Mu
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Israel’s right and need to defend the safety of a refuge for Jews
As vote nears, Democrats push attacks on constitutional rights
Monday, October 7, 2024
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Red Enlightenment: On Socialism, Science and Spirituality (2023) by Graham Jones
Red Enlightenment: On Socialism, Science and Spirituality (2023) by Graham Jones
Have you ever wanted to read an over-300 page book in which the words spiritual and spirituality appear 163 times?
Me, either.
Graham Jones has not written a book about UFOs and how they built the pyramids, however. There are no pleas here for saving the planet by making our own clothes. Instead, Jones is reaching out to help us use completely anti-Marxist mind-over-matter subjectivity to summon a socialist millennium.
Over a hundred years ago, Lenin called this God-building, though he and his fellow scientific socialists had some less nice words for it, too.
Lenin's polemics was written after the defeats of Russia's 1905 revolutionary upsurge. A temporary retreat of working class and peasant militancy led some revolutionaries to seek salvation in spirituality; they did not blame themselves for the class retreat, or the dictatorship of capital, but the workers and farmers themselves.
Red Enlightenment: On Socialism, Science and Spirituality by Graham Jones was published in 2023 by Repeater Books. I have read a number of books from Repeater in the past, usually studies employing academic jargon to fuse explications of horror fiction with fashionable word salads of current cultural theory. Which is enough to make any reader cry out for spiritual escape.
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxbx3rdLhhzaWWZnkQJPLlC-6h98wC-gWr?si=8lQkbA1tjNBck2o6
What Lukacs termed the “permanent carnival of fetishized inwardness” of the petty bourgeoisie goes on.
Jay
6 October 2024
Saturday, October 5, 2024
"We want to create well-equipped revolutionists who know enough not to be captivated by passing fads"
Washington’s starting point is not defending Jews -- Back people of Israel in a war against Jew-hatred – The Militant
Washington’s starting point is not defending Jews. All it cares about is defending U.S. imperialism’s economic and political interests, including stability in its relations with governments in the region and for maritime shipping and oil production.But the capitalist government in Israel refuses to subordinate the need to fight Jew-hatred to its alliance with Washington. By refusing to back down and making real progress, Israel is striking a blow to U.S. imperialism.The liberal bourgeois press, while admitting that Nasrallah’s goal was destruction of Israel, printed obituaries painting him as a charismatic leader “loved” by Shiite Muslims. The Washington Post said he “was seen as a father figure, a moral compass and a political guide” by his followers, and as “the man who empowered Lebanon’s once downtrodden and impoverished Shiite community.”A Sept. 27 New York Times article claimed that even though Nasrallah “referred to Israel as ‘the Zionist entity,’ maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin,” at the same time he was for “one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.”The murderous actions of Hezbollah throughout the Middle East belie these bouquets from the U.S. press.Hezbollah was a direct creation of the regime in Iran in 1982. The Iranian rulers sought to extend their influence into Lebanon as they consolidated a counterrevolution at home aimed at reversing gains made by working people during the 1979 revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah of Iran. Hezbollah works to advance Tehran’s goal of destroying Israel and killing or expelling all the Jews there.
Fight Jew-hatred, join Oct. 7 events
Fight Jew-hatred, join Oct. 7 events“The solution is tied to building a revolutionary working-class party of all nationalities in every country — including in Israel, and most importantly, in the U.S. — that works toward workers taking power.”Fruit pointed to the remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the U.N. on Sept. 27. “My country is fighting for its life,” he said. “Israel yearns for peace, but our enemies seek our annihilation. … We will win because we don’t have a choice.”He said there was a choice “between a historic reconciliation between Arabs and Jews or the tyranny and terror of more Oct. 7s.” Many U.N. representatives walked out during these remarks.Fruit urged everyone at the meeting to join upcoming events marking the Oct. 7 pogrom.“No new capitalist world order is possible that would make the world more peaceful,” Fruit said.“Across Africa, governments are massively indebted to lenders like the World Bank, Washington and more recently to the rulers of China,” she pointed out. One participant in the campaign meeting asked about the debate at the United Nations over whether to give Africa, with 54 countries and some 1.5 billion people, two permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, but without veto power. “Is this an obstacle to getting solutions?” he asked.“The U.N. came out of World War II and it’s a body of capitalist governments,” Fruit said. “They are the problem, contending to steal all the wealth from working people.“Workers need to organize ourselves, tackle our problems like Thomas Sankara led working people in Burkina Faso to do,” she said, pointing to the 1983-87 popular democratic revolution in that West African country.
Join, build the SWP campaign“There are five weeks left in this campaign,” John Studer, the Socialist Workers national campaign director, said during the discussion. “Workers know there is something deeply wrong with the economy. They abhor the Oct. 7 attack on Jews in Israel.“The biggest discussion is whether the working class is capable of doing something about it. The SWP thinks it is and we want to discuss that with as many workers as possible. We want workers to break with the capitalist parties, endorse the SWP campaign and become part of it. Join with us at actions Oct. 1 to support postal workers and on Oct. 7.
Friday, October 4, 2024
Election Trivia Answers
Netflix has a series of colorized WW2 documentaries
"World War II: From the Frontlines"
A better title: "Don't make these 10 mistakes like that loser Hitler."
Holocaust gets 5 minutes at the end around the US forces' discovery of Dauchau.
No mention of that small Asian nation called China.
For instance.
Ugh! 😣
Cf. Some real history:
The Marxist view:
World War II: Three wars in one
U. S. Logistics: uneven and combined development in the Pacific theater:
Reading notes: Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, Cornell University Press (1973)
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Election Trivia... but what year???
The Green Party's electoral cretinism
Genocide? 12 months and still the IDF saves lives.
Fredric Jameson 1934-2024
Socialist Worker, a particularly screamy, Jew-hating website on the UK sectarian left, has published an obituary of Fredric Jameson, 1934-2024.
I stopped reading SW around 2013, when I also started skipping all-but-the-headlines for US Stalinist “antizionism” periodicals like Workers World.
But since I spent this spring reading ten Jameson books, I gave the obituary a read. Author and SW editorial board grandee Alex Callinicos wrote it.
A few excerpts that I agree with will suffice:
[....] At the end of the book [Marxism and Form (1971)] Jameson writes, “The works of culture come to us as signs in all-but-forgotten-code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognised, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see.”
It was the task of dialectical criticism to restore these fragments to their place in this invisible totality—capitalism....
[....] it allows us to understand history as the “absent cause” of all our strivings. In it the “ground bass of material production continues, … yet conveniently muffled and intermittent, easy to ignore”. But “history is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets limits to individual as well as collective praxis.”
[....] In his most important theoretical work, The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson boldly claims that “the political perspective”—he means Marxism—is “the absolute horizon of all readings and interpretations”.
[....] In 1991 he responded defiantly to the apparent triumph of Western imperialism at the end of the Cold War. “Capital and labour (and their opposition) will not go away under the new dispensation,” he said. “Whether the word Marxism disappears or not, therefore, in the erasure of the tapes in some new Dark Ages, the thing itself will inevitably reappear.”
[....] Jameson argues that Marxism does not simply reject what appear to be rival theories. Instead, it recognises that they offer partial, limited perspectives on reality. It takes over their insights and integrates them into its understanding of the social whole....
Jay
3 October 2024
Source: Socialist Worker, Thursday 26 September 2024 Issue 2925
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
The deepening crisis of capitalism, part 2
Excerpt:
Marx had (at least) four things to say about a situation like this:1. The profit rate will fall for the system as a whole in the long run and in the final analysis.2. Capitalists introduce methods that reduce this fall, but these methods work in such a way as to increase the falling rate in the long run.3. The measures undertaken by the capitalists can only stall or reverse this falling rate temporarily for the system as a whole.4. The capitalists would not be able to recognize the source or the outcome of the problem.
From: