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Analysis & Polemic

August 14, 2005 - 1:53pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Someone Tell the President the War Is Over"

Frank Rich, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html">The New York Times

Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?


A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll — a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.

August 14, 2005 - 11:28am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Peter Waterman writes:

"A Letter from Lima:
Is the World Still Broad and Alien?"
Peter Waterman

It occurs to me that I have been coming to Peru, on some kind of internationalist pilgrimage, for 20 years or so.

The first time was in 1986 when I was doing research on ‘international labour information’ in Peru (Waterman and Arellano 1986). There seemed at that time to be plenty of the old labour and socialist internationalism in Peru, received and transmitted by maybe a dozen different newspapers or magazines, of an equal number of different organisations or socialist tendencies. (For one tragic/pathetic Peruvian experience of Trotskyist internationalism, see the disenchanted Martínez 1997, reviewed Rénique 199?).

August 14, 2005 - 11:19am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Peter Waterman writes:

"Internationalism and Nationalism"
José Carlos Mariátegui


[José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was a journalist, editor, poet, popular educator, political and social analyst, party and union organiser, who laid the foundations of the modern Peruvian labour and socialist movement. He identified with the Russian Revolution and Communism but resisted the imposition in Latin America of certain Comintern policies, and developed original ideas on the revolutionary role of the peasantry and indigenous peoples. He was exiled in Europe in the turbulent period following World War I and the Russian Revolution, and combined a fervent nationalism with a just as fervent internationalism. He put his internationalist convictions into practice in his union newspaper, Labor, that appeared for one year in 1928–29. One-third of its coverage was devoted to international developments, largely to labour issues. This article is a classical internationalist statement from a socialist in a peripheral capitalist country. It was originally presented as a lecture, on November 2, 1923, in the office of the Student Federation, Lima, Peru. The text is taken from Mariátegui (1973a). The English text was originally published as Mariátegui (1986). The translation was by Peter Waterman and Carlos Betancourt. It was scanned and marginally corrected August 2005.]

In various of my lectures I have explained how the life of humanity has been brought together, connected, internationalised. More exactly, the life of humanity in the West. There have been established links and ties, new to human history, between all nations incorporated into European civilisation, Western civilisation.

Internationalism exists as an ideal because it is the new reality, the nascent reality. It is not an arbitrary ideal, it is not the absurd ideal of a few dreamers or utopians. It is the sort of ideal that Hegel and Marx define as a new and superior historical stage, which, organically enclosed within the present, struggles to realise itself and which, until it is realised, whilst it is being realised, appears as an ideal before an aging and decadent reality. A great human ideal, a great human aspiration, does not spring or emerge from the imagination of a more or less brilliant person. It springs from life. It emerges from historical reality. It is the present historical reality.

August 13, 2005 - 6:34pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

ephemera writes:

"The Forum and the Market:
The Complexity of the Social and the Struggle for Democracy"

Jeremy Gilbert

This paper starts from the observation that the very concept ‘social forum’ is to some extent predicated on a distinction between the market – the primary organisational model of neo-liberalism – and the forum, conceived as a different kind of model.

It explores the different logics of social organisation implied by the competing concepts of the forum and the market, taking off from Arendt’s assertion that the transformation of the former into the latter was always the project of the tyrants of ancient Greece.

It explores the complex political logics by which the collectivism and partial homogeneity required by any democratic situation have increasingly been undermined by the socio-economic processes of liberalisation and marketisation typical of post-modern capitalist societies. It goes on to explore different ways of understanding human collectivity in the light of the ‘democratic paradox’ by which individualism and egalitarianism are, at a certain level, logically incompatible.

It ultimately takes issue with any attempt, such as that exhibited by Hardt and Negri, to resolve this dilemma by willing the social into a more ‘simplified’ state than that it has always hitherto existed in, but argues that by contrast the very strength of the social forum project has been its willingness to experiment with the creation of multiple and overlapping new sites of democratic representation and deliberation. It finally suggests that if this project is to have useful correlates in the UK context, it must be understood in relatively abstract terms, as the lack of a history of radical democratic invention in the UK renders any direct public critique of representative democracy unlikely to win popular support.

[This article first appeared in 'ephemera: theory & politics in organization', Vol. 5, Iss. 2 (May 2005). The full-text pdf version can be downloaded at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal]

August 13, 2005 - 6:27pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

OlekNetzer writes:

"Real Causes of War Discovered"

Olek Netzer

In July 1970, on the Syrian front, the army ambulance I navigated to a UN outpost was hit and all my companions were torn to pieces. Traumatized, I could not erase the sensory experience of those moments from my inner vision, as if it were happening in the present and projected on my mind's screen again and again. I wanted to get over it, but I became convinced — perhaps obsessed — by the thought that I would not be able to go on living without coming to understand, but really understand, why it had happened.

August 8, 2005 - 6:16am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

Bernie Roddy writes
Assata Shakur in Cuba - A Video Review

"I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984. I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one.”

“She is now 120 lbs of money,” State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes told the New Jersey Star-Ledger. The U.S. government recently raised the bounty for the capture of Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur, to $1 million. The new initiative “is going to exert pressures that weren’t in place nationally and internationally before,” said Fuentes. “And we’re going to follow up to make sure everybody is aware of this both inside and outside of Cuba.”

August 6, 2005 - 2:54pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Bill Templer writes:

"Hiroshima at 60"
Bill Templer

In recalling Hiroshima’s holocaust, a memorable letter written on 8/6 by the grand old man of the American socialist left, Scott Nearing, is worth remembering, here from his autobiography The Making of a Radical:



"The event which tore me away from my emotional and habitual commitment to western civilization was the decision of Harry Truman to blot out the city of Hiroshima. It happened on my sixty-second birthday, August 6, 1945.


On that day I wrote President Truman: 'Your government is no longer mine. From this day onward our paths diverge: you to continue on your suicide course, blasting and cursing the world. I turn my hand to the task of helping to build a human society based on cooperation, social justice and human welfare.'


[…] The decision which led to Hiroshima was one of the most crucial ever made by modern man. […] The decision was the death sentence of western civilization. I dissociated myself from the United States government after August 6, 1945 because I felt that the use of atomic weapons against Japan was not only a crime against humanity but was a blunder which would lead to a gigantic build-up of the planet’s destructive forces."



Nearing's thought and life as a Debsian socialist remain relevant to progressive politics today, he’s being read again inside the green left and elsewhere. His anti-war anti-capitalism pamphlet "The Great Madness: a Victory for the American Plutocracy" as timely today as in 1917. Worth a look: bigeye.com/madness


Ted Van Kirk, the Enola Gay’s navigator, gave an interview today on BBC in which he repeated the standard myth about how the bombing of Hiroshima "saved American lives and ended the war." Ted has no regrets about having incinerated 140,000 innocents in a split second, the 'mother' of all atrocities. Any bombing today anywhere pales in the shadow of 8/6. There are nearly 240,000 names of the dead on the Hiroshima Monument. Brief insightful article on these myths: truthout.org
-- along with two narratives from survivors.

July 27, 2005 - 3:54pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Doomsday Approaches:

The End of the Housing Bubble"

Mike Whitney, Counterpunch


I sold my home three weeks ago anticipating what I believe will be "Economic Armageddon" in the United States. It wasn't an easy thing to do. My wife and I have lived in the same home for 25 years, raised both of our children there, and owned the property outright without any loans or mortgage. The house was paid for in "sweat-equity", that is, by wielding a shovel day-in and day-out in my one-man landscape business. I don't say that for sympathy, but to illustrate that we played by the rules, worked hard, paid our taxes, and took advantage of the American dream of home-ownership.


All that has changed.

July 26, 2005 - 10:13am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Horizontalidad in Argentina

by Marina Sitrin

"Horizontalism" is one of the ways in which so many here describe part of what they are doing and how they are doing it. Horizontalism is not an ideology, however, it is a relationship -- a way of relating to one another in a directly democratic way while at the same time creating through the process of discovery. What has resulted is the creation of an amazing complex of movements, all linked,that range from hundreds of occupied and producing factories using forms of direct democracy and collective decision making, to dozens of neighborhood asambleas (assemblies), to dozens of piquetero groups, many of whom are organized into a network of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD), and hundreds of autonomous neighborhood kitchens and centers of popular education.

The following is a small selection of interviews with protagonists in the autonomous social movements in Argentina, the second in a series that will continue to appear here in the coming months. These are among the many voices that I have the privilege to be compiling into an oral history to be published bilingually in the near future.

July 26, 2005 - 9:24am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Hitler's Shadow and the Coming Storm"

John Chuckman

Despite many differences, there are striking parallels between Bush's invasion of Iraq and Hitler's invasion of Russia, and understanding these parallels serves to warn of the coming storm Bush is calling down upon all of us.


Hitler's decision to invade Russia was a horrific turning point in history, certainly the most consequential decision of the twentieth century and likely the most destructive in all of history. We still live with some of its terrible results.

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