“Finally, a reference on this site to the tsunami raging out there in the real world. In the name of fighting economism do commmunists have to avoid any mention economics!”
Like a tsunami? Perhaps. But perhaps even somethng more profound than a flood, something that actually accelerates the reshaping of continents, and the land itself. Zerohour points out that Kasama has (of course) many posts about economic crisis. But EME also has a point.
Aren’t we are lagging in our response, even in our attention?
For the moment revolutionaries don’t yet have an organized national structure prepared to jump in — with cadre, tactics and an overall revolutionary strategy. We are working on that. But even given those limitations, aren’t we still moving too slowly on this?
Eddy Laing has been yelling in our ears about the depth and importance of the global economic crisis.
And Eddy puts forward a specific analysis for consideration:
“The principle contradiction in the US and all of the other imperial societies has re-formed around the current economic collapse; that contradiction is driving, not being driven by, all other social relationships“
It has been said: If we don’t step up and coordinate a response, not just to the immediate crisis — and most definitely not as ‘economic democracy’ — but to the whole system, we are only adding to the stench.
So there are some burning questions raised for us to consider:
This was originally found at Asia Daily news with the title, PM instructs Maoist cadres to stay alert.
PM instructs Maoist party cadres to stay alert
Prime Minister and Chairman of Unified CPN (Maoist) Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ has instructed his party cadres to stay alert for another revolution, on Saturday.
Addressing a function organised by All Nepal Trade Union Federation (ANTUF – affiliated to Maoists) in Lalitpur, Dahal said the party will not always be engaged in the peace process. “The constitution-drafting process will not last forever, we should seriously prepare ourselves for the next situation,” said Dahal.
Dahal opined that while many communist movements in the world failed because they could not recognise the need of the hour, Maoists in Nepal understood the situation and acted accordingly.
He said, his party would now take the revolution into new heights against colonial forces.
This appeared on the Take Back NYU website. The repeated expression of solidarity, by these students, with the people of Gaza has quickly become part of the controversy.
When this solidarity to Gaza was criticized, one student answered:
“Students across the United States are standing in solidarity with Gaza because it’s what we feel must be done. The money that WE pay to fund our “public” universities could partially be provided by the billions of dollars that the United States government gives to the Israeli military. A military, which in turn, murders hundreds of civilians and “militants” who only want the unjust occupation of Palestine to end (some interesting numbers are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel-United_States_military_relations). We as students stand with our peers whose schools have been completely destroyed and whose friends and professors have been murdered by Israeli scum.”
A group of student-empowering, social-justice-minded rabblerousers have occupied the Marketplace at Kimmel and we refuse to move until our demands are met. All are encouraged to join us on the third floor and help us sustain this occupation until NYU complies with our demands. (Our demands are listed below)
We apologize for inconveniencing the loyal lunchgoers of the Kimmel Marketplace, but we are not sorry for causing a disruption! Established channels have been insufficient to make our voices heard by the administration, and we have waited too long to be taken seriously. By disrupting the University’s functioning now, we are forcing the administration to deal with those people it depends upon the most—we, the students!
Our demands, though many and varied, are united by the desire to empower students to take part in the governance of their University.
Last night, 10 pm EST, a group of students began an occupation of the NYU campus in the cafeteria of the Kimmel Center (next to Bobst library). The group, Take Back NYU has called for a solidarity rally outside to support their actions inside. They need supporters outside as well as people to spread the word far and wide. For more information, go to their website here.
Below is a short statement from the students and a list of demands.
NYU is the latest university to join a wave of global student occupations in the name of student empowerment. The Kimmel Center for University life is official a reclaimed space.
Demands
We, the students of NYU, declare an occupation of this space. This occupation is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Take Back NYU! coalition, and of campaigns from years past, in whose footsteps we follow.
As we prepare to post the last article in our series on the Spanish Civil War — here is the song, written by Bertold Brecht, and presented in many languages by the International Brigades
How did classes arise in human history? This is the chief topic of the following essay by Eddy Laing, the second in a three-part series written for Kasama. Part 1 appears here.
Why historical materialism matters, 2
by Eddy Laing
The Core of Culture is the Mode of Production
Every human society, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, coheres around modes of activity that solve the prerequisites of food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical and ideological needs. Generally, modes of production are comprised of the activities through which the group provides for this subsistence and reproduction, including the rules, customs, techniques, beliefs, and other ideas that have arisen from and in turn enable those basic activities, such as how those activities are communicated across generations and geography.
Marx described the capitalist mode of production as distinguished by two characteristics. First, the social product takes the form of commodities (a useful product of human labor created for exchange), and second, the aim of production is the creation of surplus-value (the value created by labor beyond its cost as labor-power), which is appropriated as interest, ground rent and profit by capitalists.33 In this mode of production, the capitalists direct the kinds of social production and how the social surplus (the surplus-labor of the society as a whole) will be used as they compete to exchange commodities in various markets. Within this type of economy, human labor is one of the commodities produced and traded. The proletarian sells her labor-power for wages with which she feeds, clothes and shelters herself and her dependants, and thereby lives to work another day (and create more surplus-value for the capitalists).
This does not mean that only one mode of production is possible in any society.
This is a lecture made by Stephen Jay Gould as part of a series at Wittenberg University 1994-95. Lecture is structured in the form of a paradox and three riddles about Darwin’s life. Each is designed to shed light on one of the key features of the theory of natural selection, its philosophical radicalism, and why it has been so poorly understood.
Photos have been added to the audio. It appears here in 3 parts — and unfortunately only covers the first half hour of the lecture.
Thanks to the Danish site Modkraft (counter-force).
Natural History Stephen Jay Gould: A Darwinian gentleman at Marx’s funeral (Sept, 1999)
“The odd friendship of an evolutionist and a revolutionist.” Reprinted as chapter six in Stephen Jay Gould: I Have Landed (London, 2002).
The Friends of Charles Darwin Marx of Respect (2006)
“It’s a well-known chestnut of Darwinian trivia that the father of international socialism, Karl Marx, once offered to dedicate one of the volumes of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, to that other 19th Century bearded revolutionary living in the south of England, Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, it turns out that this particular chestnut is something of a myth, although the story of how it came about is of interest in its own right.”
Marxists Internet Archive Glossary of People: Darwin, Charles (1890-82)
Monthly Review
Margaret A. Fay: Marx and Darwin: A literary detective story (Vol. 31, No. 10, March 1980, p. 40-57)
“… Marx’s offer to dedicate any of his work to Darwin was finally revealed for what it really is: a myth which entered the accumulation of historical facts when a letter which Darwin had written to Aveling in 1880 was attributed to Marx’s correspondence 50 years after both Marx and Darwin died.”
New Left Review Valentino Gerratana: Marx and Darwin (Issue 82, Nov.-Dec. 1973, p.60-82)
“… a striking and sensitive analysis of the actual relations between Marx and Darwin, which should put to rest many partisan preconceptions.” Only summary online.
History of Political Thought
D.A. Stack: The first Darwinian left : radical and socialist responces to Darwin, 1859-1914 (pdf) (Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 2000, 29 p.)
“Myths, misunderstanding and neglect have combined to obscure our understanding of the relationship between left-wing politics and Darwinian science. This article seeks to redress the balance by studying how radical and socialist thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, desperate to legitimate their work with scientific authority, wrestled with the paradoxical challenges Darwinism posed for their politics.”
In germany, an important clash has taken place — as thousands of anti-fascists mobilzed to confront the annual Nazi/skinhead rally in Dresden, Germany. We expect that more analysis will become available soon, but for now, here is an initial report from the British Indymedia site. “No pasaran” means “they shall not pass” — it was the slogans of anti-fascists in the 1930s Spanish Civil war, who were determined to stop and defeat the rise of fascist forces to power.
In Dresden, Germany, some 4,000 anti-fascists demonstrated today against an annual march of 6,500 neo-Nazis, the biggest procession of its kind Europe-wide.
Already at the beginning of the demonstration by the Antifa-coalition ‘No Pasarán’, scuffles with the police broke out. Shortly before the scheduled arrival at the endpoint of the demonstration, there was massive assault by the police forces, so that the demo had to be disbanded.
‘No Pasarán’ had expected 2,000 participants – 4,000 came. The Antifa mobilisation was a remarkable success. However, despite 4,000 Antifas and thousands of other demonstrators of the bourgeois coalition ‘Go Think’, the Nazis could march in Dresden, however, largely without interruption.
Like every year, now the ‘after-show’ has begun. Small groups of both sides are in the city and the police is, as always, completely overwhelmed.
In the last year 185,210 visitors have connected with Kasama discussions. That is about 500 a day. (Since December 2007, there have been 629,433 pageviews.)
About 60,000 (a quarter) of the visitors have come from outside the U.S.
Meanwhile the site has displayed 911 posts, drawing 9,274 comments.
That means an average of 10 comments per post, and an average of over 20 comments a day.
We gathered these figures using ClustrMaps, which is about to reset our disply to “zero” — to leave room for the next year. If you want to check out the last year’s records, go look today.
Here are the record details:
United States (US) 125,237
Canada (CA) 8,485
United Kingdom (GB) 7,973
India (IN) 7,309
Australia (AU) 3,524
Germany (DE) 3,135
Philippines (PH) 2,185
Netherlands (NL) 1,534
France (FR) 1,395
Nepal (NP) 1,385 Read the rest of this entry »
“We need to look at the theory we inherited and knock off the barnacles and reconceive our theory as something in motion (not fixed or closed) — and reengage it with the thinking of our times (in a creative interaction that does not lose the specificity of our goals and movement). And where necessary, we need to abandon verdicts that no longer apply….
“Our challenge is to to advance a core revolutionary project using methods that encourage public questioning of even those ideas that we deeply believe are valid and enduring. That can only be solved in the doing.”
By Mike Ely
Chuck Morse wrote:
“Mike, I think it’s good that you want to “open up” Marxism. People have been doing that for a century. But, as some point, you’re not going to be a Marxist anymore.
I can’t help asking: Is that the only choice?
Didn’t many who worked to open up Marxism over the last century, in fact, help open it up? Can’t we go further?
We all probably know that one of Marx and Engels’ great accomplishments is often said to be the creation of something called historical materialism, or in their own phrase, “the materialist conception of history.” What is this conception? What is the particularity of this approach to history, and how is it connected to revolutionary change?
In this essay, written for Kasama, Eddy Laing seeks to answer these questions, using not only the works of Marx and Engels, but more recent findings and research in anthropology and social sciences.
This is the first of three parts.
Why historical materialism matters, 1
by Eddy Laing
At the core of Marxism is the methodology of historical materialism (HM), which “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” 1 As developed by Marx and Engels, the dialectical materialist conception of history is not just an interpretation of the world; it is a guide to active transformation and “in its essence critical and revolutionary.”2
Of course, it can be argued that any study of history is necessarily a study of social development. Unlike histories defined by the acts of presidents, generals, bankers or other elites, and measured against the Idea, or Moment or other ideological abstractions, historical materialism proceeds from an analysis of how society as a whole functions, “starting with the material production of life itself and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production.”3 In other words, historical materialism is a study of societies as they really are — as diverse and complex assemblies of people with various needs and aspirations. In order to do that, we need to examine society in all its stages and component reciprocal actions; how people make their lives, enact the state (laws, governance), and conduct themselves ideologically through religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, art, literature, music, etc. These activities and expressions are in fact social practices and, taken together, form the cultural matrix of the given society.
This year, 2009, marks the 4oth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a watershed moment in the history of the modern LGBTI-Q movement and, it must be argued, an important breakthrough in the history of the society itself.
Rowland is the instigator of the By Any Means Necessary blog, where this piece first appeared under the title “The History and Legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion.”
by Rowland Keshena
The Stonewall Riots were a series of violent clashes between New York City cops and groups of gay and transgender people. It all began on the early morning of the 28th of June 1969, and proceeded to last for several days. The clashes became a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, never before had gay and transgender people moved and acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police harassment directed towards their community. My intent here is to tell the history of Stonewall, and to attempt to do justice to its legacy.
Darwin's first sketch of the "tree of life" from one origin. Note the cross-bars for extinction -- and that change is not conceived with some direction-as-progress. And notice Darwin's simple words introducing the sketch, "I think..."
The following first appeared on Counterpunch.org. This is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (and of Abraham Lincoln’s).
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
– Darwin’s Intro to The Descent Of Man.
* * * * * *
There is a Grandeur in This View of Life: Darwin’s Living Legacy
By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.
This February 12th is the bicentennial birthday of one of the greatest minds in history. This man’s inquisitive nature, generous spirit, strong character and hatred of slavery led him to ideas that jolted the society of his times, led to protracted conflict, and caused a seismic shift in how civilized society thought of human beings and life itself.
Abraham Lincoln?, the Civil War?, the abolition of slavery in the United States? Well, yes it is also Lincoln’s 200th birthday, but no, our man is Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882). While the celebration of Abraham Lincoln (12 February 1809 – 15 April 1865) is important in the United States because of his role in the abolition of slavery there, the celebration of Charles Darwin is of wider significance because he opened a cornucopia of scientific knowledge, which helped free the minds of so many from the stunting influences of prejudice and religious fantasy. Just as Abraham Lincoln is the iconic marker for a major advancement in the social, political and economic nature of the United States of America, so is Charles Darwin the marker for a vast expansion in the understanding of this living world.
A Biographical Summary
Darwin was the son of a wealthy doctor, and soon showed an interest in natural history. He received an excellent education, first at the University of Edinburgh and then Cambridge, drifting from medicine to taxidermy, and numerous topics in natural history: marine biology, geology, botany, entomology. Darwin gravitated to the company of other gentlemen naturalists and parsons-to-be, who viewed their scientific studies as religious natural theology, the elaboration of the details of the divine design. At 22, he was invited to join Captain Robert FitzRoy, as a self-financed naturalist and gentleman companion, on the planned two-year voyage of the HMS Beagle to chart the coastline of South America.
Being pro-sex isn’t necessarily pro-prostitution or pro-misogynist pornography. But you should consider that a little over ten years ago, most commies in the U.S. would have derided the idea that women can enjoy pornography, efforts by dancers and prostitutes to organize unions, etc. Keep in mind that American feminism was under the influence of people like Dworkin and McKinnon, who declared all heterosexual sex is rape, and attacked men for wanting to have sex. Being pro-sex was a revolt against that inhuman ideology which had gripped the movement, and said, sex is good, sex is natural, sex is human. It was definitely a good thing.
There is often a blurring performed — that merges sex-as-such and sex in this society, when in fact, it is important to tease them apart.
Clearly sex is “natural” and part of what makes us human (and part of what makes us animal, obviously!) There are real biological drives toward sex, and pleasure involved. And also, possibly, nurturing and affirming intimacy involved too. Those ties that bind.
But sex in this society is deeply marked by its context — it happens under under conditions of patriarchy, commodity exchange, the inequalities of poverty and power, generalized exploitation of people and the ideologies that justify that.
We approach Darwin Day, a well-deserved celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. People around the world honor his life, his great idea of natural selection and enthusiastically popularize evolutionary biology (against religious myth).
The following piece asks what is the impact of so often referring to a science using the name of one man (a “founding father” of sorts).
How accurate is that? How well does it capture the relationship between the founding and development of scientific insights?
As always, posting this article here (borrowed from the New York Times Feb. 10) is not an endorsement of its analysis. (Its own reference to Marxism is particularly, uh, uniformed.) But it is helpful raise questions about how to view, describe and develop living science — and how to understand and describe the role of pathbreaking individuals within the greater collective work.
What should we name that presumptuous communist theoretical work of “knowing the world to change it”?
* * * * * *
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
This article was published by the Red Star. Thanks to Banned Thought for making this available. The original title was “The street struggle is connected with the peace process”
by Kiran
How are you evaluating the unity between CPN-Maoist and CPN (Unity Centre-Masal)?
Our party had already made decisions to make single pole of the revolutionary parties and organization. It is the beginning of the unity among the revolutionaries. This unity will certainly fulfill its responsibility for the nation and the people that is to accomplish the revolution.
You are in change of the organizational department of the unified CPN-Maoist. How have you done division of responsibility of party leaders?
We are thinking about 2 phases of work division. Party central committee has 138 members. We have done our work division of the first phase. Central committee member will bear the in-chargeship of the state committee of autonomous states, mass organizations, fronts and forums. Secondly, there are special bureaus and departments. Thirdly, there are the responsibility in the fronts of the government, constitutes assembly and the different committees of the government and CA [Constituent Assembly].
Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole (May 20, 1959 — June 26, 1997) (pronounced [ka-maka-vi-vo-ole])
Bra-bra Iz is remembered for his voice (of course) but also for the role he played in breaking with Don Ho plastic tourist culture and connecting with the lives, language, hopes and experiences of Hawai’ian people.
EME writes in regard to our post about a tee-shirt:
This was originally found at 
How did classes arise in human history? This is the chief topic of the following essay by Eddy Laing, the second in a three-part series written for Kasama. Part 1 appears 
Marx and Engels’ great accomplishments is often said to be the creation of something called historical materialism, or in their own phrase, “the materialist conception of history.” What is this conception? What is the particularity of this approach to history, and how is it connected to revolutionary change? 
This article was published by the 
