I agree entirely that you can't eliminate the ubiquitous intelligence structures in empire without killing the empire. This sort of information can be useful for propaganda and education, but what I mean is that this sort of information doesn't have any value of its own: it needs to be attached to active and directed agitation, because the intelligence community currently has a death grip on how this information is being disseminated, presented, and processed. They can't stop it from getting out there, but they're doing their damnedest to control everything else about it.
If we want anything actually productive to come out of these leaks we need to directly contest the narrative structures they're pushing. I think that first world radicals often forget just how different the perceptions of liberals are and the kind of ass-backwards assumptions they process political information with, expecting them to see the obvious hideous face of empire when they might as well be blind. Makes for shitty ineffectual propaganda.
Things that more explicitly and undeniably expose the contradictions of empire make the best tools for this, like the excellent link on direct evidence of US supply drops for ISIL Petrol posted yesterday (http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13931206000521) and of course that story isn't being picked up by any publication your average citizen of empire would read.
YOU TRIED
or it is chauvinism now whats the cool term
chavinism
some 1 please photoshop that 2 liter into a copy of economic & philosophic manuscripts
walkinginonit posted:But, theoretically, if a Communist movement seizes power they would have to engage in the same types of surveillance programs. It would be suicidal not to use the same surveillance tactics that the Capitalists' use.
It's true. The only way to beat Capitalism is to outcompete it by being more evil. As Comrade Stalin demonstrated.
shriekingviolet posted:This sort of information can be useful for propaganda and education, but what I mean is that this sort of information doesn't have any value of its own:
Well this is obviously true because the only information which has inherent true value on its own is the infallible revolutionary science of Marxism/Leninism and the fundamental tenets of Mao Zedong Thought.
http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Guyanese-Working-Class-Rodney/dp/0911565108/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425133126&sr=1-1&keywords=The+birth+of+the+Guyanese+working+class
or
http://www.amazon.com/History-Guyanese-Working-1881-1905-Atlantic/dp/0801824478
i've been putting off reading these for a while, so might as well choose one. im leaning towards the second, most recent one.
what I would really like to read is this though: http://www.amazon.com/Lakshmi-out-India-Walter-Rodney/dp/9768160985/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425132783&sr=8-1&keywords=lakshmi+out+of+india
but it's $351 on amazon and cant be found through my other means of finding books (can't do an interlibrary loan). apparently it's geared towards children ( http://guyanachronicle.com/lakshmi-out-of-india-by-walter-rodney/ ), but it sounds really interesting.
Edited by Peelzebub ()
anyone know anything about biotech? i should just get an SA account again and ask on there. any other science "forum" geared towards questions / answers costs money (as in big money).
Edited by Peelzebub ()
1. Contemporary discussion about the existence or non-existence of Feudalism in the 18th century is off point, because it ignores how the category of Feudalism was itself largely created by 17th century and 18th century polemicists who were keen to attack a system of class privilege which justified itself with refrence to distant epochs, and which they, with a good deal of justification, felt had deep roots with the past. They were not trying to make a falsifiable claim for a literal identity between the 1200s and the 1700s, they were trying to find a vision of history and set of social concepts adequate to their experience of simultaneous temporal novelty and temporal persistence, neither of which they could find in their immediate predecessors:
Eighteenth century historians gave to feudalism more meanings than meet with the approval of modern academics. Yet that does not mean that 18th century writers knew no history. They seem, however, to have felt more deeply about the past than most modern writers, which may explain why the latter find it so hard to forgive them.
2. The Revolution was as much a fulfillment of the Ancien Regime as it was a radical beak with it. This is not a new idea (see Tocqueville) but Mackrell gives it a fresh angle. The book touches on the ways that the Republican critique of the aristocracy was prepared for decades in advance of the revolution by royalist jurists, bureaucrats, and historians who were eager to demolish the claims to social usefulness and sacred antiquity made by the nobility in order to justify the expansion of monarchical power. Further, this polemic was, to a point, backed up by action: The crown abolished serfdom in the crown lands in 1779, with a decree containing language imitating that of Voltaire and other philosophes. 1789 and 1792 can thus be viewed as the cutting the Gordian knot type answers of the popular classes to the problems that the monarchy had already posed for itself.
3. There was a radical disconnect between the so called 'humanitarian' attack on feudalism made by the philosophes and similar types and the actual everyday needs of the French peasantry. The peasants, as far as we can tell from the surviving records, wanted a reliable and accessible judicial system; the end of the aristocratic monopoly on the mills,the ovens, the wine presses, the forests, etc; and, of course, land. Parisian writers, by contrast, were enthralled by lurid anecdotes and salacious rumors about rare, defunct, legendary, or just plain non-existent feudal practices, such as the "right of the first night." Anxiety about husbands losing authority, sexual or otherwise, to barons, priests, or their wives' fathers seems to have had a particular sway over their imaginations. Furthermore, while these intellectuals were eager to attack legal serfdom, they had no thought at all to the condition of peasants who were, legally, free, but increasingly subject to the more "modern" chains of commerce, backed up by the resilient power of the titled landed classes.* Physiocracy assured them that problem would take care of itself (and that was the most advant garde body of political-economic thought acceptable among the elites) .And so for decades a war of words was conducted in the presses and salons that was far more about sentimental uplift for the leisure classes and the competition for status between the clerks and the clerics than it was about building a movement intending to actually alter the real base of the status quo.*
Then in 1789, without leadership from the cities and apparently entirely ignorant of the writings of their philanthropic advocates, the peasants rose up and forced a reluctant, sometimes overtly hostile, revolutionary regime in Paris to recognize a new set of social relations in the countryside (which the new state power still did its best to reverse, in whatever way it could).
4. If, then, the 19th century French peasantry was suspicious and inclined towards inertia, it was not so much out of innate 'rural idiocy" as out of a learned realism . As Mackrell puts it in the epilogue::
Frequent betrayal had soured them and had caused them to withdraw sullenly into a world of their own. Those who sought their votes soon learned that they wanted nothing in return but to be left alone. Under the ancien regime, they had been cheated out of their produce; during the Revolution they were cheated of many of the gains from their supposed emancipation from feudal and seignorial obligations; subsequently they were cheated of the economic and social reforms that could have improved their lot. If the peasant continued to live in the past, it was largely because that was where his social superiors wanted him to live. The peasant who continued to see an oppressive feudal seigneur behind an extortionate landlord was shrewd rather than alarmist.
One criticism I would make would be that the book lacks a chapter focusing on the religious dimension of the critique of feudalism, specifically how 18th Century continental Christian, orthodox and otherwise, notions of interiority, conscience, and pious living (which were leavened in the French context by the reverberating waves of the Jansenist, Quietist, and Gallican controversies) fed into attacks on seignorial culture and eroded the sacred aura surrounding the ancien regime in general.
* To be fair, few politically minded people of this time really did, with the exception of eccentrics like Linguet.
*Still, a new sort of public 'democratic' moral sensibility was created in the process, along with sets of propositions about freedom and equality concerning man as a generic type that would prove invaluable for the further expansion of the state machinery.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
LPV: The question is about the elections? That is, if elections are held will the blockade against Cuba end? Could there be elections held in Cuba? Because it is said that there are no elections in Cuba and that is why the blockade against Cuba continues. The question is if you think Communism has been applied in Cuba or not?
Alejandro Castro Espín: Do you realize that does not make any sense? That is an argument used to attack a country, to impose a different political system on it that besides being ineffective has had no results. That does not make sense. So, the argument is that they impose a blockade because we do not have direct elections. I am telling you that our elections could not be more direct, and I am going to explain it to you so you can learn about it and also because it is important to eliminate the stigma created by American imperialism and its allies regarding the Cuban political system. That stigma must be eliminated. You don’t have the direct knowledge about this and you may think that there are no direct elections in Cuba. I am going to tell that they are direct and you can compare our process with any other country including the United States.
In Cuba the elections for the powers of the State comes from the people, first it comes from meetings of the citizens at the base. In Cuba we call them blocks, the divisions of a city that is the term we use. Several blocks of neighborhoods that live in the same area gather in assemblies that are stipulated by law. In those assemblies the people choose freely among themselves who will represent them. The criteria takes into account the candidates characteristics, including if they are hardworking, If they are good people, if they have a clean past, and money has no bearing on who is nominated.
This is how a candidate comes about and I want to emphasize and important thin first and that is they are not nominated by a party, the people nominates them. This is not the same process that happens today in bourgeois society, where political parties prepare a nomination list. No, in Cuba it is the people at the base level in neighborhood assemblies, without any influence of money. The one chosen is based on the one who represents that neighborhood the best. There always has to be at least two candidates but there can be many more. After the popular election, we chose one and we call him a local delegate and then all of them meet to form a Municipal Assembly; let us call it a superior political administrative level. The Municipal Assembly of the People’s Power, and those elected by the people, form that Assembly and that Assembly chooses in the same way the power at the municipal level. Among those elected by the people select who can represent them at the municipal level and the same happens at the provincial and national level, when they reach the national level the National Assembly is formed, in a popular election where they nominate all those people they think have the right attributes, prestige and authority to govern them.
The National Assembly chooses the superior powers of the State that is the Council of State, the Council of State then chooses those who direct the society; the President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, the Vice-presidents of the Council of State and Ministers, that is the highest power of the State and then the highest power of the State defines a Government and after that Government is defined. The Government is formed with those elected by the people who have been elected at various levels, because all off those positions elected at the national level come from the base.
The President of the country must be nominated at the base, in the municipality. It is not like here in Greece where the parties are listed at the top level and they can list anyone. We are not like bourgeois democracy the ones you say that imposes the blockade to make Cuba change. We have direct elections. Here they put people on a list and then tell the people supposedly what they have done so they can be elected. That is the difference and why we say our democracy is truly participatory and popular.
It is important you understand this because we need to eliminate that stigma I was mentioning, because its intention is to maintain the aggression against my country. These attacks have been going on for over 50 years against a people who only decided to choose its own destiny, to be sovereign and independent. Cuba has not accepted the domain and imposition of an empire that has wanted to dominate us for over half a century.
When we arrived in this country we found your citizens admiring us for our stand. We have spoken with people from the right, from the left, from the center. We have talked with people at the street level, but also in localities, several mayors, and governors from regions like Lamia. And it has been very interactive, we talked with them about how we are perfecting our democracy and exercising the process of peoples’ power, because we understand that everything can be improved. What we do not accept is the comparison of our participatory democracy with bourgeois democracy which has not solved anything for humanity. The only thing it has done is to take humanity towards a precarious point. They have created the environmental crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis and the pandemics all over the world. The reason for that is because they have taken the majority of the resources and given it to militarism paid for by the western powers because it is a great business for them; this is the real truth. We have to talk about all of this and make it available for people everywhere so they can draw their own conclusions.
nominated by mass organizations totally controlled by the central party into a single slate. does this argument convince anyone.
gwarp posted:
oh yeah, i bought the first book btw, may or may not post about it (most likely not)
and no one pm'd me to help me with my homework; ty fkrs.
For,example, he both admires Nasser as a secularist, as an anti-colonial leader, and as an opponent of the royal houses of the Gulf, while at the same time lamenting the fact that he failed to work more with the United States* or exercise more leniency towards the Muslim Brotherhood. He wishes Nasser had remained more steadfast to his original democratic tendencies while opining that he should have purged the army sooner, and with greater severity. Aburish is elegiac for the dream of Pan-Arabism at one moment, then shortly thereafter compares its adherents in the 60s with present day members of Al Qaeda.
His is not the most coherent of positions, but watching this ambivalence play out is fascinating in and of itself.It is made very clear that, while Aburish doesn't admit as much, Nasser was and remains his Caesar, despite the fact that he studied in Jerusalem, despite his years of work as a Western propagandist, despite his vocal pessimism concerning the ultimate destiny of the Arab nations. Aburish states clearly that his hero failed at all his most important objectives, and, most damningly, left no institutions behind for a successor to build upon; yet the last paragraphs of the book are a description by Aburish of himself as a younger man working in California who, upon hearing the news of Nasser's death while driving along a highway, stopped by the side of the road and began to break down in tears.
Besides this inter-textual authorial drama, there are several historical points he raises that are worth discussion. Among these is the thesis that revolutionary secular Arab politics wasn't stopped in its tracks in 1967 by the Israeli army, as is commonly supposed, but in 1959 by the failure of the Mosul Rebellion initiated by the pro-Nasser faction to overthrow the Soviet leaning Qasim and bring Iraq into the United Arab Republic that had recently been formed by Syria and Egypt. This defeat was primarily bought about by a tragic confrontation between Pan-Arab nationalists who realized it was neccessary to secure Mesopotamia for the future of their project, and the Iraqi Communists*, who feared for their prospects under such a union (with good reason considering the treatment of their counterparts in Egypt), with assistance of the USSR and the Great Britain on the side of Qasim. The effects of this reversal were the demoralization and strategic disorientation of the government in Cairo. Nasser after 1959 retreated increasingly from pursuing a concrete political and economic union of the Arab peoples in favor of seeking only a more or less general consensus among the various existing states. The Naksah only confirmed this drift instead of initiating it.Or to put it another way, Zionist victory, with the hardening of the American position against the Arabs and the empowerment of the Saudis that accompanied it, made sure that the setback of 1959 became an irrecoverable strategic blow for secular political forces in MENA, putting them on the defensive for decades to come.
*Even though Aburish makes it clear repeatedly that the US had leaned early own towards a strategy of using Sunni Islamist reaction as a means of maintaining the Middle East in line, against "Communism," under which label, after some initial good will, Washington would place Nasser and similar figures as well.
*who, strange as it seems now, were both the most organized political and military force in the country at the time. Their militia, known as the "Peace Partisans", was vital for the defeat of the coup.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
postposting posted:LPV: The question is about the elections? That is, if elections are held will the blockade against Cuba end? Could there be elections held in Cuba? Because it is said that there are no elections in Cuba and that is why the blockade against Cuba continues. The question is if you think Communism has been applied in Cuba or not?
Alejandro Castro Espín: Do you realize that does not make any sense? That is an argument used to attack a country, to impose a different political system on it that besides being ineffective has had no results. That does not make sense. So, the argument is that they impose a blockade because we do not have direct elections. I am telling you that our elections could not be more direct, and I am going to explain it to you so you can learn about it and also because it is important to eliminate the stigma created by American imperialism and its allies regarding the Cuban political system. That stigma must be eliminated. You don’t have the direct knowledge about this and you may think that there are no direct elections in Cuba. I am going to tell that they are direct and you can compare our process with any other country including the United States.
In Cuba the elections for the powers of the State comes from the people, first it comes from meetings of the citizens at the base. In Cuba we call them blocks, the divisions of a city that is the term we use. Several blocks of neighborhoods that live in the same area gather in assemblies that are stipulated by law. In those assemblies the people choose freely among themselves who will represent them. The criteria takes into account the candidates characteristics, including if they are hardworking, If they are good people, if they have a clean past, and money has no bearing on who is nominated.
This is how a candidate comes about and I want to emphasize and important thin first and that is they are not nominated by a party, the people nominates them. This is not the same process that happens today in bourgeois society, where political parties prepare a nomination list. No, in Cuba it is the people at the base level in neighborhood assemblies, without any influence of money. The one chosen is based on the one who represents that neighborhood the best. There always has to be at least two candidates but there can be many more. After the popular election, we chose one and we call him a local delegate and then all of them meet to form a Municipal Assembly; let us call it a superior political administrative level. The Municipal Assembly of the People’s Power, and those elected by the people, form that Assembly and that Assembly chooses in the same way the power at the municipal level. Among those elected by the people select who can represent them at the municipal level and the same happens at the provincial and national level, when they reach the national level the National Assembly is formed, in a popular election where they nominate all those people they think have the right attributes, prestige and authority to govern them.
The National Assembly chooses the superior powers of the State that is the Council of State, the Council of State then chooses those who direct the society; the President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, the Vice-presidents of the Council of State and Ministers, that is the highest power of the State and then the highest power of the State defines a Government and after that Government is defined. The Government is formed with those elected by the people who have been elected at various levels, because all off those positions elected at the national level come from the base.
The President of the country must be nominated at the base, in the municipality. It is not like here in Greece where the parties are listed at the top level and they can list anyone. We are not like bourgeois democracy the ones you say that imposes the blockade to make Cuba change. We have direct elections. Here they put people on a list and then tell the people supposedly what they have done so they can be elected. That is the difference and why we say our democracy is truly participatory and popular.
It is important you understand this because we need to eliminate that stigma I was mentioning, because its intention is to maintain the aggression against my country. These attacks have been going on for over 50 years against a people who only decided to choose its own destiny, to be sovereign and independent. Cuba has not accepted the domain and imposition of an empire that has wanted to dominate us for over half a century.
When we arrived in this country we found your citizens admiring us for our stand. We have spoken with people from the right, from the left, from the center. We have talked with people at the street level, but also in localities, several mayors, and governors from regions like Lamia. And it has been very interactive, we talked with them about how we are perfecting our democracy and exercising the process of peoples’ power, because we understand that everything can be improved. What we do not accept is the comparison of our participatory democracy with bourgeois democracy which has not solved anything for humanity. The only thing it has done is to take humanity towards a precarious point. They have created the environmental crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis and the pandemics all over the world. The reason for that is because they have taken the majority of the resources and given it to militarism paid for by the western powers because it is a great business for them; this is the real truth. We have to talk about all of this and make it available for people everywhere so they can draw their own conclusions.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/27/the-future-of-cuba/
that whole interview is extremely my shit
books does rhizzone recommend?
quavers posted:what
i guess it depends on what parts of his genius you want to reflect on. part one of a new biography by stephen kotkin came out recently. it's big and only covers to 1928 but it's supposed to be good because it avoids some of the cliches. almost anything you'll have to filter out perfunctory denunciations. sheila fitzgerald is one of the leading russian scholars and her stuff has a lot of interesting ideas about tropes in stalin's russia, like 'unmasking' and such, although kotkin criticizes her of thinking within the trotskyist horizon.
stalin's lectures about marxism-leninism are simplistic but that's what makes them interesting (and, in my opinion, they are great). it's very deliberately the beginning of a certain 'voice' which tries to level ideology into something accessible to everyone. (arguably that also helped revisionists and bureaucrats by turning language increasingly into formalism.) a lot of the rest of stalin's work is basically denunciations of people at congresses, other than his late economic writings, which someone told me recently are apparently much better than mao gives him credit for.
a quick biography which is pretty good is "Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War" by kevin mcdermott. he does think stalin was horrible but as the title suggests it takes him seriously as a radical and war-leader, while most other biographies treat stalin as a cynic and failure.
"The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism" by Erik van Ree is okay i think, i mean, i skimmed it back in 2006 or something, so my memory is weak here. it's very 'academic' but it also sort of simplifies the picture by situating stalin more in terms of love for country and his views of nationalism and such, without being dumb. if you're looking for a 'what stalin believed' thing, and you've read his notes on leninism and such, this might be a good book to include.
there are other biographies like ulam that are supposed to be pretty good. if you want whole hog 'stalin was glorious' then check out ludo martens or grover furr. i'm sure the other ones have nuggets of wisdom here and there. obviously some of the more extravagant ones just make up crazy stuff. my sense with trotsky is that his early stuff (i mean, 1920s) is better than his later stuff, which is the opposite of what trotskyists say. as in, trotsky's main focus in the 1920s is a sort of deadening of debate and the compounding of lies, and the emergence of a bureaucracy and such. a lot of this has some sense to it, even if trotsky was wrong in terms of the line issues mostly involved. it's more in the 1930s that the positions which came to characterize trotskyism solidified into an ideology (criticism of popular fronts, support for multiparty elections, etc.).
also i said this before but trotsky's alternative strategy was probably clarified in the process because he couldn't really be like "we should generally follow stalin's line, but be more democratic, anti-bureaucratic and civil". but as a result the trotskyist line on most events in the 1930s becomes somewhat weird. like they try to blame the KPD for hitler and the PCE for franco.
Themselves posted:whoa. so trotskyism is like communist scientology? did they at least offer you a pamphlet since you arent high enough OT to get access to their exclusive library?
lol. i also was like, i have a bunch of books that i might dump at a used bookstore. since you guys are carrying books in your new office, i could sell them to you for cheap instead and you can either resell them or use it to stock your library. and the organizer said he'd only pay a dollar or two a book because "we have to pay our rent too". like... buddy... c'mon.
Women Aren't Crazy