In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, I want to start a conversation about the big picture, the transition from capitalism to socialism. Let’s start at the beginning. An article by John Lanchester appeared in the September 18th New Yorker entitled “The Case Against Civilization” argues that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had better lives than we do: African tribes that still live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle “work” about 17 hours a week to find adequate food – 2300 calories, about what we’re supposed to eat. While Lanchester doesn’t mention Engels and barely mentions the rise of class society, I […]
Happy 100th Birthday USSR
Happy birthday USSR. The October Revolution in Russian in 1917 was the defining event of the Twentieth Century. It was one of those dialectical events that happen when quantity – as in number of people in the street – turned into quality. That the revolution encountered myriad problems cannot be disputed. Serious revolutionaries are not utopians. We are focused on the process, the dialectical process by which human progress evolves. I don’t mean progress in the sense of more gadgets, but in the sense of a powerful unification of humanity toward a compassionate society focused on meeting all human needs. […]
The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War. The man can make movies. The story was so engrossing that I kept wishing the episode wouldn’t end. The filmmakers got much of the story right. But the story was told through a liberal-progressive – and deeply anticommunist – lens. Perhaps best exemplified by consistent use of “Viet Cong” to describe the NLF forces in the South, a pejorative slapped on them by the South Vietnamese puppets. I also agree with Nick Turse who wrote Kill Everything that Moves in his critique that Burns minimizes civilian casualties: https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/the-ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll/ But the film makes a strong anti-war statement. I […]
Unity?
I’d like to propose to the progressive movement that we try something new: unity. What a concept. The most unifying figure to have emerged in recent memory is Bernie. Let’s unite behind him and see what we can do. His 2016 campaign accomplished the impossible: he ran a nearly successful campaign without taking money from Wall Street. This should have been the aspect of his campaign that the party adopted, but no one else is even trying to do this: not Warren, not Harris, not Franken. I have my differences with Sanders. He’s too close to the Zionists in Israel; […]
Ending Racism
Some good things are coming out of the Charlottesville tragedy: One, people are talking about racism; two, the racists clearly overreacted by murdering Heather Heyer and wounding nine others, thus turning off many of their would-be supporters. But lest we believe that virulent racism is the exclusive property of the white supremacists, we need to understand that racism is historic, systemic, and structural, woven in the social fabric of the United States. Its essence is embodied by the following statistic: the median wealth (not income) of white households is 13 times that of Black households, $141,000 to $11,000 (1913 figures). […]
Back to School
Back to School. One strategy that progressive forces in the cities might consider is developing a vision for the public schools and then organizing a slate of candidates for school board to advocate for that vision. The schools – pretty much all of them – are in terrible shape and the back-to-basics business model that’s been in vogue since the 1980s has only made the situation worse. This model is stuck in the 19th century, where in most cases children sit down and shut up while a teacher attempts to pour inaccurate and uninteresting knowledge into their ears. It never […]
Revitalizing the union movement
The concentration of wealth at the top and the increasing level of poverty at the bottom are directly related to the weakness of the trade union movement. Any revolutionary or even serious reform movement will not succeed without revitalizing the unions. It’s true that many of what unions remain are corrupt and tend to support the status quo by in large, or the right wing of the Democratic Party. But that can be changed. In the 1970s, I was a part of a rank-and-file caucus in the San Francisco teachers’ union. My comrades in the ultraleft were shrill and sectarian […]
Happy Slave Owners Revolt Day
It’s time to face the fact that, to paraphrase Lincoln, the U. S. is a nation is of white people, by white people, and for white people. On July 4, we celebrate the 241st anniversary of the slave owner’s revolt. The British empire abolished slavery in 1831, some 32 years ahead of the U. S. White supremacy was the founding principle and remains the predominant force in the U. S. The countervailing trend has enjoyed brief moments of promise: the end of slavery, Reconstruction, Civil Rights, but those moments add up to about 20 years. Reconstruction was followed by 85 years […]
Violence
The revolution will most likely not be nonviolent. Nonviolence is a tactic that we use until we are forced to fight back. The other side, the 1%, is not nonviolent, lol. They have at their disposal the most destructive war machine that the world has ever seen. The violence won’t come from the likes of guy who shot up the phony softball game. He didn’t kill anyone, BTW. Only he was killed. I don’t think he was crazy. I think he wanted a meaningful death. I can’t defend what he did. It was adventurist, and it has endangered the movement, […]
Death
My favorite cousin and one of my closest friends a few years younger than me was killed last week in a head on crash with a tanker truck filled with apple juice. So I’m grieving, and I have death on my mind. I’m not that far from it myself, even if I live out my full sentence, as it were. I don’t get it, death, that is. We’re here for a hot minute. One thing to consider is the power of the imagination. What we know of “reality” is really just a figment of our imagination, a construct of our […]