Mumia makes a point in an accompanying obituary: That music which seems familiar (even tame) to our ears now, were (in a different time and place) “a radical, and indeed, a revolutionary music, carrying within it the seeds of rebellion and protest.”
The point, I believe, is not that everything is coopted, but that there ever breaks out anew challenges from below, that bubble out like pillow lava from previous stone formations, and glow red hot and searing as they transform the landscape.
We honor a revolutionary artist of a previous generation — and look with great anticipation for those burning new grooves of such power today.
The following is from Max Roach’s “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite”
There are many lies surrounding America’s aggressive colonial wars: We’ve now had a second president to declare the Iraq war over — while 50,000 troops remain “in theater” and whole armies are there “over the horizon.” And, of course, there are the declarations that these American mercenaries of empire are “all heroes.” Repeating it (ad nauseum) in the media and in the political arena doesn’t make it any more true (or any less absurd).
How does “handing it over” to U.S. trained troops, backed by U.S. airplanes mean the end of an unjust attempt at conquest? It doesn’t.
Kasama received the following submission from its author.
There are no heroes in illegal and immoral wars
by Robert Jensen
When the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division rolled out of Iraq last week, the colonel commanding the brigade told a reporter that his soldiers were “leaving as heroes.”
While we can understand the pride of professional soldiers and the emotion behind that statement, it’s time for Americans — military and civilian — to face a difficult reality: In seven years of the deceptively named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and nine years of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan , no member of the U.S. has been a hero.
This is not an attack on soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Military personnel may act heroically in specific situations, showing courage and compassion, but for them to be heroes in the truest sense they must be engaged in a legal and morally justifiable conflict. That is not the case with the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan , and the social pressure on us to use the language of heroism — or risk being labeled callous or traitors — undermines our ability to evaluate the politics and ethics of wars in a historical framework.
This article is from The Red Star – Issue 15, June, 2010
Kathmandu – Before and After the General Strike
by Somat Ghimire
Just before starting the general strike, UCPN Maoist organized all party gathering at a hotel Yak and Yeti. Writers, journalists, traders and businessmen and workers of civil society were present in the gathering.
These all expressed their opinion on the starting phase of the programme. Then, UCPN Maoist Chairman Prachanda gave a short cut speech on the basis of the expressed opinion. The opinion of all the participators was that the movement should be run in a peaceful manner. However, there was a suspicion that Maoist will not hold the movement peacefully; rather it will somehow be violent. This means that the essence of the opinion of the participators was that UCPN Maoist would not hold the peaceful movement. They thought that Maoist has not such type of efficiency, tactics and belief in some extent. The intellectuals were primarily broadcasting their assumptions from media that the movement will be violent. This scenario created by the propaganda showed that Maoist would enter into the valley with their violent activities from Thankot blockade. Likewise, some other groups of Maoists would enter into Kathmandu Valley through Banepa blockade with naked knives in their hands. And, some other had propagated that Maoist would enter Kathmandu by beating all the street walking people and porters through Nuwakot blockade. Extreme chaos would be created in Kathmandu. This was the traditional forecasting of the fortune tellers of Nepalese politics.
The following appeared first on Counterpunch (August 20 – 22, 2010).
“There are a lot of hurt feelings about violent attacks, and Muslims in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere frankly have more cause for them than the people of New York City. The loss of 2976 people on 9-11 was tragic. But more than that number of civilians were killed by U.S. bombing between October 2001 and March 2002, and the loss of life in Iraq due a war based on lies (including the Islamophobic conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam) has been catastrophic. And there are lots of hurt feelings over discrimination, experienced throughout the western world.”
* * * * **
Chronology of a Bizarre Controversy….
Hurt Feelings & the Ground Zero Mosque
By Gary Leupp
Here is the order of events producing this bizarre “controversy.”
2009: A Muslim organization having arranged to purchase an abandoned Burlington Coat factory on Park Place in Lower Manhattan plans to build a 13-story Islamic community center. It will feature a culinary school, conference hall, basketball court, swimming pool, and place of worship among other things and while principally servicing the Muslim community be open to all. It is to be called the Cordoba House, an apparent allusion to Muslim Spain in which Islam flourished alongside Christianity and Judaism from the eighth century up to the “Reconquest.”
In its mission statement the group says the center “will be dedicated to pluralism, service, arts and culture, education and empowerment, appreciation for our city and a deep respect for our planet. [It] will join New York to the world, offering a welcoming community center with multiple points of entry. With world-class facilities, a global scope and strong local roots, [the center] will offer a friendly and accessible platform for conversations across our identities.”
It will be four big city blocks away from where the World Trade Center once stood (“Ground Zero”). But since there are already about eight mosques in Manhattan, and a significant Muslim population in that highly diverse section of New York City, there is nothing remarkable about the group’s application to tear down the old factory building and construct the center.
The key organizer, Kuwait-born Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an imam of the Sufi school of Islam, generally described as “moderate” and mystical. He holds a degree in physics from Columbia University, had been hired by the FBI to conduct sensitivity training among their agents, and had worked with the U.S. State Department. He had met New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who strongly supports the plan for the center.
The following is Part 3 of a three part series from Khukuri that examines Bill’s thesis. Part 1 and 2 are also available. .
Marxism, Politics, and Evil:
A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”
by John Steele
III
In this final section I want to work through a number of topics, including the adequacy of Martin’s take on Marx’s thought, and some characteristic moves and modes of thinking in Ethical Marxism. I will be critical here, because I think these are matters that are important to get right.
Marx
Let’s go back to the opening sentence of a passage quoted above:
“In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests.”
This doesn’t ring true, to my ears. Where does Marx talk about what leads or motivates people to question their circumstances broadly/deeply? And when does he talk about motivation on a broad scale by “material interests”? This is quite alien, it seems to me, to the way in which Marx approaches the question, and his conception of the relation between human activity and the materiality of their circumstances. He says, for example, in a wellknown passage, that history only poses problems for which there are solutions (“mankind…sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”) meaning that problems are revelatory of social contradictions which contain their own supercession, that solutions are immanent within the problems themselves. Now whether we believe that this Hegelian-derived view of history and social contradictions is on the right track or not, the relation of materiality to human practice and its possibilities is very different from the view that it is only material interests which motivate people, which I believe is really a mischaracterization of Marx.
Rounding up communists after the Nazi coup of April 1933
Kasama was sent the following piece by a young new writer from the Red Ant Liberation Army blog. The original name of this piece was “The Prototyped Massacre Left Forgotten.”
by BJ Murphy
“First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew,
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.”
~Pastor Martin Niemoller
Many during the 1950′s that lived in the “Land of the Free” feared not the idea of Communism altogether, but the idea of what may happen to those that were found to have been a Communist. As the years increased, the paranoia against Communism decreased as if the event during the 1950′s never happened. Though, it remains a part of history that is forever remembered upon by many, & some to this day that still acts upon the mindset of those anti-Communists in the 50′s.
Such figures like Glenn Beck, a popular Fox News caster by the conservative right-wing, are ones that seem to be bringing the 50′s back, or at least the mindset that took place then, with such claims that the backing of social-justice is nothing more than the backing of “Nazi-Communism”. [1] This misleading statement has been the very slogan well-used by Beck & his followers against those who of today continue to fight for social-justice & worker’s rights under the Communist banner.
Beck’s equating of Communism with what took place during Nazi Germany is not only misleading, but is completely disregards a sad, long, & painful past of those Communists that suffered by the hands of the Hitler-led Nazi forces.
The following is a excerpted passage from the Communist Manifesto. It captures how capitalism uproots and transforms everything in its path, including everything humanity once treated as sacred.
The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. Read the rest of this entry »
More on World War 2 and “main danger. This is from the film Zoot Suit — about the racist “zoot suit riots” spearheaded by sailors in Los Angeles against Chicano and Mexicano youth.
“I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around ‘the ethical moment’ as its basis. I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues.”
The following is Part 2 of a three part series from Khukuri that examines Bill’s thesis. Part 1 is here.
Marxism, Politics, and Evil:
A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”
Part 1
by John Steele
II
In some sense Ethical Marxism is a long meditation on the crying need for liberation from the brutalities and morass of today’s world, but also the need to surpass Marxism-as-it-has-been. Indeed, Martin’s point is that these needs are crucially interrelated and that fulfillment of the former depends upon accomplishment of the latter. I think this is true and important – in fact I could not agree more. But when we come to the question of how we are to surpass the now-dead Marxism of our fathers, we have some differences. Most basically, I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around “the ethical moment” as its basis.
I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues. Rather than morality being the core or foundation of a truly revolutionary politics, as Martin argues, I believe that the political is more basic, and that ethics finds its foundation within larger human projects, including that of an emancipatory politics. Obviously this is a basic point, and thrashing it out (or at least indicating a direction of argument) is one basic aim of the remainder of this paper.
“We will not forget those who threw their very lives into the machinery of empire to stop it. We will not forget those who dared to defy convention and law to seek justice. We will not ignore those who were thrown into prison to confine and silence their powerful beliefs.
We remember Marilyn Buck. And many who loved her over years felt first the pain of her imprisonment and now the pain of her final passage.
Many of us thought that we would see her again,touch her, and hear the music of her laugh.”
Radical Women and Freedom Socialist Party Statement
In commemoration of revolutionary feminist political prisoner
Marilyn Buck (1947-2010)
August 19, 2010
The world has lost another heroic freedom fighter. Marilyn Buck died on August 3, at the age of 62, just two weeks after being paroled from a prison medical center in Texas. Ms. Buck spent the last quarter-century of her life imprisoned because she was dedicated to fighting injustice.
All her life she fought against capitalism and imperialism. She was a staunch advocate of Black, Native American, Puerto Rican and women’s liberation, and social and economic justice for all the afflicted.
From a very young age Buck protested against the Vietnam War; she was a member of Students for a Democratic Society, pressing it to take women’s freedom seriously. She actively supported the Black Liberation Army, aiding in the escape of Black Panther leader Assata Shakur.
Everyone has heard the whining and hyped outrage over the construction of a mosque near the “sacred ground” of the former two towers in Manhattan.
This is one of those manufactured “wedge issues” for exciting anti-Muslim bigots, anti-immigrant xenophobes, irrepressible racists and the utterly ignorant in a holy war against any hint of tolerance and cultural diversity.
Kasama would like to note there has been no similar moral and patriotic outrage against other potential offenses against the “sacred ground” in Lower Manhattan. [Thanks to the New York Daily News.]
Main outrage and reality check: The U.S. is building ground zeros right next to mosques all around the world.
* ** * * * *
Mosque gets all the press, but…
Area near Ground Zero full of bars, porn, liquor stores, salons
BY Erin Einhorn
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU
Monday, August 16th 2010, 4:00 AM
Thunder Lingerie and More is one of the typical New York businesses in the downtown WTC area that mosque opponents are claiming to be be hallowed ground.
Opponents of a proposed lower Manhattan mosque and community center speak in hushed tones about the sanctity of the “shadow of Ground Zero.”
Tell that to the patrons of the Pussycat Lounge, a strip club where a photo of a nearly naked woman marks its location just two blocks from where the World Trade Center stood.
Or the Thunder Lingerie and peep show next door, where the marquee sports an American flag above a window display of sex toys and something called a “power pump.”
“My reaction is that this is just another media stunt, because what is not being reported as strongly as the final troop leaving Iraq is that we’re still leaving 50,000 troops in country, not to mention that the 4,000 who are leaving are being replaced by 7,000 security contractors, called “dirty gangs” by Iraqis. I think that basically what we have is just a recycling of forces in what effectively could be called a transferring of military duties from the US military into the hands of corporate paramilitary forces in Iraq.”
JUAN GONZALEZ: The news networks had hours of coverage of the so-called withdrawal throughout the day yesterday. Much of it was interviewing the troops coming home and their families. Well, we’re also joined by an Iraq war veteran, one you probably won’t see on CNN or MSNBC: Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía, the first US combat veteran to publicly resist the war.
Camilo Mejía served six months in Iraq in 2003 with the Florida National Guard. While on a two-week leave in the United States, he decided never to return. Mejía went into hiding to avoid redeployment and was classified as AWOL, or absent without leave. After five months on the run, he surrendered to the military at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and submitted a formal application for discharge as a conscientious objector. His application was denied. In May 2004, a military jury convicted him of desertion, and he was sentenced to one year in prison. He served nine months behind bars, prompting Amnesty International to declare him a prisoner of conscience. He wrote a book about his experience called The Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía. He is the former chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and he joins us now from Miami.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
CAMILO MEJÍA: Good morning, Juan and Amy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Camilo, your reaction now to this so-called news of the withdrawal of the last combat brigade from Iraq?
We recently posted a poetic critique on Gandhian nonviolence by an Indian communist, Satchidanandan.
JP suggested that we consider the following video by Norman Finkelstein saying, that he “uncovers some aspects of Gandhi’s thought that are not in mainstream circulation.”
We have been discussing the history, politics and morality of meat-eating.
by Mike Ely
To Hunt, Then Honor, Then Eat
I spent some time on the Anishinabe reservation called Lac du Flambeau — where the people were fighting for their treaty rights. Specifically they were fighting to reclaim their right to spear fish on Wisconsin lakes, and hunt for deer off the reservation. They faced Klan-like white racists who mobilized mobs to prevent them from exercising their rights and culture.
The role of hunting and fishing within the Anishinabe culture was eyeopening. Spear-fishing was part of what defined them as a people. (the name Lac Du Flambeau referred to the flaming torches they used to carry while spearfishing at night.)
They explained to me their feeling of kinship with the animals they killed and ate, their responsibility to honor them and not waste anything, and their ritual prayer on killing followed by an offering of tobacco to the dead. There was a strong custom to share some of the meat with the elders who couldn’t hunt for themselves.
In another sense, the people I met were remarkably utilitarian toward the animals. There was not some tremendous romanticism surrounding what they were doing — they were hunters (yes, killers) and they were looking for meat to eat. This was not sport, this was not recreation or entertainment. It was work they loved, and it was deeply integrated into who they were culturally.
The following is Part 1 of a three part series from Khukuri that examines Bill’s thesis. Part 2 is here.
Marxism, Politics, and Evil:
A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”
Part 1
by John Steele
In this essay I’ll be attempting to come to grips with Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, a major effort by Bill Martin to map out the sort of theory he believes to be necessary in the 21st century for revolution and human liberation. I’ll first try to lay out Martin’s principal claims and lines of thought, followed by some questions and critique.
This is a large book which brings a number of themes, subjects and questions into play. I will only be dealing with the essential line of argument and thought, concerning Marxism, politics and ethics. Specifically, I will not be able to enter into some concrete questions which Martin casts as ethical and to which he devotes a large proportion of space in the book: imperialism, animals and the human consumption of meat, and the question of place. These are major parts of the book, not only in bulk but conceptually too, as attempts to both configure political questions ethically (imperialism) and to situate ethical questions (meat-eating) within a Marxist context. But although this study does examine some of the forms of argument which emerge in these areas, I have not been able to consider the substance of these questions, as they are framed in Ethical Marxism.
“Woman Rebel” will be shown on HBO—of all places—on August 18 at 8pm and repeated on August 26 at 11:45am. This 45 minute documentary on “Silu”, a battalion commander of the Nepalese Maoist guerrillas, is a reminder that other television networks have stepped in to fill the void created by PBS after the Bush administration turned it into an arm of the “war on terror”. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, shows like Frontline and POV continue to serve the war aims of an out of control national security state.
The following was suggested by R. Graves in our thread on human meat-eating. R. Graves writes that this is a “good article from michael pollan where he wrestles with Peter Singer’s ethical arguments, and ends up rejecting factory farming but not meat eating in general.”
The first time I opened Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.
Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view “speciesism”–a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes–as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.
