Maduro Apologizes to the Community Councils – Is This the Real Thing?

Click here to access article by Bruce Lerro from Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Because he asks a very significant question--"is this the real thing?", I am posting this brief article on the above website which is based on a longer report posted on Venezuelanalysis. 

I was dismayed following my two week visit to Venezuela in 2005 by what I saw there which has been confirmed by subsequent events. It seems that leaders, how ever radical they are to begin with, cannot get over the allure of power that all leaders since recorded history (the last roughly 2% of the 200,000 years of human existence) are drawn to. Hugo Chavez talked a lot about the community councils as a revolutionary core of the Bolivarian Revolution but he went on to simply use them as his political power base. Having said that, I admit that it's not for me to judge any revolutionary struggle because I don't know all of the powerful forces they confront which are usually backed by the all-powerful US Empire. 

The fascinating People’s account of how the Russian Revolution was actually won (part 3 of 5)

Click here to access article by Ramin Mazaheri from The Greanville Post.

The Iranian-American argues that a recent book entitled A People’s History of the Russian Revolution by Neil Faulkner presents the real story of the Russian Revolution. This recent book borrows heavily from Trotsky's 3-volume History of the Russian Revolution.  

Both Trotsky and Faulkner treated the February revolution as the decisive event that led eventually to the Bolsheviks taking power. It was the people who were decisive in overthrowing the Czarist government; and had the embryonic capitalist class succeeded in co-opting it, you would see the Russian Revolution celebrated in Western media and in their histories. Instead we are fed mostly lies which denigrate this great achievement of the people.  

There is no such thing as a self-made man, nor a one-man revolution – these are both capitalist myths.

The opposite is what is presented in this book: The People’s story of the February Revolution, and how they ended their millennia of rank tyranny.

The people won the allegiance of army veterans, who were of the people and could identify with the people. This was of critical importance. The people instinctively knew not to waste their time with the police, who were carefully recruited to serve the ruling aristocracy. Mazaheri personally saw this also to be true in 2011 while covering events in Egypt.

Who was not responsible for the Russian Revolution, and who was? [part 2 of 5]

Click here to access article by Ramin Mazaheri from The Greanville Post. 

Mazaheri, an Iranian-American working in Paris, borrows heavily from a new book entitled A People’s History of the Russian Revolution (by Neil Faulkner) to explain what this revolution was all about.

What we should increasingly understand is that 1917 actually occurred not thanks to the intellectual – even a non-solitary one like Lenin – but thanks to the decades of grassroots organizations which defied the state police who then found their ultimate catalyst in the soldier unwilling to fight for a Tsarist, and then also a Bourgeois (West European) state.

We must remember that common soldiers are – for all intents and purposes – an organised, “grassroots” group…especially once they rebel from state authority and transfer allegiance to the People, who were increasingly represented by worker and share-cropper councils.

That is precisely what happened in 1917 – the confluence of massive groups which discussed, agreed and then carried the People’s will and placed it – fully formed – into the hands of a Bolshevik Party which promised to implement Their will.

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."  

10 Things We Should Be Doing Instead of Obsessing Over the 2016 Election

Click here to access article from LocalOrg. 

Here is a list of 10 things Americans should have been doing to strengthen their communities and empower themselves sociopolitically, economically, and technologically over the past 2 years instead of having obsessed over the ultimately irrelevant process known as Election 2016.

It is ultimately irrelevant because regardless of who wins, just like in 2008 when Barack Obama took office, all of the abuses and wars raging now will continue, and all the wars meant to begin under the previous president will be justified and executed under whoever the new president happens to be.

Life Itself Is Being Patented, Privatized and Re-engineered

Click here to access a transcript of an interview with Ashley Dawson, author of Extinction: A Radical History, posted on TruthOut.

The periodic crises of the capitalist system also drive it to seek out new and easily exploitable natural resources. Capitalism's frontier consequently expands outward incessantly. ....

Today, this expansionary dynamic of capital is playing out through the commodification of life on the genetic level. Large corporations are moving genetic material around from one organism to another and, increasingly, seeking to turn living organisms into factories to produce lucrative products. In the process, life itself is being patented, privatized and radically reengineered.

Imagine A Farming Industry That Grows Food, Not Corporate Profit

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from Huffington Post.

In Mali on Feb. 27, 2015, the organization Nyeleni (global congress for food sovereignty) produced The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology. It advocated a model of food production radically opposed to the current corporate-controlled system. Delegates pledged that they would work to:

"... build our own local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production... We cannot allow agroecology to be a tool of the industrial food production model: we see it as the essential alternative to that model... We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world."

Insurgency, conflict, and communalism in Colombia

Click here to access this fairly lengthy interview conducted by Janet Biehl, a companion of Murray Bookchin for many years, with José Antonio Gutiérrez D., a Colombian activist teaching in Ireland.

I have followed events in Colombia sporadically for the past several decades. The country has always impressed me as being steeped in the most extreme form of class war, drug kings, terrorism, brutal paramilitary armies, assassinations of unionists, teachers, organizers, etc. And, of course as usual, the leaders of this country have always enjoyed strong support of US leaders and the US ruling capitalist class. 

The US gives money to Colombia for eradication purposes, but the government mainly uses it against insurgents, in the areas that are under FARC influence, and not in areas controlled by right-wing paramilitaries, who operate in compliance with the national army more often than not.

The point is, it’s the lower chains of production that absorb the risk; the peasants in Colombia and, the small-time street dealers in the US. They bear the brunt of the War on Drugs. The cocaine users on Wall Street are never touched. Nor are the financial advisers, the real estate dealers, all the rest who participate in the most profitable activities in this industry. It’s the peasantry that carries the burden. The narcotics mirage distorts our understanding of the basic reality of class struggle.

Judged by its own stated objectives, the War on Drugs has been a failed policy. .... It succeeds in driving drug prices up. And being a criminal operation is part of what makes the drug industry profitable. It also helps drive peasant farmers off the land, and it allows the US to meddle in Latin American affairs with absolute impunity, as some form of moral crusader.

But this article has given me hope that things are changing for the better politically, at least for the numerous small farmers.

...a new way of doing things is coming into being, although I wish it were more horizontal. But each struggle is what it is, and you have to work with what you have and try to improve every day. But there’s a lot of participation today, far more than in traditional politics. The guerrilla force [FARC] has taken a step back, and that space has been reclaimed by communities working in a more autonomous way. That is starting to happen in many parts of the country. People come to meetings. They can speak freely in the assemblies. 

The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism [very inspirational]

Click here to access article by Joe Brewer from A Medium Corporation. 

This inspirational piece is just what we need to face the new week.

This great lie that we whisper to ourselves is how they control us. Our fear that other impoverished people (which is most of us now) will look down on us for being impoverished too. This is how we give them the power to keep humiliating us.

I say no more of this emotional racket. If I am going to be responsible for my fate in life, let it be because I chose to stand up and fight — that I helped dismantle the global architecture of wealth extraction that created this systemic corruption of our economic and political systems.

Why I Wept at the Russian Parade

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. 

This German-American geopolitical analyst was in Moscow to observe the celebrations of the defeat of the Nazis in WWII. He was so moved by the optimistic spirit of the Russian people that was so visibly reflected in their faces and actions that he wept. Then he wept again thinking about the depressed spirit of his fellow Americans. 

You could see it in the eyes of the Russians on the street: they knew that they were good. They were good not because their fathers or grandfathers had died defeating Nazism. They were good because they could be proud Russians, proud of their country after all the ravages of recent decades, most recently the US-backed looting during the 1990’s Harvard Shock Therapy in the Yeltsin era.

I shed tears being deeply moved by what I saw in those ordinary Russians and tears for what I felt had been destroyed in my country. We Americans have lost our sense that we are good or even perhaps again could be. We have accepted that we are bad, that we kill all around the world, that we hate ourselves and our neighbors, that we fear, that we live in a climate of race war, that we are despised for all this around the world.

We feel ourselves to be anything but good because we are in a kind of hypnosis induced by those narcissistic oligarchs to be so. Hypnosis, however, can be broken under the right circumstances. We only have to will it so.

For more of an explanation about Gen. Shoigu's gesture and the overwhelmingly positive response by the Russian crowds as briefly described in this article, I suggest you read Saker's take on the event which he watched via video.

Alternatives to the police

Click here to access article by Evan Dent, Molly Korab, and Farid Rener from McGill Daily (Canada).

The student authors at McGill Univerity in Montreal, Canada talk to Prof. Luis Fernandez of Arizona State University and examine some local experiments in Canada. Because conventional police forces have been created to serve capitalist interests, community based policing show promise of serving communities much better until such time as societies can be thoroughly transformed. 

Imagining a world without police, however, is daunting – without police, who would respond to emergencies? Who would we call when we see a crime being committed? Despite this, Fernandez doesn’t see a society without police to be that far off.

“Most of our communities already exist without policing. Most of our human interactions are already outside of the purview of police officers,” he said. “Most of the social relationships between people do not require police intervention,” he added.

While a complete abolition of the police system would require a change in social order, some alternatives to the current police system set out to empower people to keep their communities safe, while encouraging everyone to live lives that are free of violence and oppression. A society with little or no policing requires strong community organizations to mediate and react to conflict when it does occur. 

Corporations vs. communities: a tale of two meetings

Click here to access article by Morten Thaysen from New Internationalist Blog. 

This week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID hosted a meeting in London with big agribusinesses to discuss strategies to increase corporate control over seeds in Africa. The location of the meeting was secret. So was the agenda. Attendance was strictly invite-only and nobody who even came close to representing African small farmers was invited.

Meanwhile, farmers and food sovereignty activists met at the World Social Forum in Tunis to discuss their solutions to the problems of our food system. These two meetings represent not just two different types of meeting – a closed, secretive meeting of the powerful versus an open, democratic meeting of grassroots activists – but also two radically different paths for the future of our food. One is based on corporate control and would generate vast profits for a small elite; the second is centred on sustainable, democratic, local food production. 

Power Anywhere Where There’s People

Click here to access article by Cynthia Peters who interviews Ayana Aubourg, a member of Youth Against Mass Incarceration, from Telesur.

Aubourg and her friends at Youth Against Mass Incarceration (YAMI) in Boston are clearly doing very constructive political work with their efforts to educate themselves, recover their own history, acts of solidarity, and constructing relations among themselves that a healthy society should include.

We believe that capitalism and white supremacy have created a system where most people suffer in order for a few people at the top to benefit. Most crimes committed today occur are greatly a result of the system that we live in. Capitalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia drive people apart. They leave some people with more power than others and cause some people to behave oppressively towards others. In a better world, we wouldn’t need prisons. We would have structures in the community that would hold people accountable. We would develop approaches to justice that would be restorative and transformative and not punitive. 

How Facebook Killed the Internet

Click here to access article by David Rovics from CounterPunch.

This is a topic worth thinking about, and I have been. I've wondered about the realities of social media, their impact on people who might access this blog. I'm really quite ignorant on this subject. Are the little handheld gadgets really conducive to reading and thinking about material on my blog? If not, do most people have computers or access to them anymore? Is social media just a trendy habit that will soon change? If you have any informed opinions on this topic, I would appreciate hearing from you.

It appears to me that social media has had a damaging impact on citizen journalism as exemplified by the many Indymedia outlets that have gone away (I was unable to access Seattle Indymedia this morning). This is especially worrisome because I regard citizen journalism as the highest priority to enable us to take control of society away from warmongers, worker exploiters, climate and habitat destroyers.

Community Police in Guerrero’s Costa Chica Region to Celebrate 19 Years of a Better Way to Combat Crime and Corruption

Click here to access article by Greg Berger and Oscar Olivera from The Narco News Bulletin.

This rather lengthy report tells an inspiring story of how people in over a hundred communities in the violence ridden Mexican state of Guerrero have organized themselves and created their own parallel justice and policing services.

The Same Southern Mexican State Where 43 Students Were Disappeared Is also Home to a Grassroots Movement that Shows How People Can Police Themselves When the State Becomes Criminal

Put People Not ‘Empire of Capital’ at Heart of Development

Click here to access article by Ravi Kanth Devarakonda from Inter Press Service. 

The Raul Prebitsch Lectures, which are named after the first Secretary-General of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) when it was set up in 1964, allow prominent personalities to speak to a wide audience on burning trade and development topics.

This year, President Correa took the floor on Oct. 24 with a lecture on ‘Ecuador: Development as a Political Process’, which covered efforts by his country to build a model of equitable and sustainable development.

The author reports on a number of excellent comments made by the Ecuadorian president regarding neoliberal policies, capital flight to support the US dollar, restrictions on the movement of labor, and other topics.  

True Heroes Behind Kiev Ceasefire

Click here to access article by William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook.

Engdahl provides a summing up of one of the Empire's latest adventures, Ukraine, which could have brought about a nuclear conflagration; and offers thanks to the "true heroes" who averted such a catastrophe. It illustrates once again that "the people united can never be defeated." Hence, the powerful efforts by Empire agents to divide people.

We should all thank God it has not happened, and that Russia has acted with remarkable restraint in the situation. Instead, a rag-tag citizens’ militia across eastern Ukraine, fighting for their homes, their lands, for their families and friends, whether or not in part helped by Russians, have fought an incredible battle. It has been a battle to stop the insanity put in power in Kiev that US State Department neo-conservative Assistant Secretary Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland and CIA Director John Brennan and others in the Obama Administration have brought.

.... Finally with the declaration by Ukraine’s Poroshenko of a ceasefire, it is time to recognize the debt of gratitude all lovers of world peace and civilized people everywhere owe to the citizens of eastern Ukraine whose refusal to allow the destruction of their lives by a criminal band of US-financed barbarians in Kiev just might have helped avoid a world war. [my emphasis]

Introducing Oligrapher: power mapping on LittleSis

Click here to access article by Kevin Connor from LittleSis Blog.

From Wikileaks to Edward Snowden to the rise of investigative media organizations like ProPublica and First Look there are some signs that a century after Brandeis and other muckrakers took it to J.P. Morgan, Standard Oil, and other monopolists, we are entering a new era of modern-day muckraking. This seems true even in spite of the extraordinary pressures on the field of journalism. And whether modern-day muckrakers are looking at the defense and intelligence apparatus, Wall Street, Big Oil, or some other industry or issue area, corrupt and cozy elite networks often end up at the center of the story. Some of the information dug up on these networks can be molded into a compelling narrative, and good stories will of course always be essential. But sometimes having another way to look at these connections and networks can be really helpful – that’s where Oligrapher comes in.

Strikes by public sector workers largest in three years [Britain]

Click here to access article by Matthew Taylor and Rowena Mason from The Guardian.

Britain is to witness the biggest round of industrial action for three years as teachers and firefighters join care workers, refuse collectors, librarians and other civil servants at picket lines and rallies across the country.

Up to a million people are expected to take part in the protest on Thursday, as workers protest about the public sector pay freeze, falling living standards and pensions.

See also "#J10: the people strike back" from CounterFire (Britain). 

We need further co-ordinated strike action. But at the same time as pushing for further strikes we need to develop the alliance between unions and the majority who are under attack.

If we are divided there is a danger that the government can force through austerity despite the anger people feel. If the unions keep up the action and build stronger and stronger links with the wider public, they could be in a position to spearhead a great movement for change.

Makerspaces: More Than a Fad

Click here to access article from LocalOrg.

While the business model aspect of a makerspace can be compared to a health club, the output of a makerspace is quite different. While makerspaces are meeting and workspaces where both business and socialization (and a combination of the two) can occur, they also serve as local educational institutions, SME (small and medium enterprises) incubators, skill training centers, as well as a focal point where communities can gather and collectively pool resources and pragmatically, technologically solve problems.

Here are some other illustrations of this concept: