capitalist worldview itself. Now that there was no alternative, the missionaries of the enlightened capitalist order could spread across the globe, teaching the previously “primitive” and “backwards” peoples how to live in the brave new present. We were all connected now in an universal fellowship of consumers and producers: we could all have strawberries in wintertime, a Starbucks in every town center, a representative democracy, and access to a global network of information called the internet that would bring us all closer together. In those early days, the propaganda was intoxicating. Even for those of us who opposed this new global ordering of the world based on Anglo-American capitalist values, we still all had the sense some new world was being born. That’s why, while in English the opposition to this new political formation was called anti-globalization, in Europe and the Global South the movement was called Altermondialisme: “other world-ism.” Derived from the popular rallying cry, “Another World Is Possible,” the idea of altermondialism was that all these new technologies and the cessation of geo-political strife after the death of state communism could usher in a more democratic and less capitalist world. The WTO protests, for instance, had seen the birth of several new decentralized and non-hierarchical communications technologies and organizing structures (for example, the IndyMedia collectives and infoshops, or the Direct Action Networks). Also, the astounding diversity of political interests and ethnic concerns that had come together for that protest and many subsequent protests was seen as a model of what a new resistance movement could look like. First Nations tribal leaders marching alongside union leaders and migrant farm workers, listening to speakers from India and Brazil and reading texts from African activists and Italian anarchists: this looked to many as a true other world being born. Of course it didn’t happen that way. What we got instead was the globalization of capital and a new form of state and corporate repression that has proven itself far more efficient than the political repression in the failed communist states, as well as an acceleration of capitalist destruction in the Global South and human-caused climate change.
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2021 18:29:14 GMT
Sadly he's popular again Carl Schmitt en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_SchmittCarl Schmitt (/ʃmɪt/; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative[4][5] theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism,[6] and his work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism. Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Waldemar Gurian, Jaime Guzmán, Reinhart Koselleck, Friedrich Hayek,[7] Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Leo Strauss, Adrian Vermeule,[8] and Slavoj Žižek, among others. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Schmitt was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. But there can be little doubt that his preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease."[9]
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Post by Admin on Sept 16, 2021 19:31:11 GMT
"In the era of rising multi-polarity, the imperialists seek to divide the globe into two worlds: the one where the NATO bloc’s “democracy” holds sway, and the one where China and Russia’s “authoritarianism” is in control. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. provides military assistance to three-fourths of the world’s dictatorships." SEPTEMBER 16, 2021 BY DANDELIONSALAD Coups, Censorship and Propaganda: The U.S. New Cold War Playbook, by Rainer Shea dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/coups-censorship-and-propaganda-the-u-s-new-cold-war-playbook-by-rainer-shea/by Rainer Shea Writer, Dandelion Salad Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Sept. 14, 2021 September 16, 2021 “Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader’s indignant passion as a member of the “West,” and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West’s, and especially America’s, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.” — Edward Said, 2001 In the era of rising multi-polarity, the imperialists seek to divide the globe into two worlds: the one where the NATO bloc’s “democracy” holds sway, and the one where China and Russia’s “authoritarianism” is in control. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. provides military assistance to three-fourths of the world’s dictatorships. Or that Washington is complicit in backing the atrocities of Nazi-aligned “democratic” regimes like the ones in Ukraine and Colombia. Or that the U.S. has the world’s worst prison system for human rights, an increasingly militarized and deadly police state, and a “democracy” which is a corporate-run farce. This idea that Washington leads the “free world” must be uncritically accepted, just like during the previous cold war. To fortify this counter-factual narrative in the face of mounting contradictions, the U.S. empire must enforce an ever-intensifying paradigm of censorship and propaganda. The baseless narrative that China is committing a “genocide” against the Uyghurs must be coupled with efforts to deplatform media outlets like The Grayzone, one of the few publications which challenge the imperialist media’s distortions surrounding Xinjiang. In the social media age, this campaign to control the flow of information has taken on a more totalizing form than was the case when the CIA started covertly influencing the media during the Cold War. Now the CIA—which gained the official legal authority to covertly plant stories within U.S. media in 2013–can propagate its lies about Xinjiang “concentration camps” and supposed north Korean public executions within digital media. Which then gets pushed onto the public through social media algorithms that have been manipulated to promote “authoritative” sources like the New York Times. The internet has also been weaponized to snuff out those who are most reliably doing journalism. In the last five years, Google has systematically suppressed search results for socialist and anti-war websites. And in the last year or so, The Grayzone, MintPressnews, and other anti-imperialist outlets have been blacklisted on Wikipedia by a group of Venezuelan regime change operatives on explicitly political grounds. Since Russiagate kickstarted media hysteria about “fake news” and “Russian interference,” this kind of corruption for the sake of informational suppression has become casual within the functioning of the internet. The Web as we initially knew it has been dismantled. It’s been replaced with a NATO bloc Great Firewall where social media companies, at the behest of the U.S. government, not just regularly censor alternative media but suspend prominent accounts from Venezuela, Syria, Iran, China, and other countries. Whereas China’s Great Firewall is designed to stem the flow of the West’s constant online fascist propaganda, which the PRC is under no obligation to allow to run freely within its borders, our Great Firewall is designed to suppress information which can help us break out of the fascist worldview. That can show us China isn’t to blame for the pandemic, that the stories of DPRK “human rights abuses” have been fabricated for the purpose of inflaming Orientalist racism against Koreans, that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang are actually benefiting from the economic development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, that Cuba in fact has a democracy far more functional than our own “democratic” republic. These and the other realities which could shake us out of the anti-communist worldview, and challenge our government’s geopolitical machinations, get preemptively erased from the consciousness. And those who expose the atrocities of the U.S. empire, such as Julian Assange, get tortured so that they can be made examples to other potential hard-hitting journalists. This is the model that Washington’s more explicitly anti-democratic allied regimes from recent years have taken on: suppress dissenting material and brutally retaliate against those who try to report on the state’s abuses. After the U.S. carried out a coup against Evo Morales two years ago, Bolivia’s new regime targeted media outlets which challenged the pro-coup narratives (they didn’t even want anyone calling the affair a “coup”) and tortured journalists who reported on events like police brutality. This history shows that we in the core of the empire are subject to a repressive approach which mirrors that of a fascist Latin American junta. Bolivia’s coup regime has been taken out of power, but the imperialists continue to carry out coups wherever they still can, and lately these coups have taken on an even more Sinophobic nature. This month, a U.S.-backed military coup happened in Guinea. U.S. forces even trained the soldiers who perpetrated the coup, and the motive behind this meddling was clear: to oust the previous government for its cooperation with China in Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects. Subtly, the U.S. media and the “humanitarian” NGOs have long been manufacturing consent for this coup; last year, U.S.-tied Human Rights Watch put out an interview titled “Displaced and Destitute as Guinea Advances Dam Project with Help from China.” Its accounts of the impacts of the negative parts of the BRI project weren’t necessarily incorrect, but it portrayed the issue with an obvious bias wherein the BRI’s potential to bring electricity to millions of Guinea residents (as the BRI has already done in other parts of Africa) was downplayed. Now that this coup has happened, we won’t get to see the living standard increases that the BRI would otherwise have gotten the chance to bring to Guinea. The imperialists have halted the country’s progress towards joining the new, more equitable world that China is building. And this adds onto their parallel success in Mali, which had its hopes of BRI development dashed by its recent coup. This year’s coup in Chad, and the brewing potential for a coup in Niger, could also complicate the BRI. As this violent sabotage of multi-polar progress unfolds, HRW and its backers are rebuilding the narrative precedent for a new coup in Bolivia; this week, HRW put out a statement that accused Bolivia’s new socialist government of unjustly prosecuting the coup regime leaders who had carried out massacres of protesters, and that even repeated the long-debunked lie from the Organization of American States about the socialists having perpetrated “electoral fraud” prior to the coup. Thankfully, Bolivia’s proletariat has shown itself to be too well-organized for the imperialists to hold onto power within the country. Which will eventually become the case for the proletarians within all the other countries where Washington has been meddling.
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Post by Admin on Sept 17, 2021 10:06:31 GMT
‘Worst I’ve seen in 20 years’: How the Epik hack reveals every secret the far-right tried to hide 'They are fully compromised end-to-end.' www.dailydot.com/debug/epik-hack-far-right-sites-anonymous/A large-scale breach of the domain registrar and web hosting company Epik has exposed a massive trove of data, including the names of individuals behind some of the far-right’s most notorious websites. The data, as first reported by independent journalist Steven Monacelli on Monday, was released as a torrent this week by the hacking collective Anonymous. In a press release on the hack, dubbed Operation EPIK FAIL, Anonymous claimed that it was able to obtain “a decade’s worth” of information, including domain registrations and transfers, account credentials, and emails from an Epik employee. “This dataset is all that’s needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the internet that has eluded researchers, activists, and, well, just about everybody,” the release alleges.
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Post by Admin on Sept 17, 2021 19:45:55 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 19, 2021 17:06:35 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 20, 2021 18:09:40 GMT
ON CONTACT: UNDERCURRENTS OF AMERICAN FASCISM By Chris Hedges, RT . September 19, 2021 RESISTANCE REPORT popularresistance.org/undercurrents-of-american-fascism/On January 6, 2021, a mob, incited by outgoing US President Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol building, in an attempt to halt the in-session congressional certification of the 2020 election results. Within the mob, as scholar Gabriel Rockhill points out, were many current members of the military and police. Some of the leaders of the organizations involved, such as Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio and Joseph Biggs, had direct ties to US intelligence agencies, having served as FBI informants. Only one fifth of Capitol Police were on duty that day, both unprepared and underequipped, even though the US national security state had advance knowledge of the plot. Capitol Police were seen opening barricades and fraternizing with the mob. The assault raises questions about how deeply fascist undercurrents run beneath the ruling elites and organs of state security. How much of the ruling capitalist class backed the organizations behind the assault on the Capitol? To what extent are proto-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys ‘astroturfed’ by them? (Astroturfed means discretely funded so as to create the illusion of a grassroots-movement.) What was the exact ratio and relationship between state agents and the para-state –i.e. vigilante– actors? Was this solely an organic conflict between the Trump and Biden camps, or was something deeper at play? And what does all this portend for the future, especially given the staggering levels of social inequality, deep financial wounds caused by the pandemic, and the decision by the Biden administration to walk back from its tepid campaign promises, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Is this a moment of rising fascism in American society? And is it prefigured by the attempt by ruling elites in the 1930s to carry out a fascist coup with the breakdown of capitalism? Is this where we are headed? Transcript Chris Hedges: Today, we discuss the undercurrents of American fascism with the scholar Gabriel Rockhill. Gabriel Rockhill: I’ll just point your listeners to a very important statement made by Mike German, who’s a former FBI agent and now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He pointed out that some of those involved in The Capitol riot had been involved in similar incidents in recent years and were repeatedly caught on tape. And this is a quote from Mike German, “We know their names. We know their criminal histories. They’ve been doing it because the police have been letting them do it. They’ve been doing it because the FBI have been letting them do it.” Right? And this is from a former FBI agent. And so this should raise questions both about the capitalist backers and the state complicity in fascist forces on the ground. And one of the reasons it’s important to see this kind of triangulation between the capitalist backers, the state, and then parastate or, you know, parallel fascist organizations is because historically we know that this is often how fascist organizations have worked. CH: On January 6th, 2021, a mob, incited by outgoing US President Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to halt the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Within the mob, as scholar Gabriel Rockhill points out, were many current members of the military and police. Some of the leaders of the organizations involved, such as Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio and Joseph Biggs had direct ties to US intelligence agencies having served as FBI informants. Only one-fifth of Capitol police were on duty that day. And they were unprepared and underequipped, even though the US National Security state had advanced knowledge of the plot. Capitol Police were seen opening barricades and fraternizing with the mob. The assault raises questions about how deeply fascist undercurrents run within the ruling elites and organs of state security? How much of the ruling capitalist class backed the organizations behind the assault on The Capitol? To what extent are proto-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys astroturfed by them, meaning discretely funded to create the illusion of a grassroots movement from below? What was the exact ratio and relationship between state agents and the parastate, i.e. vigilante actors? Was this solely an organic conflict between the Trump and Biden camps or was something more at play? And what does all this pertain for the future, especially given the staggering levels of social inequality, deep financial wounds caused by the pandemic, and the decision by the Biden administration to walk back from its tepid campaign promises, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Is this a moment of rising fascism in American society? And is it prefigured by the attempt by the ruling elites in the 1930s to carry out a fascist coup with the breakdown of capitalism? Is this where we are headed? Joining me to discuss the nature and virulence of American fascism is Gabriel Rockhill, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. So in this very fine article, you look back at this fairly serious attempt by the business elites to fund a fascist coup and draw parallels to the moment that we’re in now. But let’s talk about the undercurrent of fascism in American society, fascist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, as you write the formation of the American Legion after World War I. These have been essentially fascist or proto-fascist movements that have always existed within the power framework. Robert Paxton makes this point in this book, “Anatomy of Fascism.” So it’s not like it’s created anew. It’s something that’s been with us for a long time. Perhaps you can lay that out. GR: Yeah. Fascist–fascism, when it arrived on the European scene, particularly in Italy and then extended to Germany, was later framed in terms of the kind of dominant history that we get in textbooks and the mass media as being an anomaly, an exception, a kind of break with democratic rule. And, of course, there were certain things that were relatively unprecedented. But one of the extraordinary things when you look at the actual history of fascist movements is that there were fascist movements in every capitalist state in the wake of the Great Depression, and that fascism always took on specific forms in relationship to its inscription within a very unique national context. In fact, one extraordinary analysis in this regard comes straight from the mouth of a fascist, the self-declared fascist, General Francisco Franco in Spain, who said, quote, “Fascism, since that is the word that is used, fascism presents, wherever it manifest itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary,” end quote, which of course makes sense because if ultranationalism is one of the key components of fascism then when it manifests itself in different countries, simply taking models from elsewhere and imposing them would create the sense that, “Well, this is a foreign development,” and other such things. Georgi Dimitrov pointed out that when fascism is operative in the United States, it will be under the name of American patriotism and the defense of the constitution. And so specifically within the US context, there were of course a whole series of fascist and semi-fascist organizations that were operative in the ‘30s and even prior to the 1930s. So much so that there were a lot of discussions, even in the mainstream press, of Mussolini’s Blackshirts simply being the Italian version of the Ku Klux Klan. And this makes a lot of sense from the perspective–from a historical perspective because of the dedication on the part of organizations like the Silver Legion, Ku Klux Klan, Friends of Germany, and other such fascist or semi-fascist organizations because they were organizations that were dedicated to many of the same things that the Blackshirts in Italy and the Nazis were dedicated to, the supremacy of so-called Western civilization, a pro-capitalist orientation, a rabid anticommunism, an investment in ultranationalism that leads into imperialism and colonialism. And so in my own research, it’s been very important to break with this ideology of fascist exceptionalism that suggested only occurred maybe once or twice in history in unique places, and instead extend the analysis to look at all of these different fascist movements both in the past, and as you opened, as well in the present. CH: Well, what’s interesting about these kind of paramilitary vigilante groups is that they were greenlighted by the ruling elites, especially after the civil war, to carry out a reign of terror. And they were the White Leagues, there were all sorts of organizations against African-Americans. They were used–the gun thugs, the militias, the Pinkertons, the American Legion were used to attack militant workers, the Wobblies with great deals of violence. Hundreds of people were killed. So there’s always been built within in the American system an accepted wing of fascism. And that nurturing of that wing in a time of crisis is very dangerous as we saw in the 1930s and as we are seeing now. Perhaps, you can talk about what happens in societal breakdown. You write extensively about the attempt of a–by the business elites to carry out a coup, recruiting the former Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. But draw those parallels between the 1930s and now, and what happens to these–this nucleus. And, well, we have to–we have to also acknowledge that there–these kind of paramilitary organizations have expanded with the creation of mercenary forces run by–many of them by Betsy DeVos’ brother, the former Blackwater. I think it’s called Xe now or something. So let’s talk about that. GR: Yeah. I think that one of the things that you’re alluding to that’s so important for understanding both the deep history of fascism and its contemporary manifestations in the 21st century is the political economy of fascism, right? And so sometimes it’s assumed that fascism is simply a set of ideas or beliefs, and that in order to struggle against them, we need to wage a kind of ideological war in the name of being more tolerant, you know, fighting against the politics of hate and other such things. And in my own research, one of the things that I’ve kind of tried to bring to the fore, and other researchers have done this as well, is the ways in which so many of these movements gain both prominence and media visibility through the support of certain factions of the capitalist ruling class. And so in the case of the 1930s in the article that you’re alluding to that I published on the planned seizure of state power within the United States to establish an explicit fascist dictatorship. This was the language that was used at the time, right? They weren’t using the kind of whitewashed language in the post-White World War II era in which people would suggest, “Oh, it’s not really fascist. Maybe it’s something else.” They were explicit about this being a fascist dictatorship. And the capitalist ruling class contributed. And this included some of the leading families in the–among the kind of rubber barons of the early 20th century. Morgan of JPMorgan, the bank, du Pont, Rockefeller, Pew, Mellon, all of these elements of the capitalist ruling class recognize that they had an extreme and profound crisis on their hands. That crisis was both economic and ideological. The economic crisis was due to the fact that the Great Depression had really just wreaked havoc over the capitalist countries. And it had not done this to the Soviet–you know, to the Soviet Union which had broken with capitalism, at least to, you know, a very large extent, as a socialist–as a socialist state. And so it was becoming increasingly clear to many people, particularly the working and toiling masses, that capitalism wasn’t working and that socialism was doing a lot better. This was linked to an ideological crisis, and that was the inability of the political elite in the capitalist classes to rule hegemonically, meaning to rule by consent. To get the general population on board with their particular project. The election of FDR was quite important for the consolidation of a particular orientation within the political elite at that point in time, which basically amounted to a slight class compromise with the New Deal, as it was established in the ‘30s, the idea being that FDR was going to shore up the interests of the capitalist ruling class and give small provisions to certain sections of the working class in order to stave off revolution, right? But another faction of the capitalist ruling class as well as the right wing of the Democratic Party broke with FDR over this because they were looking at and examining what was going on in Europe, and they identified fascism as the best passable solution for both the economic and the ideological crisis of capitalism, right? Because fascism would allow them to get a certain sector of the population on board with a rabidly capitalist, anticommunist, anti-worker program that would ultimately allow them to increase their profits and invest in the permanent work comp. CH: Well, to what extent–one of the things FDR did was recognize unions. United Mine Workers Union had been banned. He brought it back. The United Auto Workers union which carried the big sit-down strikes in Flint and other cities. To what extent did that kind of relationship with unions or willingness to accept unions form–or to what extent was that a driving factor in pushing the business elite to embrace fascism? GR: Yeah. Definitely FDR’s support of union organizing and–as well other elements of the New Deal that were basically providing both organizing abilities and a social safety net to the working and toiling masses. And although this was only carving into capitalist profits ever so slightly, it was too much for certain sectors of the ruling class. At the same time, of course, as I’m sure you know, FDR didn’t by any means go far enough. You know, one of the stories that I tell in the lead up to this planned fascist seizure of state power was a conflict over the Bonus Army march of 1932. And FDR maintained the line that we shouldn’t pay this bonus. We shouldn’t really support the veterans in various ways. He didn’t push for a bill against lynching, right? So a very important part of the New Deal was what was going on for Black Americans at that point in time. He also kind of lined up on the military establishment in various ways and continued–I mean, in the lead up to World War II, some of the kind of more imperialist elements of the history of the United States. So it’s obviously a mixed record. And from our vantage point today, it’s important to do a kind of variegated analysis, right? Look at the gains for the working masses and then also point out where there are certain limitations. CH: Great. When we come back, we’ll continue our conversation about the fascist undercurrents in American society with Professor Gabriel Rockhill. Welcome back to On Contact. We continue our conversation about the undercurrents of fascism in American society with Professor Gabriel Rockhill. So let’s just lay out for people who don’t know briefly that attempt to carry out a coup which, as you write in the article, which people can find on–is–liberationschool.org? Is that where they can read–it’s a very smart piece. All of your stuff is. But let’s lay out what happened. And it was the major ruling families. I went to prep school as a scholarship kid with their children and grandchildren. Let’s talk about what–and they are as–you know, up close, as repugnant as they seem. Let’s talk a little bit about what they did, just the mechanics of it. GR: So the basic plot was the following, and I should preface this by saying sometimes when people identify conspiracies on the part of the capitalist ruling class or the political elite, people will cry foul immediately and say, “This is a conspiracy theory. This has never been proven.” Just so that your listeners know and viewers, this was proven by the US government in the McCormack-Dickstein Committee that investigated it, that there was indeed a conspiracy to overthrow the US government and establish a fascist dictatorship, even though the same committee also–they cut out some of the testimony in the final published report, and so it took, you know, a lot of investigative journalism to get the full story. But what we now know, and in fact we knew as of about 1934, 1935, is that a significant faction of the capitalist ruling class and finance capital in particular created in 1934, the American Liberty League. And this liberty league brought together business elites and high profile political figures, many of whom were on the right wing of the Democratic Party as I mentioned a moment ago. And they both put together the funds necessary, $3 million but they said they had up to $300 million. So an extraordinary amount of money. To hire what they referred to as a man on the white horse. They wanted a kind of military-style leader who they could use as the figurehead for this particular movement. They hired Gerald G. McGuire, who was an employee of a brokerage firm to go into a study tour for four months of European fascist movements in order to identify the best movement–or the best model to be applied in the United States. He came back after going to Germany, Spain, Italy, and France, and did identify some of what he considered to be the strengths of those various movements, like Hitler’s solution to unemployment was forced labor. He thought that would be a great idea within the context of the United States. Or the Blackshirts who used as the backbone for their movement impoverished veterans. He also thought that was a great idea. But the primary model that he latched on to was a fascist organization in France called the Croix-de-Feu or the Cross of Fire. And that was a fascist organization composed of some 500,000 commissioned and noncommissioned officers that later would grow into actually the biggest political party in France in the Third Republic. So it’s a very significant fascist organization. And with this model in mind, then he reached out to General Smedley Butler who is identified as one potential candidate. There were others, including General Douglas MacArthur, James E. Van Zandt, and others. And put to him the following project that if he could raise an army of about 500,000 veterans, march on Washington, and force FDR to accept him as a kind of Secretary of General Affairs, and then take a position as just a figurehead very much like the King of Italy, then the government could be–the elected government could be displaced. He would become the de facto leader, and could then pursue the agenda of his capitalist backers, which was to roll back the New Deal and to allow them to accumulate at the level that they’d like to accumulate. And moreover, by then also throwing the veterans themselves who had been mobilized in this fascist army under the bus, so to speak, because they were going to be paid their pensions for just one year, but after the fascist seizure of power was consolidated, they were going to be let go. That is the plot in a nutshell. But there were also other parallel plots, I should–I should mention just in passing. This was not the only one. CH: Well–and this is exactly what the Nazis did. They betrayed the working class. They gave them a day off and then they abolished all the unions. The very core of their support, in many ways, came from certainly the rural working class, not so much the industrial working class. And you saw the same thing in Italy. There’s–I want to draw a parallel which you do in the article. So you talk about how during the investigations by the McCormack and Dickstein Committee in the House of Representatives, there was an immediate attempt to kind of cover up what the committee discovered to protect the ruling business elites, and you draw a parallel between what happened then and what’s happening now. GR: Yes. Absolutely. I mean, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, we can see very clearly because we have the distance that historically allows us to see more–you know, in a much more straightforward manner what was going on then. It ran a faith in government campaign. And this is often what bourgeois democracies will do when it becomes part of the public record, that there’s been some malfeasance on the part of the political elite or the capitalist ruling class. There’s so much blowback that they have to do something. And so a faith in government campaign consists in recognizing certain facts but then doing everything that they can in order to consolidate the general population’s belief that the government is ruling in their own best interest, right? So in the case of this committee that was investigating the fascist plot, they recognized that there was a fascist plot but they refused to call for–testifying any of the capitalist backers because this was simply based on “hearsay”, right, which is actually testimony on the part of those who were being enrolled in the plot. They also censored their report, as I mentioned earlier. They tried to use Red Scare tactics by saying that, “Well, the communists were backing some strike movements and whatnot.” And they didn’t pursue any prosecutions of the conspirators, even though it was a proven conspiracy, right? And as we know from the contemporary moment, the Republicans have been pushing back on a concrete investigation into what exactly happened on January 6th. We can, of course, relate this to other moments, right? The Warren Commission in the wake of the JFK assassination. We could look at the 9/11 Commission. There are so many other examples of what the political elite in a bourgeois democracy like the United States will do to try to really minimize the blowback from proven conspiracies or from moments in time, like January 6th, where a lot more needs to be known about who exactly was involved in allowing this to happen or participating in it financially from behind the scenes, right? In that regard, we don’t only need governmental investigations because of the limitations that I’ve just pointed out, but we need the work of investigative journalists, of activists, and militants who are really putting the pressure on in order to figure out what’s actually going on behind the kind of political spectacle that’s often created. CH: Well, in a footnote here, you’re quoting Vanessa Wills. She talks about the DeVos families, Koch brothers, Robert Mercer, the Dorr brothers as key figures in The Capitol attack, drawing primarily from the ranks of small business owners, military, et cetera. They were–they were astroturfing or funding as they did with the Tea Party. Very similar kind of phenomenon. GR: Absolutely. A hundred percent. And this is, again, why the political economy of fascism is so important. When there are fascist movements on the ground, these are rarely simply, absolutely organic and grassroots themselves because of the way in which they also play into the hands and interests of the capitalist ruling class. They’re pro-capitalist, antisocialist, generally anti-worker, et cetera. And so the capitalist backers of the lockdown protests as they’re called, are a really important part of the lead up to what happened on January 6th. And also the question of the complicity of the state in both allowing and potentially even encouraging what happened on January 6th. I’ll just point your listeners to a very important statement made by Mike German, who’s a former FBI agent and now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He pointed out that some of those involved in The Capitol riot had been involved in similar incidents in recent years and were repeatedly caught on tape. And this is a quote from Mike German. “We know their names. We know their criminal histories. They’ve been doing it because the police have been letting them do it. They’ve been doing it because the FBI have been letting them do it.” Right? And this is from a former FBI agent. And so this should raise questions both about the capitalist backers and the state complicity in fascist forces on the ground. And one of the reasons it’s important to see this kind of triangulation between the capitalist backers, the state, and then parastate or, you know, parallel fascist organizations is because historically we know that this is often how fascist organizations have worked. CH: And they successfully muted the press or turn the press into a megaphone. You have examples of that, how when Smedley Butler exposed this plot, he was discredited on the front pages of the New York Times and everywhere else. But just in the last minute and a half, I want you to talk about where we are now, how dangerous a moment it is, and to what extent has these–have these historical antecedents informed us about where we’re going? GR: Yeah. One of the important things is to see that as Biden came into office in the United States, he used the PR campaign of being the savior of democracy and kind of last bulwark against Trumpism as a halo that really permitted him to roll back so many of his campaign promises and to continue the US imperialist expansions abroad, as well as crackdowns internally on dissent. And in that regard, we should not simply be hoodwinked by this kind of “good cop, bad cop” logic that’s often operative in bourgeois democracies where you have the Democratic Party and the Republican Party kind of functioning in this capacity, and instead recognize that there has not been a serious reckoning with what happened on January 6th, and that even the Democratic Party has a vested interest in continuing to function as a kind of tolerant party for fascist elements, because those fascist elements, as we know from history, are the final solution to class struggle. So if capitalism is on its heels, if socialism is advancing, the capitalist ruling class is not going to allow itself to be overthrown peacefully, right? It will mobilize counterrevolutionary forces of the most draconian sort. And so the fact that under democratic leadership with Biden, you have the continuation of fascist organizations in the United States, US imperialism, we have these fascist elements that are really integral to the deep history of capitalism, and therefore, from our perspective, as those who are struggling for a more egalitarian world, we have to recognize that fascism takes different forms and different shapes, and that it’s always an element operative under capitalist rule and bourgeois democracy. As much as it can help us stave off certain fascist elements, will keep some of them in the wings in case there’s ever a real threat to bourgeois democratic and hence capitalist ruling. CH: Great. That was Gabriel Rockhill, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
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Post by Admin on Sept 21, 2021 13:38:02 GMT
The attack on Democracy is what angers Socialism - It's Not Centrism versus Extremism It's Democracy and Socialism versus Totalitarianism and Barbarism - Meagan Day Jacobin Mag, October 2020. "Socialism makes war upon a system;not upon a class"
James Keir Hardie.
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Post by Admin on Sept 22, 2021 17:53:05 GMT
Zarah Sultana: Electoral College Is a ‘Shameful, Anti-Democratic Power Grab’ By Zarah Sultana The proposal to abolish 'One Member, One Vote' in Labour leadership elections is an attack on democracy by a Westminster elite – and betrays Keir Starmer's commitment to empower party members. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/09/zarah-sultana-electoral-college-is-a-shameful-anti-democratic-power-grabThere’s nothing really that special about MPs. We’re not necessarily the finest minds (look at Gavin Williamson) or the best public speakers (try listening to Tory MPs in the Commons). But what we are is representatives, elected to serve our constituents in Parliament, a responsibility we owe to our parties. Were it not for Labour members and trade union affiliate members – who knock on doors, deliver leaflets, and build support for socialist politics in our communities and workplaces – I and my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) would be nothing. The hundreds of thousands of people who sustain our party and the millions of workers who make up the wider labour movement are rooted in their communities. They face the same struggles as millions of ordinary people do. They know what it’s like to face cuts to Universal Credit, underfunding of schools and hospitals, and the injustice of low pay and unaffordable rents. My CLP is made up of nurses, teachers, students, pensioners and many others – people from all walks of life. They are the lifeblood of our party, and often are at the heart of the community too. Any notion, then, that Labour MPs have a better understanding of the challenges facing the people they’re elected to represent, and the members to whom we owe our positions, is offensive elitism, driven by an unfounded arrogance. This kind of attitude – the idea that a small group of politicians who spend the vast majority of their time in, and are often enraptured by, the Westminster bubble – know better than everyone else is precisely why so many outside SW1 find politics profoundly alienating. When Keir Starmer ran for Labour leader, it seemed to many members that he grasped this. He pledged a “more inclusive, more democratic culture” in the party, and to “push power, wealth and opportunity” away from Westminster. Keir even wrote that we “must embed into our systems and actions this principle that all members are equal.” His leadership thus far has hardly lived up to these promises. But Keir’s attempt to reintroduce an electoral college for future leadership elections is a new low and marks a grievous betrayal of his mandate. The return of an electoral college would be a shameful, anti-democratic power grab by the leadership, hoarding yet more power in the hands of MPs in Westminster. It would mean that the vote of a single MP in future leadership elections would be worth the same as literally thousands of members and trade unionists. In attempting to push through this proposal, Keir is not only further trashing the mandate on which he leads the party, but turning his back on the most basic of democratic principles: one person, one vote. Opposition to this elitist Westminster power grab isn’t limited to socialist MPs on the backbenches. Multiple shadow ministers have spoken out against it. So too have Open Labour and Simon Fletcher, a former senior special advisor to Keir, who wrote that a return to the electoral college would be a “totally unacceptable diminution of the rights of Labour Party members.” After all, it was Ed Miliband who introduced the ‘One Member, One Vote’ (OMOV) system in 2014 as Labour leader. While the media were determined to spin it as a set-piece confrontation with the trade unions, Unite, my union, alongside GMB, saw that it was in fact a historic advance for party democracy. Ed himself said that one member, one vote was about “letting the people back into our politics,” and making “us more reflective of the country we seek to govern”. He was absolutely right. As was my colleague Jonathan Reynolds, now the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, when he said in 2016 that he sees “no justification for MPs having a third of the vote to themselves.” Jonathan pointed out that the electoral college “belongs to an era of machine politics that is no longer with us.” These are not the actions of a party leadership that has any interest in winning the next general election. Keir should be taking the fight to the Tories and presenting a compelling vision to the country. Instead, he is attempting to entrench permanent control over the party by a faction whose only agenda for the past decade has been aggressively opposing first Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn – and publicly trashing their respective social democratic and socialist programmes. All those across the party and movement who want Labour to be a progressive, democratic party that faces the challenges of the twenty-first century – rather than a Blairite rump ruled by a narrow Westminster clique – must unite to oppose this anti-democratic power-grab.
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Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2021 12:18:36 GMT
The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida Translated by George Collins Part of the Radical Thinkers series www.versobooks.com/books/3721-the-politics-of-friendshipThis book is free to download as an ebook until September 24th, 23:59 EST, as part of our student reading sale. An influential exploration of the idea of friendship and its political consequences. “O, my friends, there is no friend.” The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida's “political turn,” marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida’s thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “my friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future.
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