Posts tagged occupy
(excerpt)
SR: There’s been a revival of Marxism: for example, commentators have noted that since 2008, sales of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto have risen. You describe yourself as a ‘non-Marxist socialist’. Can you elaborate?
CW: I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding, not just in the modern world but for our historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is indispensablebecause how do you talk about oligarchy, plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s Karl Marx.
It’s inadequate in the end because of the cultural issues. You have to deal with death, you have to deal with dread, despair, and disappointment. You have to deal with anxiety, insecurity, fears and so forth. And Marx just didn’t go in that direction. And people say, ‘well, you can go with Freud’. Yeah Freud got some interesting things to say, no doubt about that. But it’s indispensable and, in the end, inadequate. But it’s a beautiful thing to see the revival of a Marxist analysis. I think Marx was the great secular prophet of 19th century Europe. And that makes a difference.
What’s the word on The Street?
The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training - which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s - was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.
Brooklyn women make their building theirs
The rent strike started two years ago when Sara Lopez woke up early one morning. No one sleeps much in these three buildings — in the winter there’s no heat, in the summer there’s no electricity, and all year there are rats and cockroaches scurrying in the walls — but that morning Lopez had slept even worse than usual, and she was mad.
“I thought and thought and decided that I needed to do something,” she said. “So I knocked on 51 doors because I got mad of so much injustice.”
At each door she and Trelles spread a clear message: Stop paying rent. It wasn’t an idea born out of an ideology regarding private property or capitalism or self-governance. Instead, Lopez — a retired public employee who says she still has faith in the power and intentions of the local government — was espousing a radicalism born from necessity and experience. She knew that tenants could run the buildings better than Petito, whom she called un payaso, which means “clown” in Spanish but sounds far more poisonous than that when hissed in her Honduran accent. In the winter of 1982, after a former landlord simply abandoned the buildings without heat, Lopez brought the buildings’ families together, and they governed themselves — collecting money to pay the bills and replace the boiler, and forming teams to clean the hallways, put the trash out and make repairs.
Read the article in its entirety, it’s so good. These ladies know what’s up.
Freaking beautiful. organize and take control of your own community.
(via sabots-are-for-sabotage)
“Marx’s Method in Capital”
David Harvey & Alex Callinicos
Can’t you see that your wage your salary or income is all the freedom that you have? Your freedom, your liberty doesn’t go a step further than your wage. The freedom that is given to you on paper, that is written down in law books and constitutions, does not do you a bit of good. Such freedom only means that you have the right to do a certain thing. But it doesn’t mean that you can do it.
To be able to do it, you must have the chance, the opportunity. You have a right to eat three fine meals a day, but if you haven’t the means, the opportunity to get those meals, then what good is that right to you?
” Alexander Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism (via antistate)(via socialdem)
…and the population isn’t asked whether solar panels should be a huge freaking priority, regardless of who’s producing them!
Seriously - I can’t stand to see the government make vague hints about the importance of green energy, and then keep cheap green energy OUT of the country, made by those who are willing to produce it… protecting their local solar producers, but also protecting their dependence on fossil fuel industries…
Can someone please enlightenment me? or support me? this is ridiculous. WTO cares about trade, nation-states, corporate agendas, not people’s priorities. Prove me wrong…
I’m reading some Pannekoe right now. He points out, rightly, that co-operatives and other more just economic institutions are still in competition with capitalist firms in a larger capitalist sphere.
Wouldn’t the same logic apply to any specific locality in which communism is achieved? In advanced industrial society, where production and daily life are so dependent on an integrated world market, any locality, even on the level of an entire nation, or region, would be dependent on the remaining capitalist-based systems that existed abroad?
The Bolsheviks waited desperately for revolution in Germany and other European capitalist nations, but it never came. Isolation from the rest of the industrial world struck what may have been a fatal blow to revolutionary efforts in Russia. Is a real victory for socialism or communism really dependent on world-wide, or at least economically independent regional, revolution?
I’m reminded, sadly, of Stalin’s arguments for “Socialism in One Country”, derp de derp…
Any help, comrades? Alternatives to Stalin please?
