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Post by Admin on Oct 3, 2020 16:40:18 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 8, 2020 13:05:10 GMT
CLASS DIVIDES AND CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS“When I compare the present moment in the US to China’s Cultural Revolution, it’s not from the perspective of a defender of capitalism or the status quo. It’s from a perspective that seeks class abolition and complete social revolution, not just cultural radicalism.” From Lorenzo Raymond abeautifulresistance.org/site/2020/11/28/class-divides-and-cultural-revolutions“Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black.” — Assata: An Autobiography It is a hot day in June of 2020. At a Brooklyn protest associated with “Black Lives Matter”, I join in with a group of African-American women as they lead the crowd, call-and-response style, in a chant you may be familiar with: IT IS OUR DUTY TO FIGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM.- IT IS OUR DUTY TO WIN. WE MUST LOVE EACH OTHER AND SUPPORT EACH OTHER. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS. When we’re done, the phrase “It is our duty to win” stays with me for the rest of the night. It lingers because this is a strange sentiment to hear in the context of 21st century radicalism. Winning is a concept that, while not free of morality, is free of moralism. Contemporary leftism has adopted the doctrine of “prefigurative politics,” and while there are numerous high-minded ways of summarizing the this ideal, it is essentially a way of saying “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game." [1] Up until recently, the theory of prefiguration was so ingrained that it amounted to a form of pacifism—A less violent world could never be attained through violent means, we were told. In her influential 2011 essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House,” Rebecca Solnit used Audre Lorde’s famous prefigurative metaphor (“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”) to dismiss property destruction and fighting cops from the repertoire of the Occupy movement. That level of absolutist idealism has been discarded, thankfully. Working-class Blacks in Ferguson rejected utopian nonviolence, leading the anti-policing movement to new heights in 2014 ; critiques of state murder have remained prominent due to fiery insurrections like Baltimore and Kenosha. But idealist fundamentalism maintains its stranglehold on the social justice movement in another way—the prioritizing of cultural revolution over materialist class revolution. Cultural revolutions can be historic, of course. From the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire to the explosion of the Red Guards in China, they’ve left a mark on the world. Yet the question remains: In the long-term, do they benefit the masses of people in whose name they are done, and do they truly hurt the elite whom they’re supposed to be targeting? In other words, do they bring us any closer to winning? “Of all our studies,” Malcolm X often said, “history is best qualified to reward our research.” Let us look at some. In Rome, the viciously persecuted Christians managed to shift culture to the point where much of the elite, and eventually Emperor Constantine himself, championed their cause. The Roman establishment converted to Christianity and enabled the faithful in tearing down the pagan statues that represented their oppression. Yet outside of this, little positive happened in the lives of the masses. Constantine’s militarism was bolstered by his Christianity (indeed, in his religious vision, he saw a cross over a battlefield accompanied by the words, “by this, conquer.") Scholar Michele Salzman notes that the emperor’s “Christian appointees…were of the same status as their pagan peers, that is from old, established senatorial families.” The anti-authoritarian aspects of Christianity were degraded as it became wedded to the state. Roman masses often fought among themselves in bloody riots over heresy while Constantine and his heirs established a new family dynasty. And slavery continued. [2] Some classical scholars promoted a myth that Christianity brought down Rome, but modern historians agree that the Western empire was crumbling well before the Constantinian shift. In fact, the cultural revolution seems to have given imperialism a new lease on life: the Christian leaders established Constantinople and Byzantium—the “New Rome” in eastern Europe. The Byzantine Empire lasted nearly a thousand years and helped launch the Crusades. How does this relate to Black Lives Matter? Going against expectations, the elite increasingly embraces the movement and frames it in capitalist terms to the point where the CEO of JP Morgan Chase publicly “took a knee” for the victims of police brutality. Repulsive companies like Walmart and Amazon, known for exploiting the labor of people of color and directly busting unions, do everything they can to buy in to the struggle, donating millions to “antiracist” NGOs. It’s not clear if their accompanying policy reforms help the Black masses at all, but we do know that for newly woke investment bank BlackRock Inc., the changes do not include dropping their investments in private prisons. [3] The corporations’ allies in government have taken up the cultural aspects of the cause as well. Republican senators and military commanders are moving to rename all US bases that currently honor Confederate leaders. Congressional Democrats, of course, went full cultural nationalist, wrapping themselves in African Kente cloths for their post-George Floyd press conference. This is the same congress that refuses to give us Medicare for All or consistent anti-poverty relief but does funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks. Would Assata Shakur, a committed anti-imperialist who considers socialist Cuba to be a noble society, consider that winning? One of the main justifications for rioting as a revolutionary tactic is to wage economic warfare, yet the stock market, which rises with the fortunes of the largest companies, prospered more than ever during the summer uprising. (Contrast this with the results of a material revolutionary victory like the end of the Vietnam War in 1973-74, where the stock market crashed. The completion of the New Deal in 1937 also lowered stocks.) To the extent that elite dividends have leveled out, it’s because the 1% thinks congress isn’t doing enough to stimulate consumer consumption. The neoliberal version of antiracism has been great for 21st century business, and it’s certain to expand. [4] The notion of American capitalism thriving without white supremacy may seem absurd, but then so did the idea of Romans renouncing centuries of paganism to prosper under the banner of a despised Jewish sect. Analogies to China’s Cultural Revolution may seem spurious given how many comparisons have been made by right-wing pundits (as well as The New Yorker’s retaliatory comparisons between Trump and Mao). But partisans are clearly working from a cartoon version of Chinese history; The actual “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was not primarily a massacre by student-led movements, it was a civil conflict with multiple sides. Recent scholarship shows that in fact the majority of casualties were the Red Guards and their allies. [5] At their inception, the Red Guards sincerely wanted to advance radical collectivism and eliminate capitalism in China. They took their cues for how to accomplish this from Mao Zedong, since they credited him with the success of the 1949 revolution. They allowed Mao’s faction of the elite to frame this as a cultural revolt that would leave the Communist Party intact, as well as most of the economy. Statues were toppled, curriculums were reformed, commissars were displaced, and radical slogans filled the air. But the party kept all activity within narrow cultural confines. When Zhou Enlai was confronted with complaints about deprivation of workers and peasants, his response was to denounce their grievances as “economism.” “Oppose economism” quickly became an official Red Guard slogan. [6] As leading China historian Andrew Walder notes, the “temporary and contract workers” who helped begin the rebellion in 1966 were not allowed to define “the main lines of factional division, and their self-interested [economic] demands were repudiated in 1967 and their movements were suppressed.” The Chinese elite sidelined policy issues and populist demands with the “regime’s practice of categorizing individuals based on their family background.” A person’s class “heritage” came to define her identity to an almost racialized extent. As this culture of collective blaming spread out to the countryside, it led to chaotic and bloody feuding by civilian neighbor against civilian neighbor. But the Red Guards were not involved in this. In fact, the grassroots left tried to minimize the importance of family class categories. According to Walder, a “famous manifesto that denounced the system of class labels generated widespread support, but it was denounced as reactionary by the elite sponsors of the rebel movement who were close to Mao Zedong…the issue hardly figured at all in the much larger and more influential Red Guard movement in the universities.” On both the left and right we hear talk of protest movements being managed by elite actors—Not only is there the antisemitic legend of George Soros as prime instigator of the George Floyd rebellion, there is also the claim made by Susan Rice and other Democratic operatives that the uprising is being administered by Vladimir Putin. Neither of those narratives have a basis in reality, but the phenomenon of elites taking control of insurgencies for their own opportunistic purposes is well established. Walder explains that: “Under certain circumstances, those who are privileged in the existing order will find it in their interest to form rebel groups and join in attacks on powerful officials, and even to oust them from power—precisely in order to protect their positions. To do so they may willingly align themselves with rebels that express grievances against the existing order…The connections between interests and political choices are defined by context…The social and political characteristics of members of a group provide little guidance to context-specific choices [on who to support]” [7] The uncharacteristic apologies for the uprising made by CNN, NPR and other big media outlets indicate such a self-interested choice. Trump’s tariffs have cut into the business plans of some of the most powerful corporations in the world like Apple, Walmart and Costco, who have only narrowly avoided losses so far due to constant parrying with the president. [8] [9] They predicted that his trade policy would lead to US unemployment, but it did the opposite by 2019, damaging the companies’ credibility. These businesses which torment their workers all over the world and profit off of minerals mined by children in Africa are not endorsing human rights out of empathy or responsibility, but out of a turf war among the ruling class. With the refusal of Washington to relieve the worst economic crisis in 80 years, and the denial of the Democratic nomination to the popular progressive Bernie Sanders, a radical rebellion was to be expected. The elite was thoroughly poised to step in front of the moving parade and steer it away from a direction that could threaten their wealth. As Black Lives Matter activist Andray Domise put it, this rebellion built on anti-capitalism and working-class power was diverted into “a diversity job fair” for African-Americans in the professional managerial class. [10] Andrew Walder also notes that the Chinese “rebels who seized power lacked the ability to enforce their claims—whether they were coalitions of popular insurgents and cadre rebels or cadre rebels who acted alone.” Thus the elite leaders were willing to stand down and let them take limited local control, knowing that they did not have enough weapons or organization hold territory for long. Cultural chaos was tolerable as long as “the disorder did not undermine the planned economy, public order and national security.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 15, 2021 0:35:13 GMT
Revolutionary Marxism vs. PostcapitalismPost on: January 3, 2021 Emilio Albamonte The Marxist method and the relevance of the era of crises, wars, and revolutions The following text is an edited version of the opening report made by Emilio Albamonte at the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS) conference, which took place in Argentina on December 11–13. It addresses the theoretical and historical foundations for understanding the international situation. This includes the definition of the era of crises, wars, and revolutions as a strategic framework of the current crisis, and the concept of “capitalist equilibrium” to analyze the relationships between economics, geopolitics, and class struggle. It also looks at different responses to the crisis, as well as the questions the current stage poses for revolutionary Marxism. *** To open the conference, I want to take up three questions. First, on the current world situation and the Marxist method for understanding it. I want to address the strategic problems and the structural tendencies. The document by Claudia Cinatti looks at the political problems and the current tendencies.1 The second question is to analyze different responses to this situation. This is going to look at theoretical debates with different currents — currents that are based in academia, which are generally petty bourgeois and anti-socialist. There are no, or rather there are very few, socialist and revolutionary Marxist tendencies at universities today. First it is necessary to understand what they are saying, then to debate with them theoretically from the standpoint of Marxism, and finally to discuss their program (if they raise a political program, because not all of them do so explicitly). Today we are going to analyze the so-called postcapitalist currents. Comrade Paula Bach has been studying these currents and is writing a book, and we are publishing a chapter of that book today. Finally, I am going to speak about the situation of the proletariat, and our situation in general terms, beyond the political conjuncture, from a historical point of view, and why, from our perspective, the proletarian revolution, with all the difficulties it implies, is the only realistic solution to the crisis of capitalism. Not to the current crisis in particular but to the recurrent crises that capitalism keeps having, and that it may continue to have in the medium and long term. That is, a response to the fundamental tendencies of capitalism for which reformist currents of different types cannot offer a solution. These crises may find a short-term resolution, as many capitalist crises have had, but we need to analyze the international situation from a Marxist point of view, as Trotsky did, and I will refer to his method. www.leftvoice.org/revolutionary-marxism-vs-postcapitalism
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Post by Admin on Jan 16, 2021 19:01:05 GMT
"The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters."
Fidel Castro
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Post by Admin on Jan 29, 2021 13:32:31 GMT
Be Your Own Revolutioncaitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/be-your-own-revolutionI made the mistake of involving myself in a sectarian Twitter spat when I was halfway through my morning coffee today and I instantly felt like an idiot. People from the Left Twitter faction I'd offended rushed in to push back against the offense I'd caused them, and within minutes I felt it: the all-too familiar sensation of inspiration and creativity draining away from my body. Tension, coldness and defensiveness where previously there was playfulness and the crackling sensation of an exciting new day in which anything was possible. If you're active online, you've probably experienced this too. The days when you're involved in sectarian bickering are the days when you are at your least creative, your least inspired, and your least effective at fighting against the machine. At best the drama gives your ego a tickle (as social media platforms are designed to do), after which you feel a bit yuck. The longer you engage in it, the lower the probability that you will produce something creative and inspired that day. As a general rule, you may find that it works best to reject cliques and factions altogether. When you "belong" to any group you feel compelled to defend it, and to move with it wherever it goes even if that's not where you feel like the energy is. You get invested in wanting the collective to move in a certain direction, and you get frustrated when it just wants to focus on silly nonsense and sectarian feuds. So my advice to you here, which you of course can take or leave, is to just blast off on your own and fight your own revolution in your own way. The unfortunate fact is that our society is insane, and its madness pervades literally every political faction to varying degrees. Marrying yourself to any group means marrying its madness. Instead, focus on becoming more sane, and then act based on that sanity. Just blast off. Don't wait for your comrades. Don't try to pull them along with you before they are ready. Just blast forward into your own revolution, burning brightly and scorching the machine with your own light. If you shine brightly enough, the others may follow when they are ready. One of the most frustrating things is seeing where we need to move and not being able to get the collective to come with you. You're like, "It's there! Let's move!", and they just want to bicker and ego spar. Just blast off into health yourself, and trust that the others will follow if and when they are able. Be your own revolution. You have all the media access you need to help wake the world up with the power of your own inspired action. Reject cliques, factions and sectarianism, and have the courage to stand on your own two feet attacking the machine with your own unique abilities. This doesn't mean you can't organize and work collectively; you absolutely can. If you see people doing something you want to uplift, uplift it. But when you're done, don't stay and become a member of the club. Move on and retain your self-sovereignty. If you're doing something that people want to help uplift and amplify, let them do so. When they don't want to anymore, let them go. Don't try to manipulate them into staying. You are free to collaborate with anyone on any issue at any time. You don't actually need to be a member of the Blah Blah Whateverist Club to do this. And when nothing is happening that you want to collaborate with others on, you can attack the machine on your own, using your own unique set of tools based on your own inspiration. You are not owned or bound. All these debates we're seeing lately over who should be let into and kept out of the Revolution Club, how the Revolution Club should act, who should lead the Revolution Club etc are based on the assumption that there has to be a Revolution Club in the first place, and there just doesn't. Organize and collaborate on a case-by-case, issue-by-issue basis while remaining sovereign. Have the compassion to prioritize the needs of the collective and the courage to stand as an individual. Trying to impose your will on exactly how the collective revolution should and should not be moving is a doomed endeavor, because you cannot control the collective, you can only control yourself. So be your own revolution and attack the machine wherever you detect a weak point in its armor. I've avoided all cliques and factions like the plague, and I've been far more effective in this fight than I would have been if I'd chosen to glom onto some faction and uphold all its -ists and -isms. It would have killed my ability to move with agility in whatever way is demanded by each present moment, because I would have been binding myself to the movements of a group that isn't seeing what I'm seeing and can't move the way I move. This is just what's worked for me, and of course your mileage may vary. But if you're like me and you don't see the various groups, organizations and factions getting us to where we need to go, consider stepping out of the vehicle, standing on your own two feet, and waging your own revolution. __________________________ Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
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Post by Admin on Jan 30, 2021 11:21:20 GMT
TOWARD A REVOLUTIONARY LEFT FRAMEWORK ON AN AGE-OLD DEBATEBy Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. January 29, 2021 | STRATEGIZE! popularresistance.org/toward-a-revolutionary-left-framework-on-an-age-old-debate/Neither Class Reduction Nor Race Reduction. White supremacy and class struggle must thus be taken together as parts of a whole social system rather than separate categories of oppression. “Socialist policies cannot be truly achieved within a racist power structure, and racism cannot be fully eradicated without a transformation of class society.” Activists in the U.S. have debated race and class for decades to no resolution. Nonetheless, in this moment of U.S. imperial decay and crisis, the debate over whether race or class takes precedence in the struggle for liberation from U.S. capitalist and imperialist domination rages on. Two prominent strands of the debate have emerged over the last year which intersect with the rise of Bernie Sanders-led “democratic socialists” and the uprising against racist policing led by the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” For many leaders of the Sanders camp, white supremacy is either a distraction or a secondary issue that can be addressed through the amelioration of class exploitation vis-à-vis policies such as Medicare for All. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter camp often discuss white supremacy as the primary problem of U.S. society even if it “intersects” with gender, class, sexuality, and other aspects of the human experience with oppression. Both arguments are limited and dragged down by the weight of liberalism. Liberalism presumes that the United States’ economic and political system possesses innate qualities of self-correction once the demands of the masses are fully heard. In the case of the Sanders camp, Medicare for All and other universal programs will disproportionately benefit Black Americans. Racism will “wither away” or be significantly reduced after the white masses have received what is rightfully theirs on an equal basis with Black people. “For many leaders of the Sanders camp, white supremacy is either a distraction or a secondary issue.” In the case of the Black Lives Matter camp, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Inc . has championed a movement “whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” This is done in part by “combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy. . .” As a non-profit beholden to mainly Democratic Party donors, BLM’s Global Network has focused on reminding the world of the contributions of Black people, getting out the vote for Democrats, and demanding prosecution of police officers responsible for the murder of Black people. While BLM talks of “liberation,” its activity and analysis are decidedly liberal in that they center the eradication of racism via mild and selective concessions from the U.S. state. Black Lives Matter activists and organizations are of course politically diverse and contain militant elements, with Black Agenda Report having covered the movement extensively since it emerged in 2014. The Black Lives Matter Global Network has been given the most attention from establishment channels seeking to develop a “common sense” among the population that effectively neutralizes radical possibilities. Instead of the further development of mass demands, the debate over how to make “Black Lives Matter” has predominantly centered on questions of diversity and whether institutions of power can speak the language of consultant-driven racial politics. “BLM’s Global Network has focused on reminding the world of the contributions of Black people, getting out the vote for Democrats, and demanding prosecution of police officers.” Both ideological frameworks repeat the errors of “race reduction” and “class reduction.” The reaction from both camps following the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill offers a clarifying example. Some on the Left interpreted the mass of white hordes walking (and at times climbing) into Capitol Hill as a marker of frustration among the working class. If Medicare for All or monthly payments had been provided to the masses, then the riots would not have occurred. Others immediately called out the white supremacists and fascists who descended on Capitol Hill and demanded that these forces be apprehended by law enforcement and censored by tech monopolies in a renewed “War on Terror” campaign. Liberalism is by definition ahistorical so it should come as no surprise that race reductionists and class reductionists get events like January 6th so wrong. The white supremacist state cannot censor itself, nor does it have any interest in creating the economic conditions for its own dissolution. White supremacy and class are not separate phenomenon, especially in the context of the United States. Gerald Horne and Theodore Allen have both proven through historical record that white supremacy is embedded in the capitalist political economy of the United States. Malcolm X stated this plainly when he remarked that “you can’t have capitalism without racism.” White supremacy and class struggle must thus be taken together as parts of a whole social system rather than separate categories of oppression. “White supremacy and class are not separate phenomenon, especially in the context of the United States.” White supremacy appeared in the historical development of the United States as an intentional policy meant to consolidate the rule of settler colonialism and capitalism. European settlers of all classes would be united by their racial affiliation rather than divided by contradictory class interests. Black and other non-white peoples would be terrorized by the racialization of their being, thereby enhancing class exploitation by way of chattel bondage, Jim Crow fascism, and the like. White supremacy justified colonial expansionism, slavery, and the violence necessary to conduct each. White proletarians were kept fed with superiority even as white capitalists intensified the rate of exploitation for all workers, albeit to varying degrees of brutality and theft. When the U.S. became an imperialist power, so too did white supremacy reproduce its relations of domination between white proletarians and their global counterparts in the majority non-white world. The Capitol Hill riot was an outgrowth of a profound popular confusion that has taken hold in the United States over this basic history. Only a negation of the history of white supremacy could produce the conclusion that Medicare for All and $2,000 per month would have prevented the addle minded white Americans from storming Capitol Hill. Many of the rioters believe that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are “communists” aligned with China against rightwing freedom fighters in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The self-described “patriots” who stormed Capitol Hill are the spawn of the Trump era—a period where the crisis of U.S. imperialism opened a lane for white reaction to pose as “working class” interests. This lane was opened primarily by the Democratic Party, which used the Trump era to promote racist conspiracies of “Russian collusion” and antagonize non-ruling class white Americans as “deplorables.” All the while, white liberals and the so-called leadership of “Black Lives Matter” have followed the Democrats down a “race only” framework which seeks inclusion within a decaying imperialist state alongside openly racist “blue MAGA” demagogues like Joe Biden. “The crisis of U.S. imperialism opened a lane for white reaction to pose as “working class” interests.” Many on the white left have lamented “identity politics” while others in the Black Lives Matter camp have condemned socialists for ignoring race. The only means of combatting this irreconcilable contradiction is to return to politics. Radicals and revolutionaries must set the parameters of political debate by raising what the narrow prison cell of liberal politics erases from historical memory. For example, both race-first and class-first advocates often side with the U.S. ruling class on the critical question of war and peace. U.S. aggression toward Syria, China, and a host of countries is virtually ignored in place of false equivalencies between the victim and the perpetrator of imperialist crimes. Class-first and race-first activists, while differing in their approach to domestic affairs, often stand on the same side when it comes to U.S. militarism beyond the “red, white, and blue”-painted colonial borders of the United States. Unity around endless U.S. wars is a racist unity at its core. But militarism isn’t the only aspect of U.S. imperialism erased by race-first and class-first politics. So too is the plight of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and Julian Assange . The same goes for censorship and the ongoing repression of the real Left, which has gone virtually ignored since the advent of Russiagate. Also left off the table is the question of power, entirely. For if power was on the table, then it would be quite easy to link the struggle against U.S. militarism to the freedom of Julian Assange and Mumia Abu-Jamal, not to mention the demand for an end to censorship by corporate tech monopolies and their allies in the intelligence apparatus. These questions dig into the very roots of the U.S. imperialist system and decenter its ideological framework of American exceptionalism. Race reductionists and class reductionists, in the final analysis, are religious zealots of American exceptionalism which orients the fight for justice as a battle for a more “perfect” America where the so-called values of “liberty” and “democracy” are truly applicable to all. “Both race-first and class-first advocates often side with the U.S. ruling class on the critical question of war and peace.” One doesn’t have to look far for examples of how to place politics in command and transcend the long debate regarding race and class in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed for venturing down the long road of international solidarity and peace. His list days were spent organizing with striking Black sanitation workers and demanding an end to the U.S. invasion in Vietnam. In his speech Beyond Vietnam , King declared, I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. King is but one of scores of revolutionary activists and thinkers, particularly in the Black movement, who by their word and deed demonstrate that the debate over race versus class is marked by opportunism. Socialist policies cannot be truly achieved within a racist power structure, and racism cannot be fully eradicated without a transformation of class society i.e., the seizing of the means of production from the ruling class by the exploited classes. The war on Black America is a race war AND a class war. Class must factor into the analysis, and scholars have been popularizing the term “racial capitalism” to assist new generations of activists in avoiding the pitfalls of the “race versus class” debate. “The debate over race versus class is marked by opportunism.” A revolutionary framework must approach all struggles from the vantage point that “racial capitalism” or imperialism is incapable of securing socialism, self-determination, and peace. Only from here can we possibly discuss how to move forward in this moment of crisis. While race reductionism and class reductionism must be rejected, attention to self-determination should not. Revolutionaries should reject the liberalism of the “streets to the suits” phenomenon that has occurred in Black politics AND so-called class-centered movements like the Bernie Sanders campaign. Careful attention should be paid to the conditions that gave rise to each. This means that popular demands for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal must speak to, and take into account, the particular conditions of a thoroughly racist social order. The United States’ role as the world’s foremost imperialist power must also be placed at the forefront of all political struggle, as no truly social democratic movement can be sustained by championing the imperialist thuggery of its homegrown military apparatus. Whatever 2021 holds for the political future of the United States, it is far time that a revolutionary left framework on the debate over race and class be injected into what is, at this time, a still politically immature movement. Danny Haiphong is a contributing editor to Black Agenda Report and co-author of the book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. Follow his work on Twitter @spiritofho and on YouTube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present’s: The Left Lens. You can support Danny at www.patreon.com/dannyhaiphong.
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Post by Admin on Feb 1, 2021 1:11:04 GMT
"In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to "developing" a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be "developed" through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open--in the European view--to this sort of insanity. Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools." Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism” By Russell Means / blackhawkproductions.com / Nov 12, 2011 www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/
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Post by Admin on Feb 1, 2021 17:13:48 GMT
Kropotkin: What Revolution Meansfreedomnews.org.uk/what-revolution-means/Features, Jan 30th The first of a multi-part series marking the upcoming 100th anniversary of the death of famed anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, this article was among his first for Freedom, written in November 1886. We said, in our preceding article,[1] that a great revolution is growing up in Europe. We approach a time when the slow evolution which has been going on during the second part of our century, but is still prevented from finding its way into life, will break through the obstacles lying in its path and will try to remodel society according to the new needs and tendencies. Such has been, until now, the law of development in societies, and the present unwillingness of the privileged classes to recognise the justice of the claims of the unprivileged, sufficiently shows that the lessons of the past have not profited them. Evolution will assume its feverish shape ― Revolution. But what is a revolution? If we ask our historians, we shall learn from them that it means much noise in the streets; wild speakers perorating in clubs; mobs breaking windows and wrecking houses; pillage, street warfare, and murders; exasperated struggle between parties; violent overthrow of existing governments, and nomination of new ones as unable to solve the great impendent problems as the former ones; and then, the general discontent, the growth of misery; reaction stepping in under the blood-stained flag of the White Terror;[2] and finally, the reinstallation of a government worse than the former. Such is the picture drawn by most historians. But this is not a revolution. There are in the picture some of the accidental features of revolutions, but their essence is wanting. Window-breaking and street warfare may be as well distinctive of a riot; and a violent change of government may be the result of a simple insurrection. So it was, for instance, all over Europe in 1848. A revolution has a much deeper meaning. There may be street warfare, or there may not; there may be house-wrecking, or there may not. But in a revolution, there must be a rapid modification of outgrown economical and political institutions, an overthrow of the injustices accumulated by centuries past, a displacement of wealth and political power. When we see, for instance, that during the years 1789 to 1793 the last remnants of feudal institutions were abolished in France; that the peasant who formerly was ― economically, if no longer legally ― a serf of the landlord, became a free man; that the commons resumed possession of the soil enclosed by the landowners; that the absolute power of the King, or rather of his courtiers, was broken for ever in the course of a few years; and that the political power was transferred from the hands of a few courtiers into those of the middle classes, ― then we say, It was a Revolution. And we know that neither Restoration nor White Terror could reconstitute the feudal rights of the noblesse, nor those of the landed aristocracy, nor the absolute power of the King. It was so much a revolution that, although seemingly defeated, it has compelled Europe at length to follow out its programme ― that is, to abolish serfdom and to introduce representative government. And to find its like we must not look to the smaller outbreaks of our times; we must revert to the seventeenth century ― to the Revolution which took place in this country, with nearly the same programme, the same tendencies and consequences.[3] As to street warfare and executions, which so much preoccupy historians, they are incidental to the great struggle. They do not constitute its essence and probably they would not have occurred at all if the ruling classes had understood at once the new force that had grown up among them, and instead of plotting against it, had frankly set to work to help the new order of things to make its way into life. A revolution is not a mere change of government, because a government, however powerful, cannot overthrow institutions by mere decrees. Its decrees would remain dead letters if in each part of the territory a demolition of decaying institutions, economical and political, were not going on spontaneously. Again, it is not the work of one day. It means a whole period, mostly lasting for several years, during which the country is in a state of effervescence; when thousands of formerly indifferent spectators take a lively part in public affairs; when the public mind, throwing off the bonds that restrained it, freely discusses, criticises and repudiates the institutions which are a hindrance to free development; when it boldly enters upon problems which formerly seemed insoluble. The chief problem which our century imposes upon us is an economic problem, and economic problems imply so deep a change in all branches of public life that they cannot be solved by laws. The laws made even by revolutionary bodies have mostly sanctioned accomplished facts. The working classes all over Europe loudly affirm that the riches produced by the combined efforts of generations past and present must not be appropriated by a few. They look on it as unjust that the millions ready to work must depend for getting work on the good will, or rather on the greediness, of a few. They ask for a complete reorganisation of production; they deny the capitalist the right of pocketing the benefits of production because the State recognises him as proprietor of the soil, the field, the house, the colliery, or the machinery, without the use of which the millions can do no useful work at all. They loudly require a more equitable organisation of distribution. But this immense problem ― the reorganisation of production, redistribution of wealth and exchange, according to the new principles ― cannot be solved by parliamentary commissions nor by any kind of government. It must be a natural growth resulting from the combined efforts of all interested in it, freed from the bonds of the present institutions. It must grow naturally, proceeding from the simplest up to complex federations, and it cannot be something schemed by a few men and ordered from above. In this last shape it surely would have no chance of living at all. But this economical reorganisation means also the recasting of all those institutions which we are now accustomed to call the political organisation of a country. A new economical organisation necessarily calls for a new political organisation. Feudal rights accommodated themselves perfectly to absolute monarchy; free exploitation by the middle classes has prospered under representative government. But new forms of economical life will require also new forms of political life, and these new forms cannot be a reinforcement of the power of the State by giving up in its hands the production and distribution of wealth, and its exchange. Human progress is advancing in an opposite direction; it aims at the limitation of the power of the State over the individual. And the revolution cannot but follow the same line. If the times are ripe for some substantial remodelling of life, such remodelling will be the result of the numberless spontaneous actions of millions of individuals; it will go in an anarchist direction, not in a governmental one; and it will result in a society giving free play to the individual and the free grouping of individuals, instead of reinforcing submission to the State. If the coming Revolution is not doomed to die out before anything has been realised by it, it will be anarchist, not authoritarian. [1] “The Coming Revolution,” Freedom, October 1886 (reprinted in Act For Yourselves). (Editor) [2] This refers to the counter-revolutionary violence during the French Revolution, so named because it was done under the white flag of the Royalists. (Editor) [3] A reference to the English Revolution and Civil War (1642-1648) which produced a Republic, followed by the Dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell between 1653 to 1658. The Stuarts were restored to the throne in 1660 after Cromwell’s death. (Editor)
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Post by Admin on Feb 10, 2021 19:31:01 GMT
As 2021 unfolds, the question of strategy may confront the working class in ways it has not in decades. The strength to fight back against a capitalist onslaught of austerity coupled with an insurgent right wing will hinge on whether the working class unites itself or allies with our class enemies. How We Fight to Win: The United Front versus the Popular Frontwww.leftvoice.org/how-we-fight-to-win-the-united-front-versus-the-popular-front“It is not enough to possess the sword, one must give it an edge,” wrote Leon Trotsky in 1922. “It is not enough to give the sword an edge, one must know how to wield it.” These words are found in “Report on the Question of French Communism,” in which Trotsky was working out a detailed conception of the united front in materials he prepared for the Communist International. His context then was specifically the role of communists in France. But he laid the theoretical groundwork for understanding the difference between a “united front” based on the mobilization of the working class independent of the ruling class and its political parties, the class enemy, and one based on an alliance with elements of the ruling class. The latter kind of alliance came to be known as the “popular front” (or “people’s front”), and in every instance throughout working-class history, it has resulted in betrayal and defeat. What Is the United Front? Trotsky was discussing these questions in a context in which revolutionary mobilization was on the agenda, and in which the question was posed whether the working class could wrest power away from the bourgeoisie. His text covers, among other things, how a revolutionary organization that is smaller than other working-class parties (such as those of the social democrats) can gain the leadership of a revolutionary movement. But beyond these discussions, what Trotsky spells out is critically important for how the working class must organize generally to defend its interests. Today, such considerations are on the agenda in the United States because murderous right-wing terrorism has arisen, a movement that is increasingly targeting — directly and violently — people of color, members of the working class more generally, and the organizations of our class. To confront this threat, many are advocating that we join forces with progressive elements in the Democratic Party, one of twin parties of U.S. capitalism, or even with the incoming Biden administration. Such an alliance is not what is meant by the united front. In the face of clashes with the Right the working class needs “unity in action [and] in resisting the onslaught of capitalism,” as well as “unity in taking the offensive against it.” It is a revolutionary organization’s responsibility to take up that struggle for unity, within the context of class independence. The united front is about providing the working class with the strength that comes from unity of action as it wages its struggles against the rulers. That unity is based on developing specific agreements for action with other forces within the workers’ movement, broadly defined, without allying with the enemy. It does not hide differences but strives to find areas where the necessary tasks can be undertaken in a coordinated manner, to make the proverbial fist out of the disparate fingers and thus create strength. The united part of this conception does not mean a retreat from the disagreements “on fundamental questions of the working-class movement.” It means, rather, seeking agreement “in all those cases where the masses that follow them are ready to engage in joint struggle together with the masses that follow us.” The united front compels “the reformists … to a lesser or greater degree … to become an instrument of this struggle.” For the reformist parties and trade unions, the united front puts the onus on them to join or stand in the way. “Apart from all other considerations,” Trotsky wrote, “we are … interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses.” Through the united front, not only is the struggle strengthened, but the revolutionaries — struggling alongside activists who are unconvinced that revolutionary politics is necessary — are engaged and can be won to the perspective of going further, to overthrow capitalism. They do this as participants in the struggle, not as critics from the sidelines. “Any party which mechanically counterposes itself to this need of the working class for unity in action,” writes Trotsky, “will unfailingly be condemned in the minds of the workers.” The task is to build a united front, with “organizational avenues” for “joint, coordinated action” — again, a front that is independent of the class enemy but that decidedly engages the “reformist organization, whether party or trade union,” and even their leaders. That engagement is both part of the strategy to win and an opportunity to break the working class away from its reformist tendencies and those reformist leaders who strive “toward conciliation with the bourgeoisie” because they “dread the revolutionary potential of the mass movement; their beloved arena is the parliamentary tribune, the trade-union bureaux, the arbitration boards, the ministerial antechambers.” And it counters the “centrists” on the Left who claim to be revolutionary but who continually “vacillate” between revolutionary class independence and those reformists. A Life-and-Death Issue In early-1920s France, the “groupings” Trotsky was seeking to bring together in a united front included the Socialist Party, the very reformists of the Second International with whom the communists had broken to create a new Communist International; the syndicalists organized in the French trade union movement; and the broader trade union confederations that organized the bulk of the French working class. A dozen years later, again in France, the question facing the working class was not a revolutionary upsurge but the necessity of mounting a life-and-death struggle against the rise of fascism. In late 1935, Trotsky’s conception of the united front confronted a new “coalition of the proletariat with the imperialist bourgeoisie,” as Trotsky described the “people’s front” — in other words, the very alliance with the class enemy he had warned against in 1922. The idea had come from the bureaucratic caste that controlled the Soviet Union and its leader, Joseph Stalin. It was developed to defend that caste’s interests from threats both internal and external — but not the threats you might immediately imagine. Stalin feared nothing more than proletarian revolution in other countries of the world, which would challenge him and his band of counterrevolutionary thugs who had solidified their grasp over the Soviet Union and its revolution of 1917. It became the prevailing approach by those who followed Stalin’s ideas — even well beyond his death. It was the codification of abandoning class independence and putting the working class firmly in league with its class enemy. In France, the “privileged position” in that alliance was given over to the so-called Radical Party, the front’s main bourgeois organization. Workers were relegated to propping up the bourgeois members of the coalition. The greatest danger in France lies in the fact that the revolutionary energy of the masses will be dissipated in spurts … and give way to apathy. Only conscious traitors or hopeless muddle-heads are capable of thinking that in the present situation it is possible to hold the masses immobilized up to the moment when they will be blessed from above by the government of the People’s Front. Strikes, protests, street clashes, direct uprisings are absolutely inevitable in the present situation. The task of the proletarian party consists not in checking and paralyzing these movements but in unifying them and investing them with the greatest possible force. … The situation can be saved only by aiding the struggling masses to create a new apparatus, in the process of the struggle itself, which meets the requirements of the moment. That is the task of building the united front, independent of the class enemy. In France at the time, this was embodied in the concept of “Committees of Action” — important “as the only means of breaking the anti-revolutionary opposition of party and trade-union apparatus” (emphasis in the original). In a recent article, I discussed the meaning of the terms “fascism” and “fascist” and reviewed Trotsky’s call in December 1931 “For a Worker’s United Front against Fascism” in Germany. In that piece, he articulates the perspective of mass mobilization — a joint struggle by the entire working class, through its parties and organizations, to destroy the fascists and even prepare the working class for a direct struggle for power — that includes, if necessary, taking up arms for mass self-defense. According to this perspective, fascism is a war unleashed by the bourgeoisie at a moment when it sees crushing the working class and its organizations as the last hope for preserving capitalist rule. For this reason, it becomes decisive to maintain the critical independence from the class enemy of a united front — in direct contradistinction to the popular front, which is an alliance with the class enemy. Trotsky’s 1935 article on France elaborates this point. “Such tasks as the creation of workers’ militia, the arming of the workers, the preparation of a general strike,” he writes, “will remain on paper if the struggling masses themselves, through their authoritative organs, do not occupy themselves with these tasks” (emphasis in the original). The Popular Front’s Litany of Defeat From the 1930s to today, the popular front approach has proved itself to be not only counterrevolutionary but also deadly. In the period from 1934 to 1939, when the political alliance subordinated the interests of the working class to the bourgeoisie and its capitalist political parties, it helped facilitate fascism’s solidification and expansion of power. The strategy was adopted in Spain at the beginning of 1936 as an electoral coalition among ostensibly revolutionary organizations and supporters of a Spanish republic organized in bourgeois parties. It was Stalin’s Comintern that pushed for a coalition with anyone, including the class enemy, that declared its opposition to fascism. And thus the hopes of the Spanish workers and peasants were subordinated to the bourgeoisie. The Popular Front (the actual name of the electoral coalition) won the 1936 election but failed to prepare the working class to defend itself. That summer, the generals instigated a coup d’état and sparked the Spanish Civil War. Class collaboration stymied the workers’ movement in the fight, and the Communist Party — seeking to shore up its alliances beyond Spain, especially its pact with Hitler aimed at preventing a Nazi attack on the Soviet Union — eventually chose the bourgeoisie over providing material aid to Spanish workers. In May 1936 in France, the Popular Front (also the electoral coalition’s name) won the legislative elections and formed a government that was first headed by Léon Blum, the leader of the social democratic party known then as the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, French Section of the Workers’ International) and today as the Socialist Party. Almost immediately, the French workers’ movement launched a general strike to win the social reforms that it expected a popular front government would grant. And to be sure, some reforms were won — including large wage increases and the 40-hour work week. But the situation in Europe, the persistence of the global Depression, the rise of fascism, and the growing threat of war posed a solution for the working class that was antithetical to the popular front: the overthrow of capitalism. Things were exacerbated by high unemployment and runaway inflation. The ruling class was desperate to supercharge its arms industry for the coming war. Everything the working class had won stood in the way. How could revolution be accomplished if the working class was organized in an alliance with part of the capitalist class? It is not a rhetorical question. After World War II, the popular front approach continued as the Stalinists led workers into alliances with the bourgeoisies in France and Italy — so-called “Liberation” governments, to tamp down revolutionary upsurges by workers. These alliances with the capitalists also put the workers’ movement in cahoots with bourgeoisies bound and determined to crush the growing anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Fifty years ago, in September 1970, the people of Chile elected a popular front government that ended up leading to disaster. Salvador Allende won a narrow plurality in the presidential election. He was the candidate of Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), yet another alliance between the Stalinist and social democratic parties with various other forces on the Left and parties that represented the liberal wing of the Chilean bourgeoisie. In an example of history’s morbid sense of humor, these included a Radical Party (just like in France). Allende’s election as president was secured when another bourgeois party, the Christian Democrats, decided to vote in favor of his candidacy when the election was thrown to the Chilean National Congress. In power, the Popular Unity government of Allende pursued “la vía chilena al socialismo” (the Chilean way to socialism), nationalizing some large-scale industries and redistributing some land. Big landowners balked. Financiers began to agitate against the government. The Catholic Church expressed its opposition to educational reforms that lessened its role in the country’s schools. As the Christian Democrats and other bourgeois components of the popular front abandoned ship, the situation for the Chilean working class grew more and more tenuous. On September 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown in a bloody military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, backed by the U.S. government and largely organized and funded by the CIA. The coupists butchered some 30,000 workers and peasants, particularly targeting leftists of all stripes. Close to 100,000 people were forced to flee to other countries, where for years they were hunted down and murdered by Pinochet’s secret police as part of a terror campaign organized by the CIA — Operation Condor. In the meanwhile, the Chilean junta imposed brutal economic austerity that decimated the standard of living of the Chilean people as the country’s ruling class enriched itself at their expense. Allende’s popular front in Chile had sown the seeds of its own destruction at the hands of the generals, who, working on behalf of the ruling class, launched a coup that paved the way for the bloody defeat of the working class. To win confirmation in the Congress, Unidad Popular succumbed to the demands of the class enemy that would ensure that the institutions of capitalist rule were maintained and that bourgeois order would persist. One of the most important of these demands made it easy for the military to slaughter the people: a prohibition on the creation of “private” (that is, workers’) militias and a firm agreement that no police or military officers would be appointed who had not been trained in the bourgeoisie’s established academies. Allende’s cabinet put the most right-leaning, class-collaborationist of the alliance’s “Left” forces, the social democrats, in charge of internal security. The liberal Radical Party got the ministry of national defense. The die was cast. The political regime inherited from that coup is at the very foundation of the uprisings that erupted in Chile in the latter part of 2019. Lessons for Today The popular front strategy not only failed to stop fascism in the 1930s. It has proved, time and again, to be a path to defeat of the working class. Collaboration with the bourgeoisie is no different than inviting the fox into the hen house. And as the Chilean experience shows, the ruling class will put the shackles on advancing revolution at every turn. In that case, it demanded the country’s constitution be amended to prevent the workers from arming themselves to defend their gains and their lives. Today, we confront a growing far-right insurgency that is targeting people of color, immigrants, the entire working class. As capitalism’s economic and social crisis worsens, being fueled by the pandemic, this force may become a direct tool of the bourgeoisie’s efforts to maintain its hold on power and its ability to continue to exploit us. Will we fight that with our own power, or will we follow the deadly example of the popular front? History makes clear which choice guarantees defeat and which offers us a chance to survive and win. Whether we are confronting a rising right-wing threat, even fascism, or we are fighting the attacks that are sure to come from the Biden administration, our class independence will be decisive. The strategy and tactics that the working class chooses today and tomorrow have costs.
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Post by Admin on Feb 11, 2021 11:02:43 GMT
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO CLASS STRUGGLE? By Bruce Gagnon, Space for Peace. February 10, 2021 | STRATEGIZE! popularresistance.org/what-ever-happened-to-class-struggle/As the fight amongst the oligarchs heats up over Trump’s 2nd impeachment, one must wonder what ever happened to the days when the poor and the working class were clear-eyed enough to see their real struggle was against the rich? Wall Street banksters, the weapons warlords, Hollywood moguls, oil barons, real estate developers and the like. Instead we see the Lumpenproletariat on their knees scratching and clawing each other – defending one side of the elite mobsters who are armed against the other in Washington’s usual sideshow that distracts the nation from the ever present reality of capital accumulation. The gap between the 1% and the 99% widens to resemble the divide at the Grand Canyon while loyal Republican & Democrat party faithful bark out the scripts written by the commanders of the Congressional leadership. If you listen closely you can hear the muffled graveyard anguish of Robin Hood, Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Ida B. Wells, Woody Guthrie, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, Cesar Chavez and many more. Why are we not aiming our anger and well-justified outrage at those who really run the show? Why do we carry water for one side of the corrupt uber class against the other? Trump’s impeachment in the Senate is all about theatrics and distraction. Even before the gavel pounds to open the hearings the outcome is known. The costly show will go down to ultimate failure because 17 Republicans are needed to ensure a ‘successful’ prosecution and the Democrats will not sway enough of the other side to join the effort. Meanwhile the legions of those being evicted from their homes will grow, unaddressed by the well dressed (and well fed) politicians who stand on the Senate floor and bloviate about ‘right and wrong’. The hungry will not be fed by these hearings. The jobless will not be helped. Those without Medicare for All will not be served by those who work for the rich. National Public Radio (NPR), the NY Times, Washington Post, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN will spend hours cranking up the public with reports on the ‘historic debate’ in the halls of the people. But those halls have boundaries and those who labor inside the Congress have masters to serve and they know their jobs. They don’t do anything to disrupt the status quo. Beware what bait you bite on in the coming days. You just might get hooked into a circus act that is designed to hide the real horror of today – the reintroduction of feudalism.
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Post by Admin on Feb 13, 2021 13:11:04 GMT
The Story of Women Artists for Revolution, a Movement Against PatriarchyW.A.R. existed for a brief yet prolific period, from 1969 to 1971, igniting a robust movement against New York City’s patriarchal art industry. hyperallergic.com/621195/the-story-of-women-artists-for-revolution-a-movement-against-patriarchy/In a powerful 2019 essay in Artforum, Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett made the case that artists who were slated for exhibition in the 2019 Whitney Biennial had a moral obligation to withdraw their work in protest of the then vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Warren B. Kanders. Kanders had made himself very rich in part through his company, Safariland, which manufactures, among other weapons and police equipment, teargas used by governments to quash civil protests around the world. The authors cite as historical precedent the New York Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression, which kicked off in 1970 after Robert Morris closed his own Whitney exhibition in response to “the killing of students at Kent State, the suppression of the Black movement, and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.” In May 1970, groups of activist artists and members of establishment art organizations gathered together in advance of this strike. Among those represented was Women Artists for Revolution or W.A.R., a feminist outgrowth of the Art Workers’ Coalition (A.W.C.), an organization fighting for racial and economic equality within the New York art scene. Cindy Nemser, an art critic and member of W.A.R., reported on the event for The Village Voice, writing that “neither Morris’s brand of moral indignation nor his proposals were strong enough for all those present.” W.A.R., along with the Art Students Coalition, the A.W.C., and Artists and Writers in Protest, voiced “dissatisfaction with what they considered rather mild palliatives.” This article is one of many primary sources compiled in A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution, first published in 1971 and reprinted in 2021 by Primary Information. W.A.R. existed for a brief yet prolific period, from 1969 to 1971. The group ignited a robust movement against gender discrimination within, and widespread exclusion from, New York City’s patriarchal art industry, particularly by galleries and museums who saw art made by women as inherently illegitimate and therefore ineligible for serious consideration. W.A.R. set out to change this. A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution is an archive much more than it is a book in any traditional sense. The documents, including correspondences, public statements, news clippings, flyers, reports, lists of demands, and provocative posters, are smartly compiled into a dense and focused study of W.A.R. and associated organizations’ varied efforts to advance women’s place in the art world. It includes no actual art beyond protest posters, scant information about the artists involved, and very little retrospective editorializing. Much like attending a rally, the book’s cumulative message is persistent, if not always particularly revelatory. In this way, it provides a loose sense of the group’s narrative arc, its tenacious and often humorous rhetoric, its approaches to protest, advocacy, and community building, and perspective from affiliated artist groups on a breadth of concerns, ranging from racial discrimination to gentrification to the management structure at New York’s leading museums. The choice not to showcase the W.A.R. artists’ artwork in this publication reinforces the notion that it doesn’t matter, really, whether a particular piece of art is any good; it matters that the structures in place enable good art to be seen and valued appropriately, and equally. (If you’re craving more artwork and broader context on the movement, I’d recommend the 2010 documentary !Women Art Revolution, directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson.) By compressing timelines and adopting a very focused scope, the book is able to present a clear call-and-response between artists and the powers that be. In one memorable exchange, the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, an aligned group which included members of W.A.R., echoed the demand for 50 percent women representation at the 1970 Whitney Annual and condemned the museum’s “lousy” feminist record. In a series of letters laden with ironic quotation marks, the Whitney declines their demands, calling them “inflammatory verbal gestures” rather than “inducements to enter into discussion.” In response, members of the Ad Hoc Committee enumerated their opinion of the Whitney’s “narrow outlook” on women’s work, citing among other evidence, the existence of only four large one-woman shows since the museum opened its new building in the mid-1960s, two of which were by the same artist. “We repeat that we consider this a ‘lousy’ record.”
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Post by Admin on Feb 17, 2021 18:17:37 GMT
FEBRUARY 17, 2021 The Arab Spring Failed But the Rage Against Misery and Injustice ContinuesBY PATRICK COCKBURN www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/17/the-arab-spring-failed-but-the-rage-against-misery-and-injustice-continues/Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Despotic rulers were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp in countries across the region, as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that “the people demand the fall of the regime”. There was nothing phoney about this mass yearning for liberty and social justice. Vast numbers of disenfranchised people briefly believed that they could overthrow dictatorships, both republican and monarchical. “We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,” recited the 20-year-old poet Ayat al-Gormezi, speaking to thousands of cheering protesters in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. “We are the people who will destroy the foundations of injustice.” But these foundations were stronger than she hoped and the dream of a better tomorrow expressed by herself and millions during the Arab Spring in 2011 was to be brutally dispelled as the old regimes counter-attacked. Crueller and more repressive than ever, they reasserted themselves, or where they had fallen, they were replaced by chaotic violence and foreign military intervention. Out of the six countries where the Arab Spring had the greatest impact, three – Libya, Syria and Yemen – are still being ripped apart by endless civil wars. In two of them – Egypt and Bahrain – state violence and suppression are far worse than in the past. Only Tunisia, where the protests began after a street vendor burnt himself to death, has so far escaped tyranny or anarchy, though the uprising has largely failed to deliver a better life for its people. In Bahrain, the democratic protests started on 14 February and were centred on the Pearl Roundabout in the centre of Manama. They lasted a month before they were savagely crushed by the Bahraini security forces backed by 1,500 soldiers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Ayat, a trainee teacher, was arrested, imprisoned, beaten with an electric cable, and threatened with sexual assault and rape, and was only released after an international outcry. Others in Bahrain suffered far worse and some died under torture according to an international commission of inquiry. Doctors in a hospital that had treated injured protesters were a special target of interrogators from the Bahraini security services. “It was bizarre,” said one consultant who had been badly beaten over four days. “They wanted to prove all the violence came from the protesters or the hospital.” They demanded that he confess that blood from the hospital’s blood bank had been thrown over injured protesters in order to exaggerate their injuries. They also claimed that a sophisticated piece of medical equipment was in fact a secret device for receiving orders from Iran. Much the same backlash was happening across the Middle East and North Africa, as rulers used mass imprisonment, routine torture and summary executions to crush dissent. Repression not only affected places where the Arab Spring had been at its peak, but spread throughout the region, which is home to 600 million people, as frightened rulers sought to stamp out the slightest hint of dissent in case it could become a threat to their regimes. Could the Arab Spring have ever succeeded against such odds? The question is highly relevant today because oppression by regimes, aptly described as “looting machines” on behalf of a tiny elite, is no less than it was in 2011. Even more people now live crammed into houses with raw sewage running down the middle of the street outside while their rulers loll on yachts anchored offshore. But anger and hatred was not enough 10 years ago and it will not be enough in future. I sympathised strongly with the protesters then, though I never gave much hope for their chances of permanent success. They had initially the advantage of surprise, massive popular support and governments that were baffled by unprecedented events. But none of the kleptocratic powers-that-be intended to give up without a fight. They soon recovered their nerve and struck back with unrestrained violence. Egypt, with a population of 90 million and a powerful cultural influence on the region, was the crucial test case. For 18 days, the secular and Islamist opponents of President Hosni Mubarak fought side by side in Tahrir Square in a successful bid to end his 29 years in power. When he finally departed, they appeared to have won a great victory, but it was more incomplete than it looked because the revolutionaries failed to gain control of the Egyptian security forces or the state-controlled television and press, which went on smearing the protesters as sexual degenerates and the agents of foreign powers. Astonished by their own unexpected success, the protest leaders did not know how to consolidate their gains and prevent the return of an old regime that had been shaken but was far from defeated. It is too easy to retrospectively blame the leaders of the protests for not acting like experienced revolutionaries determined to grasp the levers of power when that leadership, in so far as it existed, had no such background. Their lack of such a revolutionary track record was why the omnipresent secret police of the region had not taken them seriously enough. Sadly, this is not a mistake that those secret police are likely to make in future. Some protesters, and many foreign diplomats, argued that they should have sought compromise with the existing elites, but that was easier said than done since the latter had no intention of sharing power with anybody. When street protesters looked for leadership and organisation, the only place they could find it was among Islamists, as with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or among the Islamists and jihadis in Libya and Syria. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad probably deliberately militarised the crisis in 2011 so that his own ruling Alawite sect and other religious and ethnic minorities would feel, with good reason, that they were facing an existential threat from a Sunni jihadi uprising. In Yemen, the Houthis, a Shia sect that had fought the government for years, took advantage of the protest movement to seize the capital Sana’a, which they still hold. Foreign powers cynically intervened on behalf of their local proxies and their own selfish national interests, usually helping to tip the balance towards autocracy. I always thought it absurd to imagine that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the last absolute monarchies on the planet, would want to spread democracy and freedom of expression among their neighbours. Was hope of progress towards political freedom a mirage 10 years ago and is it a mirage today? Protests, as widespread and prolonged as anything seen in the Arab Spring, erupted in Iraq and Lebanon in 2019 and are continuing. Political Islam has largely discredited itself because its protagonists have turned out to be as corrupt, violent and incompetent as their opponents. Overall, the greatest force for revolutionary change in this vast war-ravaged and misruled region is that the humiliation, misery and injustice that Ayat denounced 10 years ago is even greater today – and so is the rage they inspire. Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso).
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Post by Admin on Feb 18, 2021 19:23:49 GMT
Ten years ago today, regime security forces in Bahrain attacked unarmed protesters camped at Pearl Roundabout, Manama. In the third piece of his series on the Arab uprisings, David Wearing looks at how the UK helped crush Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement. Unfinished Revolutions: How the UK and Gulf Monarchies Helped Crush Bahrain’s Pro-Democracy Movement by David Wearing @davidwearing 17 February 2021 novaramedia.com/2021/02/17/unfinished-revolutions-how-the-uk-and-gulf-monarchies-helped-crush-bahrains-pro-democracy-movement/Ten years ago, a wave of popular uprisings erupted across the Middle East, threatening not only local monarchs and dictators but the strategic interests of the Western powers that backed them. In this series, David Wearing looks back on these events, their causes and consequences, and asks what they can teach us about the nature of imperialism in the twenty-first century. – A decade ago today, regime security forces in Bahrain attacked unarmed protesters camped at the major roundabout in the country’s capital, Manama, at 3am while they slept. The occupation of major public squares and spaces had become a key tactic of pro-democracy movements over the early weeks of the Arab uprisings, from Tunisia to Egypt, and now in the tiny Gulf kingdom bordering Saudi Arabia. Over the preceding days, a warm and jubilant atmosphere had prevailed in the Pearl Roundabout as demonstrators from Bahrain’s various communities intermingled, united in their call for democracy. Over 200 protesters were injured and three killed on 17 February 2011 – or ‘Bloody Thursday’ – as they were driven from their camp with clubs, knives, tear gas and shotgun rounds. Resistance remained overwhelmingly peaceful despite repeated regime brutality before and after this particularly egregious assault, and the protesters remained resolute. Indeed, a march of tens of thousands on 22 February was reportedly the biggest of the entire region-wide uprisings, measured by proportion of population. The stand-off between the monarchy and the pro-democracy movement continued for a month, with the regime deploying a two-pronged strategy of minor political-economic concessions on the one hand and lethal repression on the other. The decisive move came on 14 March, when a Saudi-UAE intervention force entered Bahrain in a crucial act of inter-monarchical solidarity. Once Saudi and Emirati troops had secured the island’s main strategic facilities, Bahraini forces were free to set about crushing the uprising for good. A state of emergency was declared. The Pearl Monument at the centre of the roundabout was symbolically demolished. The crackdown ground on inexorably over weeks, then months, then years. Last week, Amnesty International noted that over the past decade, “political repression has intensified in the country. Dissidents, human rights defenders, clerics and members of independent civil society have been silenced, and any space for the peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression or peaceful activism extinguished”. In the previous article in this series, we discussed the three lines of counter-revolutionary battlements that pro-democracy forces had faced during the Arab uprisings of 2010-11. First, the regime; second, the regime’s regional backers; and third, the international powers underwriting the status quo. Bahrain represents a classic case of this dynamic playing out.
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Post by Admin on Feb 20, 2021 22:56:28 GMT
Kropotkin: The Permanence of Society After the RevolutionFeatures, Feb 20th freedomnews.org.uk/kropotkin-the-permanence-of-society-after-the-revolution/Continuing our multi-part series marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Peter Kropotkin, this October 1890 article considers how to avoid the curdling of a revolutionary mindset over the long haul of social change. The question frequently arises in discussions: “But if you got an anarchist state of society tomorrow, how would you maintain it? And even if it did continue for a certain time, would not, afterwards, when the first force of revolutionary sentiment and vigilance had spent itself, the old abuses gradually and insidiously come to re-establish themselves, as they came to be established in the first instance?” The question is worth answering, especially the latter portion of it. The only way in which a state of Anarchy can be obtained is for each man who is oppressed to act as if he were at liberty, in defiance of all authority to the contrary, and evading or overcoming by force all force by which he is opposed or pursued. The liberty of each is created by his taking it. We are commanded to be bound to a certain course; we are forbidden to do certain things; but we can each take the liberty of pleasing ourselves, and of helping others to please themselves in accordance with our ideas of what is proper. We shall thereupon be met by force, and our opponents will seek to deprive us of our physical liberty by which we have rebelled, but we can take the liberty of pitting our own force against theirs. The Revolution is a question of ideas to be acted upon, and of force to enable us to act upon them. Given the will ― the ideas ― and given also the physical supremacy, and the Revolution is an accomplished fact, whether in a single household or workshop, or all over the world. In practical fact, territorial will enable every person within the revolutionised territory to act in perfect freedom, if he chooses, without having to constantly dread the prevention or the vengeance of an opposing power upholding the former system. Our Revolution differs from any precognised by the political parties in that it is not a result officially declared after the quelling of the troops officially opposing, but a fact consisting of the aggregate of individual victories over the resistance of every individual who has stood in the way of Liberty. Under these circumstances it is obvious that any visible reprisal could and would be met by a resumption of the same revolutionary action on the part of the individuals or groups affected, and the maintenance of a state of Anarchy in this manner would be far easier than the gaining of a state of Anarchy by the same methods and in the face of hitherto unshaken organised opposition. We are therefore only called upon to discuss in detail that part of the subject which deals with the gradual and temporarily imperceptible regeneration of the old evils. As a preliminary reply, let us say that these evils must eventually become perceptible to those affected by them, who cannot fail to become aware that in such or such a quarter they are excluded from the liberty they enjoy elsewhere, that such or such a person is drawing from society all that he can, and monopolising from others as much as possible. They have it in their power to apply a prompt check by boycotting such a person and refusing to help him with their labour or to willingly supply him with any articles in their possession. They have it in their power to exert pressure upon him to obtain his services. They have it in their power to use force against him. They have these powers individually as well as collectively. Being either past rebels who have been inspired with the spirit of liberty, or else habituated to enjoy freedom from their infancy, they are hardly likely to rest passive in view of what they feel to be a wrong. The case would resolve itself into one similar to that already considered concerning the immediate maintaining of Anarchy. And at the worst, it can hardly be supposed that the abuse would grow to be a general system like that which exists at present, without having already provoked a severe struggle. In view of the education of the people, the facilities for communication, it would be wonderful if matters went half so far. The establishment of the existing system was due to causes which would be no longer operative. The primitive communism was veiled in dense ignorance, and whilst the direct sources of supply were more numerous in proportion to the population than now, they were also not only less productive, in the absence of the means which later science has brought forth, but less easily taken advantage of than those of the present time. The natural condition was communistic, but it occurred to the minds of some, eventually, to refuse the reciprocal use of their resources to others (except in the presence of force, when hospitality was surrounded with ceremony), whilst by no means relinquishing their claim to entertainment at the hands of the rest, and even enforcing the surrender to them of all that they demanded without reference to the needs of those upon whom they claimed. As a measure of protection against this aggression, tribal property was instituted, being the natural reaction, and through that came militancy. The military system developed that of chieftainship, and from chieftainship sprang on the one hand the State, and on the other private property. From these was developed on the one hand feudalism, and on the other profit-making; then in turn were generated, on the side of feudalism landlordism, and on the side of profit-making mercantilism, followed by industrialism, and all these became merged and unified in modern downright capitalism. The State in the meanwhile modified its character, and was successively an engine for stealing wealth by commanding the military, by land-owning (feudal supremacy), by commercial speculation, by industrial exploitation, and more recently by humbugging the masses of the people. It has never been anything else but a machine for robbery, except a machine for, in addition, arbitrary suppression of free thought, speech and action. The old instinct of Communism had not been sufficiently eradicated by the tradition of property for people to conceive that they were doing any wrong by forcibly appropriating the possessions of another tribe, but it was weakened enough to prevent them from having a due and natural regard for other people in the aggregate, although individual strangers were still treated with hospitality. The occasion of this was that the few aggressive tribes, secluded from the rest, could plot and send out their predatory bands at leisure to attack the others without being expected, and, depriving the non-aggressive tribes very often of all the accumulated means of subsistence, would force them to regard with suspicion and jealousy those who were not of themselves; and those would have the best opportunity to survive who were selfish and hoarded away what they could save from the ruin, or what they acquired afterwards from their companions in misfortune, or guarded their hoards by strongholds; and of the rest, those who attached themselves to the neighbourhood of the strongholds and thus drank in some of the nature and traditions of the fortifiers (for those who were the most selfish, jealous, and suspicious were naturally the first to erect these fortifications), had a better chance to survive in the aggregate than those who did not. It was easy, therefore, to persuade the people to join with the primitive robbers for the sake of booty; today, how small a percentage could be tempted by the hope of direct violent plunder, even where there is no dread of punishment and little fear of being successfully opposed ― for instance, in Africa, which is even more accessible from the other continents now than a spot a few score miles away was in the days of our progenitors! For one thing, the idea of plunder is now repugnant to the public mind; again, the difficulties in the way, though far less than what our forefathers had to encounter in their thieving expeditions, are repellent, both because of the greater ease with which all but the most oppressed can obtain a bare sufficiency for the ordinary needs of life, and by reason of a change in the physical culture and constitution of the people generally. The conditions are, therefore, so different now that it is practically impossible to rationally conceive of a repetition of the developments which have led to the existing condition of society. If any evils do spring up, to become in time a tyrannical system, their nature must be wholly distinct from anything that we can at present conceive of. The comparatively dense population of the earth, almost world-wide communication as a matter of habitual occurrence everywhere, are in themselves apparently insuperable obstacles to the process by which property and rule came previously into existence. Furthermore, we have it for an acquired fact that the inspiration of Liberty causes not only, like every other common cause, a development of fraternity and solidarity amongst its adherents, but a modification of the mental inclinations, so that every true Anarchist feels it against his own nature to knowingly oppress any other person or interfere with anyone’s freedom of action; and it is, generally speaking, quite as impossible for him to do so as for a young man to avoid being attracted by the opposite sex, or for a mother to delight in torturing her child. We have every reason to believe that this impulse, awakened with a greater intensity than the crudely selfish ones mentioned as having arisen in the course of evolution, will be transmitted, like them, by heredity ― quite as readily and to a greater extent ― and, being beneficial, will be more persistent than they have been. We see no reason, therefore, to suspect that either the old state of things or any other that is similarly injurious will arise when once the institutions that now oppress humanity are made a clean sweep of, but, on the contrary we see reason to believe that the accomplishment of the Revolution will mark the dawn of a new epoch in human progress. Even if it were not so, the benefit of those who succeed in gaining the victory for freedom, and of some generations after them, would be worth striving for. We cannot by ordinance regulate the condition of posterity; our descendants must see to that for themselves. But if we each determine to ourselves be free and win our own freedom, history and science hint to us that we need in no wise lack the additional incentive that we are thereby building up freedom and welfare for those who shall follow us.
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Post by Admin on Feb 21, 2021 19:11:26 GMT
“I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the colour of the skin...”
Malcolm X
Assassinated: 21 February 1965, New York City - Malcolm was addressing the Organisation of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, he was shot 21 times. Three Nation of Islam members were tried and convicted of his murder, but questions remained. At the time of his death, Malcolm X was under surveillance by both the NYPD and the FBI's COINTEL operation and there is strong evidence to suggest that both organisations had a hand in his assassination.
There is no doubt, that the authorities were becoming more fearful of his political direction and the threat it posed to the rich and powerful: "People in power have misused it and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built and he only way it's going to be built, is with extreme methods and I for one will join in with anyone, I don't care what colour you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this Earth."
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