Necessity: The Mother of Invention Or The Mother of Strife? [a "best post"]

Click here to access article by Bernard Marszalek from Ztangi Press. (Amended for clarity at 10:18 AM and at 5:35 PM Seattle time.)

The author takes us on a mind-expanding tour from current research through history and archeology to uncover evidence that humans need security and peace in order to realize our collective powers (as social creatures) of creativity. (Is not "creativity" the ability or power to influence an outcome in a new way?) It is clear that our Western civilization that is anchored on the dynamic engine of capitalism is becoming increasingly dysfunctional regarding these needs. This is the inevitable end result of the overwhelming power of a tiny class of capitalists who are increasingly hoarding not only wealth but power to satisfy their addiction to the latter. The power to create must belong to all the people because it is embedded in their human nature, but for this class it has become an end in itself. Sadly they have brainwashed us into being their willing accomplices or (to stick with the addiction theme) their co-dependents.

Our jobs prevent us from being creators. Or to put this another way, the false scarcity that compels us to obediently perform our daily sacrifices to maintain our miserable survival veils the real, but unacknowledged scarcity of creation. ...our condition of enslavement frustrates our species-work – the creation of culture. It is as if we are the compliant, if not the eager, agents of our own demise as evolutionary beings.

Collective intelligence manifests on a material basis as everything from jewelry to gigantic public works like the reservoirs of the Indus cities.

His tour brings us to this apt conclusion: 

Given the reality of economic trends however, no matter how important it is to retrieve from the bosses every ounce of the value of labor that they are stealing, we need to confront the fact that jobs are not only increasingly precarious and stupid, they are disappearing. No effort to ignore this fact by focusing on immediate demands will make it disappear. There can be no effective political movement that does not meet changing reality with radicalism.

I have difficulty with the last sentence. To me, it should read something like this. "There can be no effective political movement that does not insure security and peace for its inhabitants, and to accomplish this we must radically change the way societies currently function."  

Impressions of Rojava: a report from the revolution

Click here to access article by Janet Biehl from Reflections on a Revolution. 

Every once in while in history we find examples of revolutionary societies that inspire real progressive people, people looking for social solutions to deal with the myriad problems facing societies in today's capitalist ruled world. We are now seeing reports (see this and this) of such developments in the tiny autonomous area of Rojava which is formally a part of Syria.

Normally in such conflicted areas, radical experiments are compromised by the needs of security from outside threats as happened in the Soviet Union following the 1917 revolution, and to a lesser extent in Cuba following their revolution in 1959. Such compromises do not seem to be happening in Rojava. Although Biehl makes references to problems, she doesn't list any--I wish she had.

In nine days we could not possibly have scoured Rojava for all problems, and our interlocutors candidly admitted that Rojava is hardly above criticism....

This excellent report--there are hints of more to come--reminded me of some speculations I had after reading about the Soviet revolution in the excellent book entitled The Prophet Armed (v.1) by Isaac Deutscher. In the chaos of the aftermath the Bolsheviks were faced with invasions by Western capitalist armies, counter-revolutionary insurrections from within, widespread hunger, epidemics, a devastated country ravaged by WWI, etc. I have speculated that the very understandable mistake that Trotsky made as commander of the new Soviet army was to fall back on what he regarded as the only form of organization that an army could have to secure the revolution while facing foreign armies: the traditional rigid hierarchical structure. Deutscher wrote on page 416:

The task...to be accomplished was to centralize the Red Army and to establish single command. Trotsky went on to disband the Red Guards and the partisan detachments. The incorporation of the partisan units proved unsatisfactory, because it infected the regular detachments with the 'guerrilla spirit'. .... He insisted on the organization of the entire army into uniformly constituted divisions and regiments.

This I think was a fatal mistake that had many future adverse consequences for the success of the revolution. Although it did secure the revolution for the immediate future, it was in a distorted bureaucratic form which led to its corruption and ultimate deterioration into bureaucratic ruling class government.   

An alternative would have been to supply local sympathetic revolutionary populations with arms, training, and political education. Whether this alternative could have been successful under such chaotic conditions in 1917 is debatable, but I think it was necessary to keep the revolution alive and sustainable.

This alternative appears to be operational in Rojava's revolution. Should this alternative survive and thrive, I will not only have a confirmation of my speculation; but of far more importance, there is promise of a successful revolutionary model that the rest of the world's majority can follow.

Mobilizing for the common: some lessons from Italy

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.

Bravo! Roos and this website continue to impress me as being on the cutting edge of revolutionary thought. This article, which contains a wealth of excellent links to other resources, is an outstanding example of such revolutionary thinking. I have been surveying websites intensively for the past five years and I have found no single website that is as advanced in revolutionary thinking as this one is. 

As with many of the articles posted at the site, this one needs to be studied rather than merely read casually. Some linked resources are better than others, but that is for each person to decide depending on their experience and orientation. I found the best link to be to the article entitled "Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power" by Max Haiven that was posted in January (which I missed for some reason!).

I have tried to argue previously that capitalism is not merely a system which is preoccupied with the accumulation of material wealth and power. It is a comprehensive system that affects all of our existence, that distorts our relationships, our interpretations of realty, and our imaginations. In other words, it has colonized our very minds. This is the secret of its success; it is the secret of its exploitation of us; it is why we continue with our daily grind of serving the interests of those few who preside over the system regardless of all the profound devastating consequences on our lives and on the planet. As Haiven observes, capitalism is not only about the...

...dynamics of class struggle and capitalist accumulation of a century ago, the system is more invested than ever in preoccupying and enclosing our sense of self and of the future; our hopes, dreams and aspirations; and our capacity to imagine. As such, the possibilities of meaningful solidarity and class struggle depend on the politics of the imagination. The imagination is a material process: it emerges from and informs our capacity to cooperate and labor together, and as such is at the core of the reproduction of value. If we can understand capitalism as a system based on the reproduction of value, the role of the imagination cannot be gainsaid.

As capitalist crises deepen under today’s new regimes of austerity, the desire to reinforce our ignorance, apathy and fatalism becomes stronger.  

Manifesto 2014

Click here to access article by the Greek collective writing for their website Eagainst.

Writing from a nation that is feeling the boot of neoliberalism stomping on their lives, people in this Greek collective have awakened from this nightmare to create a radically different vision for their future. Although the piece suffers a bit in its translation into English and from a format that does not favor reading via computer, it offers much inspiration in these dark days of capitalist rule. Here are a few samples:

...we reject the contemporary global political infrastructure, the concentration of power in the hands of the few which reproduces and perpetuates poverty, inequality and injustice in all areas, leading inevitably to violence and dissolving any bond of social solidarity. The existing political system of liberal oligarchies deprives humanity as it measures every human value in profit (the only dominant value) destroying every spirit of friendship.

...we propose to replace all of [capitalist] institutions...[with] political bodies that will allow all citizens to participate in the making (and taking) of decisions concerning public life, popular assemblies in squares, municipalities, workplaces (schools, factories, universities). Equality, friendship, solidarity and human creation for us should be a key objective of these new institutions.

One sentence that is especially impaired by translation into English is this:

The entire bureaucratization for our lives is characterized by the sheer totality of capitalist (and every heteronomous) imaginary that embraces every aspect of human activity and condition.

 I think that a better way to express this is: 

Our lives are shaped by the ruling class's ideological control that is pervasive throughout all institutions.

The Global Crisis of Legitimacy and Liberation

Click here to access article by Nozomi Hayase from CounterPunch.

The author attempts a lot in this essay and I leave it to you to see if she always succeeds. She reports that the legitimacy of our ruling institutions is dissipating among wide sections of our nation. The ruling class instruments of social control rooted in public relations, modern advertising, and representative government are no longer as effective as they once were for most Americans. She offers various theories to explain this crisis of legitimacy and how it developed. 

As her essay appears to be heading in the direction of us becoming "good Americans" like the "good Germans" under the Nazis, she argues for a much more positive development. However, I think it might be a bit too hopeful, but that is for you to decide.

Memory and the Radical Imagination

Click here to access the 51:41m audio interview with Max Haiven, an assistant professor of cultural studies in Nova Scotia from radio station KPFA, Berkeley, California.

Max Haiven

(The following commentary was slightly modified at 9:40 PM PST.)
I could really relate to this discussion of the "radical imagination" because I experienced it in the 1960s and early 70s. It was such an exciting time. We questioned everything, and felt that everything was possible. By contrast this period we are now living seems so false, so dead, so pitiful. (Whenever I see small children in my neighborhood, I worry for their future.) This wonderful experience of my youth has haunted me ever since, and I always yearn for this kind of experience to return to the US in the form of a vibrant subculture that can challenge the domination imposed on all of us by the neoliberal ruling class. It's not clear to me how much this sort of imagining is happening now. There are definitely signs of hope that are inspired by people like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. But we need far more people to question and to act, now more than ever before.

Because the "radical imagination" and our memory of things past are such major threats to the ruling establishment, they have made an enormous effort to kill them through their control of major indoctrination agencies--education, media, and entertainment. This is so because as stated by Professor Haiven, "the way we remember the past always shapes what we think is possible in the future". The capitalist ruling class doesn't want us to believe that our future can be anything other than this neoliberal nightmare.

I highly recommend listening to this interview.

P.S. Important mention is made of the book entitled May '68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross.

Probably Possible: A Simple Poem for a Big Problem

Click here to access the complete, wonderful poem by Andrew Gavin Marshall from his blog. 

I would like to weave you a tale of modern humanity,

That great and wonderful monstrous calamity,

With its global institutionalization of insanity,

Aiming for maximization of profitability,

Control over everything, and everything as property,

....

Bookchin's Ecology and Assembly Democracy

Click here to access article by Janet Biehl from New Compass.

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) understood earlier than almost anyone that an ecological crisis was not only looming but posted a challenge to capitalism and the whole social order. In the 1950s and 1960s, before most people even knew what ecology was, he was proposing fundamental solutions. Being ahead of his time, however, meant that his ideas were either ignored or condemned when they were first published; they remain insufficiently recognized today.

If the 99 Percent have any chance of emancipating themselves from the rule of capitalists, they must, first of all, recover their own class history of struggle, and part of this effort is to recognize their class heroes. Murray Bookchin is one such hero. He was a seeker of truth and dedicated his life to the promotion of social justice and a sustainable economic system. 

With his critical mind, he was always examining events and testing theories to see if they explained events. When they did not, he either discarded theories or parts of them, and participated in the formulation of new ideas. He was the finest representative of modern man who had absorbed the legacy of the best that human thought had to offer since the Age of Enlightenment, an era whose legacy has been corrupted and distorted by a new self-serving class known as capitalists. Is it any wonder that most of us have not heard of him?

This author has made a fine contribution to the task of knowing our history and our heroes.

What Do We Mean By “Works”? Anarchist Economics and the Occupy X Movement

Click here to access article by Deric Shannon from The New Significance. (A must read.)

...one of the near-constant criticisms of these sorts of ideas [anarchist] goes something like this:

“That kind of system would never work [the implication being that the current system, although faulty, does work] because of human nature. We’re just wired to be greedy. It’s evolution, survival of the fittest, and all that.”

Many people have been so indoctrinated in the faith-based religion of capitalism with its mantra, "there is no alternative", that they can't think straight anymore.