Sputnik

womenoccupy:

“Feminism and Occupy Wall Street” from the Feminist Peace Network [podcast]

“Friday Action Highlights Intersections in #OWS” by Lori Adelman for Feministing

“Why Occupy Should Be an Inherently Safe Space” by Melissa Byrne for Role/Reboot

“Starhawk to Support…

lebanesepoppyseed:

When someone uses a slur and a person from the marginalized group that the slur disparages calls that shit out, there are is a common reaction that piss me the fuck off and is downright abusive in how it twists why the call out is happening and how it should go down.

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malheureuxmarxist:

notesfromtheundergound:

Why is the Left so broken?

Is it because of the failure of so-called Soviet Socialism? Or is it because of lack of support from the working classes? Or because traditional leftist philosophy does not account for the fresh problems wrought upon society by modern capitalism, such as the…

I have a lot of problems with this essay, a lot of your criticisms just don’t seem to match up with the actual situation in the world.

1. Pretty much every single leftist party/group/formation lambasts capitalism for its devastating effect on nature. Marx was a vocal critic of this as well.

2. When you say the Left should be anti-political, it sounds like you mean revolutionary. You describe reformism, but reform is not the only form of politics.

3. What is the best usage for the very limited resources of most leftist organizations? Effectively combating capitalist propaganda requires a lot of money, because that’s how the media is set up. Pretty much all leftist parties/groups/formations put forward their own ideas against capitalist propaganda. Why is spending that money more important than making an immediate improvement in the lives of working people? I’m not saying that fighting propaganda is irrelevant, but on a limited budget and considering how the media works, it should be on the backburner. What are you concretely looking for?

Earlier in the post, you mention that there is a lack of working class support for leftist organizations (I’m assuming youre talking about the first world), instead of looking at this as a philosophical, organizational, or moral failure, we should look at the material conditions.

While the working class generally isn’t supportive of the Left in the first world, this isn’t the case everywhere. Nepal’s communists overthrew the monarchy, India’s communists and adivasis are waging a war of self-defense against the Indian ruling class and US imperialism and controlled 1/3 of India at one point, FARC-EP has mass support in most of the Colombian countryside and has created a radical new social order there, and US-sponsored neoliberalism is being rolled back all across Latin America.

There’s a reason that the Left is dead in most of the First World and is being revived everywhere else, and it’s because of the benefits First Worlders receive from imperialism and neocolonialism. Here’s a good post on it:

http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2010/11/labour-aristocracy-exists.html

I hope you keep blogging!

The main reason the Left is dead is because Capitalism crushed it. I’m serious. The right-wing was already well-established when the left opposition came along in the late 19th century. Despite some good advances in Russia, China, and parts of the Third World, capitalism was able to utilize its dominating resources, money, and State power, to defeat the challenge from the Left. It was never a matter of the people not accepting Marxism, but rather the State Power of the Right effectively killing it off.

occupy-anthro:

It is becoming something of a refrain among the well-meaning multitudes now energized by Occupy Wall Street that the movement needs to shed its radical origins so as to actually get something done. “If they can avoid fetishizing the demand for consensus,” James Miller wrote in late October in the New York Times, “they may be able to forge a broader coalition that includes friends and allies within the Democratic Party and the union movement.” According to some activists, groups like Van Jones’s Rebuild the Dream are poised to turn occupiers into Obama voters. Especially as the 2012 election season starts, the thinking goes, it’s time to get real.

This actually reminds me of long debates about planning that took place in the NYC General Assembly before September 17, and then again during the early days of the occupation. Many people—myself included, though I was there to observe as a reporter—first arrived with some preconceived agenda about what needed to be done given the current political situation and how the occupation should do it: abolish corporate personhood, or enact a Tobin tax, or (as crasser signs would say) “Eat the Rich.” They complained that the anarchists, along with assorted autonomists, libertarian socialists and so forth, were hijacking the movement’s progress by bogging it down in process. But, after a while, after enough long meetings, they started to come around.

For some who were experiencing it for the first time, the General Assembly became a cathartic opportunity to unload long-pent-up polemics. Perhaps never having really had their political voices heard off the Internet, newcomers would interrupt the agenda and turn the people’s mic into a soapbox. With practice, though, that would change. They’d find that hewing to the process was better than making off-topic speeches. They heard stories about the assemblies in occupied squares in Egypt, Greece and Spain firsthand from people who had been there. Helping shape the daily decisions of the Occupation started to seem actually more empowering than trying to tell Obama what to do.

The anarchists’ way of operating was changing our very idea of what politics could be in the first place. This was exhilarating. Some occupiers told me they wanted to take it home with them, to organize assemblies in their own communities. It’s no accident, therefore, that when occupations spread around the country, the horizontal assemblies spread too.

At its core, anarchism isn’t simply a negative political philosophy, or an excuse for window-breaking, as most people tend to assume it is. Even while calling for an end to the rule of coercive states backed by military bases, prison industries and subjugation, anarchists and other autonomists try to build a culture in which people can take care of themselves and each other through healthy, sustainable communities. Many are resolutely nonviolent. Drawing on modes of organizing as radical as they are ancient, they insist on using forms of participatory direct democracy that naturally resist corruption by money, status and privilege. Everyone’s basic needs should take precedence over anyone’s greed.

Through the Occupy movement, these assemblies have helped open tremendous space in American political discourse. They’ve started new conversations about what people really want for their communities, conversations that amazingly still haven’t been hijacked, as they might otherwise might be, by charismatic celebrities or special interests. But these assemblies also pose a problem.

The Occupiers know that more traditional political organizations—such as labor unions, political parties and advocacy groups—are critical to making their message heard. With the “Re-Occupy” action on December 17, they called upon Trinity Wall Street, an Episcopal church, to grant the movement an outdoor public space. As the movement enters the winter and so-called “Phase II,” outside organizations seem to be ever more crucial. But unions, parties and churches aren’t the coziest of bedfellows for open assemblies. Precisely what enables these organizations to mobilize masses of people and resources is the fact that they are hierarchical. Moreover, they are financed by, and dirty their hands with, electoral politics—all things a horizontal assembly aims to avoid.

But traditional organizations that have found new momentum in the Occupy movement don’t need to sit around and wait for the assemblies to come up with demands or certain types of actions. They can act “autonomously,” as the anarchists would say, doing what they do best with the good of the whole movement in mind: pressuring lawmakers, mobilizing their memberships and pushing for change in the short term while the getting is good. They can build coalitions on common ground with the Tea Party. The Occupier assemblies won’t do these things for them, and it would be a mistake to wish they would.

The radicals who lent this movement so much of its character have offered American political life a gift, should we choose to accept it. They’ve reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us. With the assemblies, they’ve bestowed a refreshing form of grassroots organizing that, if it lasts, might help keep the rest of the system a bit more honest. There will, however, be tensions.

“Any organization is welcome to support us,” says the Statement of Autonomy passed by the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly on November 1, “with the knowledge that doing so will mean questioning your own institutional frameworks of work and hierarchy and integrating our principles into your modes of action.”

Kevin Zeese of the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, DC, though certainly no anarchist, is even more militant against the “progressive” establishment: “Bought and paid for with millions of dollars from Wall Street, the health insurance industry and big energy interests, Obama and the Democrats are part of the problem, not the solution.”

In countries like Spain, Greece and Argentina for instance, networks of local assemblies, often built around occupations, have shaped electoral politics even without forming parties or endorsing candidates. Their focus is on the people in them, not those who would purport to represent them. I was in Athens earlier this fall, just as the prime minister was stepping down and the economy was collapsing, and I found that those in the city’s assemblies weren’t really concerned; they were too busy saving local parks and resisting unfair taxes.

Spain recently held a general election, and parties across the political spectrum were responding to issues raised by the assembly-based movement which began there in May and which profoundly influenced the organizers of Occupy Wall Street. Even so, the movement called on people to cast null votes. The right-wingers won. Many on the left here will see this as a dangerous precedent, but in the long term and the big picture, autonomists see it as better than being co-opted. There is more at stake than a contest between one status-quo party or another. Occupations and assemblies are not solely an American, Greek or Spanish phenomenon; they’re the basis of a new global justice movement to confront a global crisis.

As assemblies enter our own politics through the Occupy movement, we should take care to recognize what they’re not and will never be. Even more important, though, is what they’ve already done. They’ve reminded us that politics is not a matter of choosing among what we’re offered but of fighting for what we and others actually need, not to mention what we hope for. For this, in large part, we have the anarchists to thank.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

North Korea is a country that is alternately reviled and ridiculed. Its leader, Kim Jong-il, is demonized by the right and — with the exception of Che Guevera in 1965 and many of his current admirers — mocked by the left. Kim is declared to be insane, though no one can say what evidence backs this diagnosis up. It’s just that everyone says he is, so he must be. If Kim had Che’s smoldering good looks he may have become a leftist icon, leader of “the one remaining, self-proclaimed top-to-bottom alternative to neo-liberalism and globalization,” as Korea expert Bruce Cumings puts it. Instead, the chubby Kim has become a caricature, a Dr. Evil with a bad haircut and ill-fitting clothes. The country he leads, as befits such a sinister character, is said to be a danger to international peace and security, bent on provoking a nuclear war. And it’s claimed that years of economic mismanagement have reduced north Korea to an economic basket-case and that its citizens, prisoners at best, are starved and repressed by a merciless dictator. 

While many people can recite the anti-north Korea catechism – garrison state, hermit kingdom, international pariah – they’ll admit that what they know about the country, apart from the comic book caricatures dished up by the media, is fuzzy and vague. But this has always been so. As early as 1949, Anna Louise Strong could write that “there is little public knowledge about the country and most of the headlines distort rather than reveal the facts.” Cumings dismisses US press reports on north Korea as “uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized” and as deceiving, not educational. 

One of the reasons the headlines distort, even today, especially today, can be summed up in a syllogism. World War II, as it was waged in the Pacific, was in large part a struggle between the dominant economic interests of the United States and the dominant economic interests of Japan for control of the Pacific, including the Korean peninsula. Japan had occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, until it was driven out by the Korean resistance, one of whose principal figures was north Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war. After Tokyo’s surrender, the US tried to assert control over Japan’s former colonial possessions, including Korea. Kim’s guerilla state upset those plans. The corporate rich and hereditary capitalist families that dominate both US foreign policy and the mass media recognize north Korea to be a threat to their interests. The DPRK condones neither free trade, free enterprise nor free entry of US capital. Were it allowed to thrive, it would provide a counter-example to US-enforced neo-liberalism, a model other countries might follow, a model revolutionaries, like Che, have found inspiration in. The headlines deceive, rather than educate, because north Korea is against the interests of those who shape them. 

It’s clear why Che Guevara, and other revolutionaries, considered north Korea of the 60’s, 70’s and even early 80’s, to be an inspiration. Emerging from the womb of the guerilla wars of the 30s, the north had fought two imperialisms. It had won against the Japanese and held the US to a standstill. It was building, in the face of unremitting US hostility, a socialist society that was progressing toward communism. The country offered free health care, free education, virtually free housing, radical land reform and equal rights for women, and its industry was steaming ahead of that of the south. By contrast, the neo-colony Washington had hived off for itself below the 38th parallel was a vast warren of sweatshops reminiscent of England’s industrial revolution. People lived harsh, miserable, uncertain lives, in incessant struggle with a military dictatorship backed by the US, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to Europe’s pre-war fascist regimes.

Would Che be inspired by the north Korea of today, an impoverished country that struggles with food scarcity? Probably. What have changed are the circumstances, not the reasons to be inspired. The projects north Korea has set for itself – sovereignty, equality, socialism – have become vastly more difficult, more painful, more daunting to achieve in the face of the void left by the counter-revolution that swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and China’s breakneck sprint down the capitalist road. Would Che have soured on north Korea, because the adversity it faces has grown tenfold? I doubt it. A revolutionary, it’s said, recognizes it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. North Korea has never lived on its knees. I think Che would have liked that. 

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Santiago de Chile, Dec 20 (Prensa Latina) - Chile’s Secondary School National Coordinator maintains the occupation of seventy schools in demand for free public education, a cry enjoying support from legislators like Hugo Gutierrez, member of the House Human Rights Commission.

  Spokesman Cristian Pizarro said the protest will continue during the holidays despite water supply and electric power cuts, and exposed threats of expulsion against students in order to silence their demands and disband the movement.

More than 30 schools in Santiago remain occupied by youth with the courage to go on with the mobilization, defying the efforts to force them to yield with threats of losing their enrollment rights or food deprivation, commented Communist Party representative Gutierrez.

Around 700 schools were occupied at the peak of the protest urging changes in the education system.

 

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Czech President Vaclav Havel was portrayed in the West as the gentle leader of a “velvet revolution” when the socialist regime there was overthrown. But Havel has publicly embraced not only the expansion of NATO but also U.S. plans for a war on Iraq.

One of Havel’s opponents, Czech Sen. Richard Falbr, commented: “He is always the first president to back up what Bush says. His statement [supporting the war in Iraq] is nonsense and on a par with his remark that Yugoslavia was bombed for humanitarian reasons.” (Postmark Prague, Oct. 1)

Havel plans to send a thousand Czech soldiers trained in biological and chemical warfare to the war. (Jordan Times, Oct. 22) The Bush-Rumsfeld strategists want no consultation with these NATO allies, just “contributions.”

Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, while Havel was president. He quickly launched a series of “market reforms.” In the more industrialized Czech Republic, a capitalist layer of society grew rich. In Slovakia, the poorer half of the former Czechoslovakia, poverty went from 7.8 percent in 1993 to 13.4 percent in 1999. And it continues to rise in both republics as unemployment grows and social services are stripped away. Unemployment is now close to 20 percent in Slovakia and 9.4 percent in the Czech Republic. (Postmark Prague, Oct. 1)

Privatization campaigns in both republics have closed everything from schools to factories. With the Czech Republic already in NATO, and Slovakia as well as other formerly socialist nations in the East slated to join at the Nov. 21-22 summit, the population faces increasing misery as public money goes toward military spending.

But Havel barrels on, driving the Czechs into penury as the new ruling class enriches itself on fat military contracts. The summit on NATO expansion only serves to highlight the Prague government’s total submission to Washington’s demands.

In a visit to the United States, Havel and Czech Defense Minister Jaroslav Tvrdík promised Czech support for the U.S. “missile defense” program. Tvrdik offered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the possibility of locating a base for this “Star Wars” system on Czech territory, according to Radomír Silber of the CPBM.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.

Most Americans have been misled by the fact that in the USSR we had to build whole new basic industries from the ground up. Such a thing could not happen in America, where you are already compelled to cut down on your farm area and to reduce your industrial production. As a matter of fact, your tremendous technological equipment has been paralyzed by the crisis and already clamors to be put to use. 

An essay as relevant today as in 1934.