Spain & the EU’s ‘Oriental despotism’ is legitimizing Catalonia as a leftist cause

Click here to access article by Ramin Mazaheri from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.

The author. in his analysis of the Catalonia-Madrid standoff, illustrates true leftist thinking at its best in analyzing this issue.

What does it mean to be a true leftist or a true socialist? It means believing thoroughly, genuinely, and completely in DEMOCRACY--the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people. (These exact words were included in the US Declaration of Independence from Britain. The ruling embryonic capitalist class wanted ordinary people to support their drive to separate the American colonies from Britain for the capitalists' benefit. Outside of this context, have you ever heard such words?) If you, because of long years of indoctrination in capitalist controlled schools and following corporate media, can not understand this last sentence, read it over several times until you get it. (It's almost comical the way most people, including authorities, so casually affirm they are for "democracy", but have little idea of what it means.) It means that every institution of society, including especially the economy (socialism), must serve and be controlled by the people--that means ALL of the people.

True, most ordinary people as they are now are not equipped to participate in governing. But this is due to long years of indoctrination in capitalist controlled schools and following corporate media, as a result they are poorly equipped to participate in governing themselves. This is not because they are inherently ignorant and thus they must follow the guidance of "wise" authorities or "experts", it is because they have been dumbed-down and brainwashed because of long years of indoctrination and poor education. (They are primarily excluded from any significant decision-making because they don't control huge amounts of wealth. Occasionally one of the ruling class's "morons" gets elected to office.) This is a major problem for all true leftists or democrats to deal with.

Anyway read the article to see how a genuine democrat, also known as a leftist, analyzes the issue of Catalonian independence.

A Speech For Our Time

Click here if you wish to access this 3:37m video from the original posting by Don Quijones of Raging Bull-Shit.

The video is an excerpt from "The Great Dictator" film by Charles Chaplin. Quijones writes as an introduction:

In this topsy-turvy world where leadership is treated and studied as a science but good leaders are thinner on the ground than ever before, perhaps it’s only fitting that one of the great speeches for our time was written long before our time. Seventy-two years ago, to be precise, during one of humanity’s darkest moments – the Second World War – and, what’s more, by one of history’s greatest comic geniuses.

Remember this was during a time before WWII when Anglo-American ruling classes had such mixed feelings about their support of Nazis (for more details, read my commentary here). After all, the Nazis were vigorously moving against organized labor and had plans to convert that heretical nation, the Soviet Union, into Nazi "lebensraum". Despite the enormous popularity of Chaplin's performances, ruling class media and enforcement agencies immediately started attacking him with smear campaigns and legal charges. As a result, he fled to Switzerland. This is how a rather conservative entry in Wikipedia describes it:

The Great Dictator spent a year in production, and was released in October 1940. There was a vast amount of publicity around the film, with a critic for the New York Times calling it "the most eagerly awaited picture of the year", and it was one of the biggest money-makers of the era. The ending was unpopular, however, and generated controversy. Chaplin concluded the film with a six-minute speech in which he looked into the camera and professed his personal beliefs. Charles J. Maland has identified this overt preaching as triggering a decline in Chaplin's popularity, and writes, "Henceforth, no movie fan would ever be able to separate the dimension of politics from [his] star image". The Great Dictator received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor.

In the mid-1940s, Chaplin was involved in a series of trials that occupied most of his time and significantly affected his public image. The troubles stemmed from his affair with an aspirant actress named Joan Barry, with whom he was involved intermittently between June 1941 and the autumn of 1942. Barry, who displayed obsessive behaviour and was twice arrested after they separated, reappeared the following year and announced that she was pregnant with Chaplin's child. As Chaplin denied the claim, Barry filed a paternity suit against him.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, who had long been suspicious of Chaplin's political leanings, used the opportunity to generate negative publicity around him. As part of a smear campaign to damage Chaplin's image, the FBI named him in four indictments related to the Barry case. Most serious of these was an alleged violation of the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women across state boundaries for sexual purposes. The historian Otto Friedrich has called this an "absurd prosecution" of an "ancient statute", yet if Chaplin was found guilty, he faced 23 years in jail. Three charges lacked sufficient evidence to proceed to court, but the Mann Act trial began in March 1944. Chaplin was acquitted two weeks later. The case was frequently headline news, with Newsweek calling it the "biggest public relations scandal since the Fatty Arbuckle murder trial in 1921."

This stirring video excerpt inspired me to think how life could be in a post-capitalist society. One benefit is clear to me. With all the labor saving devices we have created and without being forced to produce all kinds of junk we don't need, we would have so much time to devote to our families and others, to our education, and to restore to health the damage their capitalist system has done to the environment. 

Production for our capitalist masters has been used to accumulate wealth and, most especially,  power over us for the benefit of these tiny ruling classes. Naturally, what has followed in the wake of their rule has been endless wars, widespread poverty, periodic collapses of our economies, all sorts of social problems, and extensive damage to our ecosystem. If we could replace their obsessive production with our production for actual human needs, we would enjoy so much real abundance in our daily lives.

The art of building a new world: Freedom according to the Zapatistas

Click here to access article by Raúl Zibechi from Americas Program. 

It takes seven hours to traverse the 100 kilometers that separate San Cristóbal and the Morelia caracol. The caravan (containing thirty cars and trucks) left late and advanced at a tortoise pace. Around 2:00 am, we arrived at the caracol, and a maze of buildings that house the institutions of the autonomous region, made up of three municipalities, twelve regions, and dozens of communities governed by the Good Government Board. 

In August the author attended "La Escuelita", or Little School, arranged for people in other lands to come to Chiapas and learn about the new society that the Zapatistas are creating. This is a report on his visit and his observations about the new society.

The Escuelita Zapatista and its proposal to the movements

Click here to access article by Leonidas Oikonomakis from Reflections on a Revolution. 

There are some glimmers of hopeful light in the world, and this article reports on one of them. 

All those activists, young and old, have dreamt of a better world — a horizontal world without domination and exploitation — and the Zapatistas took up the opportunity to propose what that such a world might look like: by letting their alumn@s live it for a week. After all, for all these years, the creation and evolution of this better world in Chiapas has been safeguarded by activists from all over Mexico and the world — and now the Zapatista communities took the responsibility to show them the results. Not to provide a “guide” or “blueprint” of what autonomy should be like, but to present what they have come up with, and to prove that a better world is not only possible — it exists here and now.

What Would Real Democracy Look Like?

Click here to access article by Camilla Hansen from New Compass (Norway). (Updated at 6pm PST)

The article offers a good survey of more democratic forms of people power drawing from both contemporary and historical examples. On the other hand, it seems at times laced with naive ideas about change as illustrated here:

If participatory budgeting is to be a tool for genuine democratisation of society, the citizens must be given decision-making power over the entire or at least a large part of the municipal budget, and the process must be a bottom-up process where the sovereign power lies with the citizens in the assemblies. Local authorities must be willing to give away power to the residents in the assemblies, and there is a need for decentralization of power from national and international levels to the municipal and local levels. [my emphasis]

However, the author redeems herself later in the article with statements like this:

A radical direct and participatory democracy will not be handed down to us by the elites, but has to be struggled for by ordinary citizens and social movements.

The major flaw in this essay is the glaring omission of the economic system that has integrated within it all elements of formal representative democracy, so that the major players of the former now thoroughly control the latter. She only makes rather oblique references to capitalism. Thus, she also ignores the damage done to people's political consciousness about taking responsibility for their lives while learning to submit over the past several centuries to the rule of capitalist ruling classes, and many other class ruled societies before them. 

Although the dream of classless societies and authentic democracy has not been extinguished in the human race, such class rule experiences has left many with a submissive and passive relationship to authorities and a weak belief in their own power. Hence, the challenge for activists is the development of a liberatory social consciousness within a system that demands obedience and conformity to ruling class norms and commitment to its values.

Sleepless in Istanbul V

Click here to access article by Dominic from libcom.org.

This is an excellent, objective report on recent developments of self-organizing efforts in Turkey by an author published in an anarchist publication. As such he clearly comes from an orientation that emphasizes political self-organization, people power, inclusive democracy, and bottom-up political structures. 

We are currently seeing the early efforts at such societal self-organizing happening throughout the world to challenge the overwhelming power of the Empire and its planet-destroying system of capitalism. Thus it is of critical importance for those of us who view this as the only alternative solution to hierarchical structures that have resulted in so many crimes against humanity since the beginning of civilization.

New Compass Meeting about Participatory Democracy at the World Social Forum

Click here to access article from New Compass (based in Norway). (Note: the introductory article contains links to both an audio and a written transcript of the WSF meeting. The transcript is accessed as a Microsoft Word document.)

One important point about participatory democracy is to make sure that the institutions really empower the citizens. Often “participatory democracy” is just a political move made by the local authorities to attract votes, a communication move that only serves to legitimate decisions that already have been taken by the authorities. To ensure real participation and decision making power to citizens, the cooperative has created the Intervention Charter. Local authorities committing to the charter are put in front of the people and held to account. The idea is that it is the people who are the experts. But implementing such a practice encounters several difficulties: the fear of the local authorities to be directly confronted by their citizens, and the difficulty of convincing both citizens and experts that ordinary citizens know what is good for their community. Low participation of citizens can also be a problem sometimes. It is not easy to mobilize people to participate nowadays. [My emphasis]

I see a danger in this presentation of participatory democracy. One must never forget that capitalist ruling classes will never voluntarily relinquish control over important decisions. The fact that they permit local experiments such as depicted in this presentation does not in any way refute this point. You see, under globalized capitalism, local decisions matter very little to capitalist ruling classes. Most tax money is spent by national governments that are controlled by these ruling classes, and local communities have lost most of the important decisions. Consider how corporations can elicit all kinds of subsidies and favors from local communities so that corporations will set up operations in their communities. This lack of power over important decisions is clearly the reason why there is "low participation of citizens...."

However, I believe that such participation is desirable in that it offers a training experience for people to prepare them for self-government.

Building The Commons: 2013 Forum

Click here to access posting by davana from Making Worlds: a commons coalition.

The significance of this post is to illustrate that the Occupy Movement has not disappeared, but is undergoing a period of consolidation, reflection, and rebirth. Here we visit people in New York City who are involved in the work of building a commons. They are people from a variety of activist and ideological backgrounds: Transition Towns activists, community organizers, Occupy Wall Street activists, Hurricane Sandy relief workers, academic intellectuals on the left, etc. 

I think one of the core commonalities that all of them share is a sense that people must re-assume responsibility for their own lives simply because their capitalist masters have little-to-no regard for them. It is a new consciousness that our society is manipulated by people who have separated themselves from communities and who have agendas at odds with the needs of communities. These activists know that they are faced with a massive project that includes new ways of thinking and relating to each other, in short, the construction of a new consciousness and culture. It is no place for individuals who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the capitalist belief that the solutions to all problems can be obtained immediately by shopping and accumulating the stuff they want to sell you, or even a liberal's belief that participating in protest demonstrations can, by themselves, fundamentally change anything.

Anyway, I invite you to explore this website (for example, links like this and this) to understand where the commons/Occupy movement is today: it is a place where people are beginning to lay the foundations for a new society by asking important questions such as:

• How are people in NYC creating common spaces?
• How can commoning efforts support and strengthen each other?
• How do communities identify with and participate in the process of commoning?
• How can commoning be a form of resistance to neoliberal privatization?
• How can we construct a commons-inspired "Occupy theory" of collective action?

Will we ever reach true equality?

Click here to access article by George Lakey from Waging Nonviolence.

I could really identify with the discriminatory experiences depicted by this author. I have witnessed them in a variety of settings including, and most irritatingly, in progressive groups. Few people are conscious of it; and because of that fact, it often goes unchallenged in many activist groups. Its hidden influence retards any construction of a new counter-culture in which egalitarian forms of relationships can develop. 

As suggested by this insightful author, ranking people is a cultural phenomenon. (He comes close to stating that its human nature.) We are constantly encouraged by the dominant capitalist culture to compete with each other. Although the author focuses much more on group cultures, the broader capitalist culture has an extreme emphasis on competitiveness (especially for the 99 Percent) and the ranking of people in general. This culture is diametrically opposed to an inclusive, egalitarian type of society that progressive people usually say they want.

Looking Back on Occupy

Click here to access article from Bureau of Public Secrets. It is an English version of an email interview with Ken Knabb by the French journal L’Échaudée. 

Knabb provides an excellent assessment of the recent activist phenomenon called the Occupy Movement in the US. I think after reading this, you will understand that the Occupy Movement has had an important impact on the consciousness of many people which will become manifest in many other modes of expression in the days to come. It also created new organizational forms which is likely to shape political organizing in the future:

Instead of relying on a few leaders or specialists, we could draw on an incomparably vaster pool of human knowledge and creativity that no one was in any position to dominate. For any problem, any number of people might come up with a workable solution. At its best this reflected a sort of “communism of ideas” in the sense that people were less concerned with who “originated” some idea, let alone who might “own” it, and more involved in the practical use of ideas, rapidly weeding out the ones that could not pass the test of experience and refining those that could. This collective process also reduced the traditional emphasis on “authors” and “texts.” ....

This manner of spreading also had the unforeseen effect of creating an unusual degree of autonomy among the different Occupies. ...“each of the new occupations and assemblies remains totally autonomous. Though inspired by the original Wall Street occupation, they have all been created by the people in their own communities. No outside person or group has the slightest control over any of these assemblies. Which is just as it should be.” .... Amid all the differences between the Occupies in different cities, no one ever dared to suggest that any Occupy should defer to any other. ...this had two great advantages: “the proliferation of autonomous groups and actions is safer and more fruitful than the top-down ‘unity’ for which bureaucrats are always appealing. Safer, because it counteracts repression: if the occupation in one city is crushed (or coopted), the movement will still be alive and well in a hundred others. More fruitful, because this diversity enables people to share and compare among a wider range of tactics and ideas.”

Organize, Imagine, and Act: How a Student Movement Can Become a Revolution

Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall (Canadian) from his blog. 

This is a MUST READ for all activists who see reform of the existing class system of capitalism as irrelevant, even worse, as in a death spiral for the 99 Percent. This is a brilliant exposition of where activists all over the world need to proceed after the initial battles with the One Percents have concluded. They need to take the next step: to transform protests over specific issues into organizing inclusive collective energies that adversely affect entire communities. This will lay the foundation for an inclusive revolutionary movement that can grow to challenge the beloved class-based system of the One Percents and establish a new social-economic system that promotes the health and welfare of 100 percent of societies. 

Enough said. Read this article, think about it, talk about it with others.

Your consensus decision-making sucks a lot sometimes

Click here to access article from In Bed with the Resistance (UK). 

This critique of consensus decision-making is most important in building new methods of activism and to build an ideological nucleus for new societies. Personally, I have long supported this form of decision-making that he briefly alludes to:

Nested councils in which the councils at the bottom choose a spokesperson to go to the next level council. The morbid fear of representation among some activists often prevents this happening, though it has appeared in the form of a ‘spokes council’ from time to time. The key thing is to view the spokesperson not as a representative but as a delegate who can be overruled from below at any time. This system too will have disadvantages, but since it is the one the Spanish CNT – the biggest and most success horizontal organisation I know of – uses, we know that it does work to some extent. Unlike consensus decision-making in big groups of people.  

Between the Leninists and the Clowns: Avoiding recklessness and professionalism in revolutionary struggle

Click here to access article by Black Orchid Collective from Anarchist News. 

This quite lengthy article focuses on current issues within activist circles in the Seattle area. One might take issue with my framing it as "within activist circles" instead of anarchist circles, but I think that anarchists are the leading edge of current activist activity. I think that, in the interests of time, you can skip the initial three sections and start with section IV, "Challenges we face if we want to survive and grow". In this article they, the Collective, clearly delineate some of the most crucial issues that need to be addressed in order to create an effective revolutionary movement with mass participants. 

Open Letter From Chomsky, Shiva, Pilger and more..

Click here to access article from New Left. 

The following is an open letter from IOPS  (the International Organisation for a Participatory Society) a potentially important new initiative in the struggle for a more just world...

I haven't had much time to look over this new organization's website, but it excites my interest. It has some very excellent people associated with it, visions which followers of this blog likely agree with, and some very interesting ideas on how to proceed with building the organization.

Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-first Century

Click here to access article by Andrej Grubacic & David Graeber from Eagainst (Greece). 

Everywhere from Eastern Europe to Argentina, from Seattle to Bombay, anarchist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions. Often their exponents do not call themselves “anarchists”. There are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, direct democracy… Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s vision at the point of a gun. Above all, anarchism, as an ethics of practice — the idea of building a new society “within the shell of the old”....

A very good read to bring oneself up-to-date on anarchism that is playing such a prominent role in revolutionary activities in this century. The authors are prominent contemporary anarchists who examine the history and roots of anarchism, its present configurations, and projected future. 

Listen, You Can Hear the Sound of Direct Democracy, or Orchestroles

Click here to access article by Cindy Milstein from Occupy Wall Street.

The author provides a vivid description of the new spirit of resistance inspired by direct democracy and the self-organizing power of the ongoing Occupy movement in Montreal and Quebec. 

LISTEN. That’s what direct democracy sounds like. A whole lot of listening, to each other, and what we need, desire, and feel good about doing. Maybe that goes a long way to explaining why neither tactics, strategies, or aspirations go stale. People here in Montreal, in building toward and moving forward with this student-social strike, have made use of and/or are creating deliberate spaces for listening, from assemblies to the wake-up calls of casseroles and now orchestroles.

Fantasties and (Possible) Realities: The Meaning of Mondragon

Click here to access article by Bernard Marszalek from CounterPunch.

In contrast to many aficionados of Mondragon, the author provides a much more sober assessment of the possible contributions that Mondragon and other cooperatives can make in building a new economy and society.

As co-ops demonstrate, beyond their everyday work, their organizational abilities to create financial institutions, develop co-op educational projects, secure land and buildings through land trusts and develop housing, healthcare and recreational facilities, they enhance their economic resilience, and in doing so, demonstrate to other groups ways of forging durability through bottom-up alliances. The cooperatives, in other words, might act as catalyzing agents for the grassroots economy, not to lead it, but to contribute their organizational expertise to the larger alternative economy.

On Anarchy: An Interview

Click here to access article, a transcript of an interview with Andrew Gavin Marshall from What About Peace? Here is a link to a French translation of the interview.

This is the best article I have ever read on the subject of anarchism. It confirmed so much that I already knew, but it also shed new light on some subjects in which I was not well informed. Anarchism has always been much maligned and oppressed by capitalist authorities simply because it offers the most serious challenge to capitalist culture that emphasizes hierarchy, authority, class structure, indoctrination, and coercive police forces to enforce the demands of a ruling class. Therefore, I consider it a must-read article for all activists.

Leo Panitch on the Occupy Movement

Here are two videos of a March interview with Leo Panitch from Newsclick website (India).

This well-known Marxist professor from Canada looks at the Occupy movement from an historical perspective in order to reveal its unique qualities and speculate on its possibilities.

Part 1 (18:49m) The Challenge is to Move Beyond Protests





Part 2 (11:24m) Constraints of the #Occupy/other protest movements

Anarchy 101

Click here to access article by Bob Black from Eagainst. (A re-publication from The Anarchist Library.) 

A very good description of anarchism. The main problem I have with it is his view of "democracy": it is a distorted form known to much of the world as "bourgeois democracy" or as "representative democracy". Essentially they are referring to the capitalist form of electoral democracy designed to fool ordinary people into thinking that it is the real thing. It's a semantics issue among many on the left.