WILLIAM SCHRYVER—Most of the gods of American high-tech and finance, and those who worship them, simply cannot discern the degree to which American power in all its forms has steadily eroded over the course of the 21st century, and that this erosion has accelerated dramatically in recent years. For most of the western elite and their acolytes, it is still early 1991, and Norman Schwarzkopf is leading a million-man army against the hapless Iraqis in a demonstration of military might that would finally expunge the bitter humiliation of Vietnam from the American psyche. Such people have religiously embraced the Hollywood fantasies of unassailable American superpower dominance. And given the reality that Ukraine and Israel are considered merely appendages of this assumed American military supremacy, the eastern European and Levantine theaters of World War Three have given rise to extreme examples of an unprecedented tsunami of propaganda I have been wont to call “The Imaginary War”.
BOURGEOIS VALUES
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Multipolarity, Iran’s coming retaliation, & how these next escalations will impact the class struggle
by Rainer Shea21 minutes readRAINER SHEA—Last week’s BRICS summit provided a clearer sense of who will join in on the war against the U.S. empire, and who will acquiesce to the empire. Brazil, led by the supposedly anti-imperialist Lula, vetoed the entry of Venezuela into BRICS. And fascist India blocked the entry of Pakistan and Turkey, which was less surprising but still a setback. These developments represent a major twist, because there’s evidence that the U.S. color revolution apparatus has intended to target Brazil and India in the past; a report from last summer by the neocon think tank the Eurasia Group listed these countries as among the geopolitical “swing states,” the players that have potential to come into China’s orbit. After the work that Modi and Lula just did to assist in the hybrid war against BRICS, it’s less likely that Washington will try to overthrow them, because they’ve shown themselves to be valuable assets.
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Support for Jill Stein Triggers Democrats Meltdown! w/ Kshama Sawant
35 Mins / Watch readEDITOR—Socialist activist Kshama Sawant lays out a new, better formulated strategy for third parties seeking to demolish the reigning and stunningly corrupt duopoly: Not to act simply as “alternative parties,” but as “oppositional parties” at all times. The 2024 election, with its horrific historical backdrop of two major wars (one an indisputable and revolting genocide in Palestine supported by the US political and media establishment), imploding governance in the US and much of vassal Europe, and an incurable economic crisis detonated by imperialism’s inability to resolve the overproduction crisis, offers third parties like Jill Stein’s Green Party a unique opportunity to test this approach by helping defeat the candidacy of Democrat party nominee Kamala Harris, says Kshama Sawant. And we think she is absolutely right. People who regard themselves as on “the left” must completely abandon the duopoly, and avoid the Democrat Party curse, the proven historical graveyard of all progressive movements.
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The Revolution Examined—Portugal: The Unfinished Revolution
13 minutes readEDITOR—The fall of Fascism, subsequent nationalizations, the entrance of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) into government, the rise of workers’ commissions, the mobilization of urban and rural protest, and land occupations held the world in thrall, if only for a short time. In the end, the corporatist bureaucratic state apparatus and its economic partners emerged renewed, chastened, and not unscathed. Chilcote singles out the durability and continuity of the state apparatus as a major factor in the prevailing hegemonic bloc and blames the fractiousness of the Left for failing to replace it. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the attempts to create a counter-hegemonic bloc paved the way for democratic, pluralistic politics in Portugal.
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Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics: Social Science or Cold War Propaganda?
by Bruce Lerro28 minutes readBRUCE LERRO—In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.