Archive for April, 2010
Dead Kennedys vs. Gil Scott Heron
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 27, 2010
Posted in >> Art and Culture, Gil Scott Heron, punk, video | Leave a Comment »
Capitalism in 13 Minutes
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 27, 2010
Isle of Flowers (Ilha Das Flores)
Part 1
Part 2
Posted in >> analysis of news, capitalism, video | Leave a Comment »
The Internationale: World Anthem of Communists & Socialists
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 26, 2010
As May Day approaches Kasama offers a selection of performances of the Internationale and solicits the favorite versions of our readers.
Videos
From the film, Reds:
for many more: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> Art and Culture, anarchism, communism, film, Internationale, jazz, labor history, movies, music, video | 15 Comments »
Bring the Ruckus: Against Sectarian Smears & Anonymous Rumors
Posted by Mike E on April 26, 2010
The following is a April 20 statement by Bring the Ruckus (Portland) — urging readers to fight for a principled and conscious culture among radical forces. Portland is on of the places where the anarchist movement has had particular importance and weight.“We should be ever watchful of attempts to destroy the basis of this solidarity by spoilers within our own respective formations, as well the strategies the media and State will employ to exacerbate disagreements in service to a return to “business as usual”… “There have been unwarranted public attacks that have been made on not only on our organization, but several other groups struggling in this arena as well. Rumors, often based on opinion, informed or otherwise are making their rounds.
“[W]e will not publicly air disagreements or grievances which we have not first brought to the concerned parties privately first… We will not engage with those who spread rumors or practice in sectarianism. We will gladly participate in conversation with anyone who wishes to bring criticism or debate in a principled and accountable manner… Find our friends, fight our foes, the future must be ours.“
Posted in anarchism, anti-racist action, police | Leave a Comment »
Bill Ayers Vs. Teabaggers
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
Posted in tea party, video | 20 Comments »
Brazil: Poor Farmers Protest Indian Military “Green Hunt”
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
(Thanks to Ka Frank)
The April 19 demon front of India’s Brazilian Embassy — organized by LCP (League of Poor Peasants).
Posted in Brazil, India | Leave a Comment »
Kasama Project: Internationalist Leaflet for May First
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
May First leaflet on Nepal
May First — International Workers Day — is a moment for us all to strengthen the revolutionary solidarity and common struggle of the oppressed people of the world. It is particularly telling this year that great outrages have been carried out against immigrant people in these days just before May First. And that in South Asia, May First has become the focus of a major test of strength, as a great crisis grips the old order in Nepal.
Here are copies of the Kasama Project’s leaflet for this May First 2010 — helping more people know about the revolutionary crisis and communist efforts in Nepal — and deepen the connections and internationalist understanding between the working people worldwide.
The leaflet is designed to be two-sided (one side Spanish, the other side English). And it is available in both color and black-and-white.
(Props to the design and translation team.)
May First leaflet Color (English) (Spanish)
May First Leaflet Black-and-White (English) (Spanish)
* * * * * * *
“How many of us, marching today in the streets on May First, know exactly what the people of Nepal are suffering?
“Do we share their dreams of revolution and a new world?
“Is revolution really impossible? Is capitalism permanent? The Maoist-led movement in Nepal says NO. In this distant corner of the world, our brothers and sisters raise the red flag.
“The world must know of this Maoist revolution. The people can make revolution and fight to create a new world!”
Posted in >> Kasama Project, communism, Kasama pamphlets, Kasama translations, Nepal, revolution | 7 Comments »
Nepal Video Allegations: Young Communists’ Martial Arts Training for May 1
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
Thanks to Alastair Reith for pointing this out. It is hard to evaluate of this video from afar – clearly this piece is claiming to document that Maoists’ Young Communist League is preparing its ranks for street-fighting. This charge of “Maoists secret big operation” is being used by the right to justify and prepare armed military attacks on the people.
Posted in Nepal, video | 1 Comment »
Nepal Report: Revolutionary students shut down 8,000 private schools indefinitely
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
Maoist student actions in Kathmandu during March, photo: Jed Brandt
The following is a report from Nepal, first posted on jedbrandt.net. Jed Brandt’s previous reports, photos and writings are also available here on Kasama.
by Jed Brandt
KATHMANDU April 25 — Revolutionary students allied with the Maoists today shut down 8,000 private school across Nepal demanding fee hikes be immediately withdrawn. Business offices were padlocked at major schools last week. When negotiations between the student union and school owners broke down, several buses were torched. As of today, an indefinite closure was ordered as Nepal approaches the Maoist decisive May First mobilization.
Re-structuring Nepal’s two-tier educational system has been a key demand of the Maoists since they launched the People’s War in 1996. With public school lacking books, salaries for teachers and even buildings throughout much of the countryside, much of Nepal’s education is pay-as-you-go. Tuition for Kathmandu Valley is about the same amount most wage-earners bring home, excluding the working classes from serious education.
Posted in Jed Brandt, Nepal | Leave a Comment »
Simple Fact: 740,000 widows in Iraq
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
740,000 widows in Iraq. Think of what that means, what it reveals!
I’ll post the following article from the New York Times… which includes more detail. But the real detail that we need to focus on is the CRIME of U.S. aggression — unprovoked attack on a major country, without cause. And the horrific results of “shock and awe” — of invasion and occupation, and the constant grinding murder of ongoing low-level civil war.
[In the photo on the right, an extended family of 30 includes three war widows and shares two trailers.>]
February 23, 2009
Iraq’s War Widows Face Dire Need With Little Aid
BAGHDAD — Her twin sisters were killed trying to flee Falluja in 2004. Then her husband was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad just after she had become pregnant. When her own twins were 5 months old, one was killed by an explosive planted in a Baghdad market.
Now, Nacham Jaleel Kadim, 23, lives with her remaining daughter in a trailer park for war widows and their families in one of the poorest parts of Iraq’s capital.
That makes her one of the lucky ones. The trailer park, called Al Waffa, or “Park of the Grateful,” is among the few aid programs available for Iraq’s estimated 740,000 widows. It houses 750 people.
As the number of widows has swelled during six years of war, their presence on city streets begging for food or as potential recruits by insurgents has become a vexing symbol of the breakdown of Iraqi self-sufficiency.
Posted in >> analysis of news, Iraq, Iraq war | Leave a Comment »
What is a Bandh in South Asia?
Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2010
Bandh in Nepal over the unsolved murder of a young communist activist
As the revolutionary movements of South Asia grab more and more attention — the word bandh is appearing. There are currently a number of major bandhs going on in Nepal — led by Maoist forces — including a new bandh of students shutting down thousands of schools in support of the revolutionary movement.
Jed Brandt has written from Nepal:
“April 25 — Revolutionary students allied with the Maoists today shut down 8,000 private school across Nepal demanding fee hikes be immediately withdrawn. Business offices were padlocked at major schools last week. When negotiations between the student union and school owners broke down, several buses were torched. As of today, an indefinite closure was ordered as Nepal approaches the Maoist decisive May First mobilization.”
And also recently:
“Indefinite bandhs are paralyzing large parts of the country after the arrest of Young Communist League (YCL) cadre in the isolated far west and Maoist student leaders in Pokhora, the central gateway to the Annapurna mountain range.”
Bandh is the word used in South Asia for political shutdowns (of whole areas, neighborhoods, factories or sometimes schools).
Posted in India, Mike Ely, Nepal | Tagged: bandh | 2 Comments »
Updated w/hi rez: Jed Brandt’s High Noon in Nepal
Posted by Mike E on April 24, 2010
Jed Brandt’s recent report from Kathmandu is now available in a printable/readable pamphlet. Share it. It first appeared in web form on Kasama and Jed’s own blog.
Pamphlet:
May First: High Noon in Nepal (b-&-w)
May First: High Noon in Nepal (color)
Excerpt:
APRIL 21 — There are moments when Kathmandu does not feel like a city on the edge of revolution. People go about all the normal business of life. Venders sell vegetables, nail-clippers and bootleg Bollywood from the dirt, cramping the already crowded streets. Uniformed kids tumble out of schools with neat ties in the hot weather. Municipal police loiter at the intersections while traffic ignores them, their armed counter-parts patrol in platoons through the city with wood-stocked rifles and dust-masks as they have for years. New slogans are painted over the old, almost all in Maoist red. Daily blackouts and dry-season water shortages are the normal daily of Nepal’s primitive infrastructure, not the sign of crisis. Revolutions don’t happen outside of life, like an asteroid from space – but from right up the middle, out of the people themselves.
Posted in Jed Brandt, Kasama pamphlets, Nepal | 1 Comment »
Healthcare: a Modest Proposal
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 24, 2010
Thoughts on the pragmatics of demanding it all, from Nil Doctrine.
Health Care & the Lost Art of Compromise
Posted in >> analysis of news, healthcare, video | 1 Comment »
FLASH: Phoenix HS Students Walk Out Against Anti-Immigrant Bill
Posted by Mike E on April 23, 2010
More than a thousand students walked out of several Valley high schools Thursday to protest Arizona’s controversial immigration enforcement bill.
The protest was organized via Twitter and Facebook, according to students who left their campuses and headed for the state Capitol.
“It says, ‘Walk out, everybody walk out at eleven and meet by security,’” Trevor Brown High School student Victor Ramos said referring to a text message he received Thursday morning.
The move came despite loudspeaker warnings from their principal to stay in class.”That’s the whole point, is that we can’t stand for this,” Ramos said.Carrying protest signs, the students then started a 4-mile-long march to the state Capitol.”I’m pretty sure half of the school is out here,” a Maryvale student said as he walked along Thomas Road.
Students represented at least five area schools: North High, Cesar Chavez High, Metro Tech High, Trevor Browne and Maryvale High School.
Gov. Jan Brewer still has not made a decision about whether she’ll sign the bill. She has until Saturday at 11:59 p.m. to decide.The Governor’s office said Wednesday they’ve received more than 1,300 calls, e-mails and faxes in favor of the bill and about 12,000 against it.
The bill would make it a crime for illegal immigrants to not have alien registration documents. It also would require police to question people about their immigration status if there’s reason to suspect they’re in the country illegally.Other provisions allow lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws, and make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly transport them.
Posted in >> analysis of news | 4 Comments »
US Intervenes: Ambassador Denounces Nepal Maoists Over Mobilizations
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 23, 2010
US Ambassador to Nepal, Scott H. DeLisi, Right.
From TelegraphNepal
Our publication of materials from the Nepali capitalist press does not constitute an endorsement of their analyses, which frankly we find quite objectionable. The comments here attributed to the US ambassador to Nepal, however, are important because they suggest that he too perceives a showdown coming.
“Large demonstrations may result in serious confrontation or may be provocative”, he pointed out urging the Maoists to opt for dialogue rather than thinking of street protests.
US Envoy to Nepal Fears Breakdown of Peace Process
“The Nepali Leaders are capable enough to steer their country but I have found in my meetings with them that there is clearly lack of trust among the leaders themselves”, said the newly arrived US Ambassador to Nepal, Scott H DeLisi. And, he added “I think, this, is the main problem Nepal is currently facing.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, imperialism, Maoism, Nepal, UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 4 Comments »
Nepal’s Days of May: A Possible Showdown, Not A Re-enactment
Posted by Mike E on April 23, 2010
“Events are not linear, and the players are not playing by any particular models.”
by Mike Ely
I’d like to step back and think about what is true in what Ka Frank is raising in his three points on Jed Brandt’s analysis.
For example on the talk about a “last battle” in Nepal’s revolutionary situation (either on May 1 or in the following month or this summer):
I think that many people reading this often have a set of fixed assumptions (in their heads) of what an endgame of dual power has to look like: specifically the October storming of the winter palace. And I suspect that some people will be expecting such a scenario now, and will even be frustrated when things don’t unfold that way.
Memories and models are extremely strong in the thinking of human beings — including many radical people. (You think you have “seen this before” — when, in fact, you haven’t!)
When people speak of revolution, it is often assumed that they must be talking of, or planning just such a moment. And people often “hear” what they assume — no matter what others are saying (including, in this case what the Nepali Maoists are saying or what Jed Brandt is saying).
I think that those of us watching Nepal’s revolutionary people should not assume that (even now) things are moving linearly in a “February to October” kind of way — where history has kept the model, but just changed the name from the Russian monarchy to the Nepalese Monarchy, from the Russian October to the Nepali June.
Jed’s main point about the existence of dual power and its instability is very true. But these contradictions are unlikely to play themselves out in (a) either a linear way or (b) along the lines of a model we may have fixed in our heads. Events are not linear, and the players are not playing by any particular models.
To put it another way:
Things are building to a “High Noon in Nepal” — but not every “High Noon” ends with a decisive shoot out. Some do. And not every shoot out ends with the good guys winning. Though some do. But sometimes someone blinks. Sometimes someone even runs away. Sometimes they both agree to go have a tense drink, shake hands in public, but secretly expect to shoot each other next week.
Our communist movement has a history of “inevitabilist thinking” — where it is assumed (and believed) that the contradictions “must” resolve themselves a certain way (or in some set of binary possibilities — like “socialism or barbarism” or “world war or revolution” or whatever).
The world is far more squiggly. complex and dynamic than that — rarely are events preordained.
Posted in >> analysis of news | 6 Comments »
Participatory Economics: A Vision of Planning from Below
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 23, 2010
How far does this train go? How will a new society engage in economic planning?
In a discussion of Louis Althusser’s essay, On the Cultural Revolution, R. Graves suggested a discussion of Parecon, the model of economic planning from below developed by Michale Albert and Robin Hahnel. The following is the text of a recent speech by Hahnel for the conference celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the Spanish anarchist labor confederation, the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT) in Barcelona, Spain on April 10, 2010.
If worker and consumer councils have no autonomous area of action regarding their own work and consumption activities, but must submit to seemingly endless discussion, debate, and negotiations about what they want to do together with many others, in many different planning bodies, ordinary workers and consumers may well lapse back into apathy even if there is no authoritarian planning procedure to disenfranchise them.
Anarchist Planning For Twenty-First Century Economies: A Proposal
By Robin Hahnel
Introduction
I cannot think of any conference, anywhere in the world, I would be more honoured and excited to attend than this conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CNT, the greatest worker organization the world has ever seen, here in Barcelona, the Mecca all libertarian socialists should visit before we die. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in anarchism, communism, Socialism, Spain, Spanish Civil War | Leave a Comment »
Volcanic Explosion…. Then Safety Collides with Profit
Posted by Mike E on April 23, 2010
Thanks to endinglichung for pointing out this piece, that originally appeared in the Weekly Worker (UK).
It was right to put safety above profits
James Turley argues that there is more to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano than disruption to tourists
The disruption caused by the gigantic ash column over Iceland is another monument to the idiocy of capitalism. With the skies of western Europe a no-fly zone for a week, a not so remarkable natural event has provoked a very human sort of chaos.
British newspaper headlines were for days dominated by the plight of stranded holidaymakers, pushing even the election campaign off the front pages. Yet volcanoes erupt frequently enough, famously so in Iceland, and sometimes with really severe consequences in terms of destruction and loss of life. But aviation, weather and safety experts warned that the huge plume of volcanic ash bellowing out from the polysyllabic mountain of Eyjafjallajökull and covering much of western European airspace would reduce pilot’s visibility and damage their aircraft. There are many potentially adverse consequences – the external plating can be eroded, fuel lines can get clogged up, and in the extremely hot temperatures of a jet turbine the ash can fuse into a hard and glassy substance which reduces engine power. The worst-case scenario is nothing short of a 10,000-metre plummet to almost certain death.
Posted in >> analysis of news, >> Science, capitalism | 2 Comments »
The Icelandic Volcano Speaks
Posted by Mike E on April 22, 2010
This piece first appeared on Counterpunch.
By GARY LEUPP
In my youth I lived on the island of Oahu for a dozen years. It is still my spiritual home and I get back periodically. The Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes on Hawai’i (the “Big Island” 200 miles to the south) have been erupting periodically since 1984, adding acreage to the island. This is normal, it’s just how Polynesian islands grow. It’s beautiful to watch, from a boat offshore, the flood of red lava down to the sea. But the expulsion of water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and various other acid and inert gases into the atmosphere can be annoying.
In Hawai’i it’s called “vog” (volcanic fog). When I was last home (in January) the sky over Oahu was heavy with it. Kilauea had been belching out this stuff for quite awhile now, the vog damaging island ginger and tibucinia plants, reducing driving visibility, exacerbating asthmatics’ conditions. But there was a major new emission while I was there, darkening the sky so far north. Usually the sky is so blue, just like the postcards show it. But it was gloomily grey through much of my visit, cutting down on my beach-time.
I think of that visit while reading of the impact of the Icelandic volcanic eruption on my fellow human beings.
Posted in >> analysis of news | 2 Comments »
Nepal Maoists: The Leadership’s Overview of Situation & Tasks
Posted by Mike E on April 22, 2010
Nepali revolutionary forces training
The following is a major document issued by the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in January.
“People’s Democratic Revolution in Nepal is now passing objectively through a gateway of great victory accompanied by a danger of serious defeat. A sharp and thoroughgoing 2-line struggle on the ideological and political questions and the need to develop through it an acquiescent plan to transform the challenges into opportunity is essentially a way to acquire necessary subjective strength that the objective condition demands. With a deep sense of responsibility, our party’s Central Committee Meeting, which continued for about three months amid intense ideological and political struggle, ultimately reached to a unanimous position on the questions of line. The document adopted in the very CC Meeting has been produced herewith.”
Present Situation and Historical Task of the Proletariat
Dear Comrades,
Today, our great and glorious party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), has arrived at a serious and extraordinary juncture of possibilities and challenges.
The way how people’s revolution, in the external struggle, is advancing amid immense possibility of victory and serious danger of defeat, in the same manner, party’s internal life, as a reflection of the former, also lies in the midst of potentiality of advance and danger of anarchism and chaos as well. The height to which we can create new unity, voluntary discipline, self-confidence and vigour by means of a correct line, strategy, tactic, plan and programme to ensure as far as possible the decisive victory of revolution in this complex crossroads of class struggle, to that level will we be able to make victorious the revolution and party by safeguarding them from the danger of defeat and anarchism. In order to develop that kind of line and plan, we, by abandoning all kinds of subjective prejudices, must be able to have objective estimation of the situation and balance of class force based on the universal theories of MLM. The plan and programme prepared on the basis of objective analysis will enable our party to lead the decisive victory of revolution. Expressing high regard and esteem to the entire known and unknown martyrs of Nepalese people’s revolution including those of ten years of people’s war and admiring the entire disappeared, injured fighters and their family members, this plenum of the central committee will be able to bring about a new dynamism in our party.
Posted in >> analysis of news, Maoism, Nepal, revolution, UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 5 Comments »
