The Actual Nature of Revolution – Class led by Caleb Maupin

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The Actual Nature of Revolution - Class led by Caleb Maupin

Published on Mar 11, 2019

Caleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved in many struggles for social justice. He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well 21st Century Socialism.






Lee Camp: The TRUTH About Juan Guaidó in Venezuela

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The TRUTH About Juan Guaidó in Venezuela


Lee Camp easily and eloquently lays out the American rationales to destroy ANY nation that chooses a non-capitalist way, doubly so if that nation is rich in some critical natural resource.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Camp is a progressive political commentator and activist for social change, radical ecology, and animal rights. Oh, he's also a terrific comedian.

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Dr. Steve Turley: Analyzing the worldwide blowback against globalization and its secular aristocracy

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AN AGE OF STRANGE BEDFELLOWS?


World crises often force strange displacements in the tectonic plates separating various political outlooks, and so it is with this turbulent age, in which globalists do their best to dumb down and sow massive confusion among the populace. People opposing this fetid excrescence are coming now from both the right (traditional conservatives) and the genuine left (not the centrist-right addled-brained liberals who normally mass around phony imperialist formations like the Democrats, yea it IS confusing). Many traditional conservatives (and libertarians, like Dr Ron Paul) are found fighting the neoliberal project, and its offshoot of endless wars and inexorable immiseration of the masses. It is in that framework that we find one of them, Dr Steve Turley, who, it should be noted, still very much supports many things that remain anathema to traditional leftists. That said, his critique of the US-led empire is healthy, lucid and spot on, and that's why we we bring it to your attention. The moment requires we focus and prioritise our enemies by their degree of malignancy, we must look at the broader and more important issues that bind us, instead of the less urgent issues that separate us, and which, in terms of practical politics, have no way of being resolved before the planet collapses, and perhaps do not need to be resolved, merely declared part of a wise truce between the disputants. Mental agility and flexibility is a necessary condition to dispose of the chief enemy theatening us all with depraved barbarism.—PG


Published on Dec 22, 2018

Find out why the Yellow Vest Uprising is spreading all over the world, even Taiwan!!!


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Turley (Ph.D., Durham University) is an internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and blogger at TurleyTalks.com. He is the author of Awakening Wonder: A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and The Ritualized Revelation of the Messianic Age: Washings and Meals in Galatians and 1 Corinthians. Steve is a teacher of Theology and Rhetoric at Tall Oaks Classical School in Newark, DE, and Professor of Fine Arts at Eastern University.

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Revolutionary wisdom

Words from an Irish patriot—

 

Three Cheers for the Decline of the Middle Class

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[dropcap]I [/dropcap]realize how callous the title of this article sounds. The decline of the middle class, which in recent years has been the subject of innumerable articles, books, and movies, entails a terrible increase in human suffering. The descent of millions of families into relative poverty is beyond appalling, not something to be celebrated. However, the perverse Marxist in me feels obliged to complicate the narrative of unmitigated catastrophe that dominates all journalism and scholarship on the subject. The fact is that “progress,” like God, works in mysterious ways, paradoxical, inhuman, “dialectically contradictory” ways. And the contemporary decline of the West’s middle class may end up advancing, indirectly, the banner of humanity that the Left has carried forward since the seventeenth century.


The point isn’t a very deep one. Consider the gravest threat that life on Earth faces today: global warming. This threat cannot be adequately confronted in the framework of capitalism, which indeed is responsible for it; it demands a systemic socio-politico-economic revolution, a social transformation that systematically elevates human needs above capital’s needs. The most realistic way to address the crisis is for governments to nationalize the fossil fuel industry and shift resources toward renewable energy, which should be produced and distributed through publicly owned utilities. And this is only the beginning. There have to be international reforestation and afforestation programs, for instance, and massive deployment of carbon sequestration methods and technologies. The very dynamics of the political economy have to be altered.

How can society ever get to this point? Evidently only through upheavals so painful that it becomes clear there is no other option. Revolutionary change on such a scale happens only by means of unprecedented crisis, which is to say social discontent so extreme that half-measures are cast aside as pitifully inadequate. As long as a large middle class exists to serve as a bulwark of social stability and relatively conservative politics, the requisite crisis will not happen. Society has to polarize between a tiny minority of ultra-rich and a huge majority of unprotected, insecure, ecologically vulnerable, politically desperate people whose violent discontent propels the “revolution” forward. Systems have to be radically disrupted, on a scale greater than during even the Great Depression, which led to the welfare state. If history has taught us anything, it’s that the middle class is an effective barricade against revolution.

We might also reflect that, climatically speaking, the best thing that can happen in the short term is a global economic depression. Carbon emissions in the U.S. dropped by 11% between 2007 and 2013, mostly because of the Great Recession. A deeper economic collapse would have an even more positive effect, quite apart from the contributions it would make to the sort of systemic breakdown that would facilitate radical change.

Karl Marx recognized that class polarization and economic crisis present unique opportunities for systemic disruption, opportunities that activists must seize. That’s the imperative, after all: to disrupt the smooth functioning of powerful institutions, and to create new institutions in their place. The more polarization, the more opportunities there are for revolutionaries. There are also more dangers, as we’re seeing by the rise of the far-right across Europe and the U.S. But these dangers aren’t necessarily insurmountable, if only the Left can get its act together and organize the drifting masses.

Millions of people are out there waiting to be organized. We can only hope that by the time of the next economic crash, the Left will be ready to seize the initiative.


Addendum

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report




A Political Primer (leaflet): What’s being hidden in plain view

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Prepared by Eric Schechter, leftymathprof


A Political Primer (leaflet)


1. We get a big influx of beginners from time to time — for instance, when the three World Trade Center towers fell, when the first Zeitgeist film appeared, when the banks crashed, and when Trump got elected.

The new political activists are naive, and wrong about nearly everything, but I’ve been too impatient with them. I need to remember that in 2006 I too was a beginner and wrong about nearly everything, and even now there are still some things I haven’t figured out.

The crises are growing, so we need more people talking about what is really going on. I’d like to simply tell them, but they may have difficulty hearing me, because what I’ve seen is very different from what they’ve previously been told. Still, maybe they’ll at least consider it. So here goes:

2. You’ve been surrounded by lies. The red pill will shock you as it did Neo. Some “conspiracy theories” are true, though initially it’s hard to tell which ones. The government, the mass news media, and both money parties are owned by big corporations, and they all lie about everything. The biggest lies are those of omission, when they agree on an issue and hardly discuss it at all.

A good start would be to get away from the corporate news media (FOX, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, etc.) and start reading some alternative media. My own favorites are CounterpunchGreanville PostBlack Agenda ReportDemocracyNowThe InterceptCommon DreamsTruthdig, Caitlin JohnstoneRichard WolffLee Camp. And read Howard Zinn’s history, too.

3. Global warming is much worse than the corporate news tells you. Floods in 2100 are a distraction from famines in 2030. Tipping points and feedback loops are about to send us over a cliff. And in addition to climate change, there is plastic in the oceans, oil in the rivers, etc., all bringing us toward ecosystem collapse, which will kill us all. Already, other species are dying off faster than any time since the dinosaurs.

Governments are doing too little to change things, because they’re bought off by big businesses that profit the way things are. The rich are short-sighted, because in the past their money has always protected them from the consequences of their actions. But soon they’ll discover they can’t eat money.

The market is not wise or efficient. It always has unmeasured costs, paid not by the buyer or seller but by everyone else. Those externalized costs are enormous, and they’re killing everything.

For our species to survive, we’ll need huge changes in government and market.

4. The economy may soon collapse for a variety of reasons, even before the ecosystem collapses. For instance, more robots means fewer wage earners, hence fewer buyers for the goods made by the robots. That trend can’t continue much longer.

In the meantime, torments grow for most people. If we don’t share, then we trade — but that favors the trader in the stronger bargaining position, thereby making him stronger still, increasing inequality. That’s inherent in any kind of trade, any system of private property, and it can’t be overcome by reforms, regulations, “moral renewal,” or voting: We can’t end plutocracy by electing better plutocrats.

Already, inequality has grown to enormous levels, creating poverty and plutocracy. Our society has enough resources to end poverty, but that doesn’t happen because it wouldn’t profit the rulers. If you’re not ready to end private property, then your calls for equity are just noises.

Wealth is power, so we have a tiny ruling class. And power corrupts, as the Stanford Prison Experiment proved; the ruling class becomes greedy and cruel. And even those of us without power are corrupted by this economic system: Competition kills empathy, turning neighbors into rivals, yielding racism, sexism, nihilism, mass shootings, and an acceptance of war.

5. The wars are all based on lies. The Department of War was renamed the Department of “Defense” shortly after the novel “1984” was published, but it was never really about defense.

  • Russia is not attacking us,
  • Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs,
  • North Vietnam did not shoot first,
  • Truman nuking Japan did not save lives,
  • the attack on Pearl Harbor was not a surprise or unprovoked,

and so on. The wars have all been bipartisan. Here are some real reasons for the wars:

  • to import cheap labor and materials,
  • to perpetuate the petrodollar,
  • to make big profits for US military corporations, and
  • to distract the US public from domestic problems.

Politicians draw lines on maps and say the people “over there” are different — but really, those are our cousins; it’s the politicians who are different. Lately some of them are crazy enough to think of “winning” a nuclear war, but no one will survive the subsequent radioactive fallout.

The USA was never “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Rather, the USA was founded on genocide and slavery, and it starts more wars and imprisons more people than anyone else on earth. Martin Luther King was quite right to call the USA “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world“; that is just as true today. Power corrupts, so we should replace all our society’s authoritarian hierarchies with horizontal networking. [Corporations are—as Chomsky called them—hierarchic tyrannies.]

6. Reforms are not enough. Reforms would be appropriate if — as we’ve been told — our society were based on sound principles such as freedom and democracy, and we’d merely strayed superficially into corruption. If that were true, then reforms could solve all our problems by getting us back to the sound principles.

But none of that is true. Regulations can’t make a kinder, gentler guillotine. The problem is not good institutions run badly, but bad institutions, founded on bad principles. We can’t end ecocide, poverty, war, and other problems until we replace our society’s real principles — hierarchy, property, and separateness — with a better foundation: harmony and consensus. It’s a fool’s errand to try to make the lies of freedom and democracy come true, for those “principles” can’t really work:

  • “Freedom” is an independence from other people, the sort prized by the plutocrat who thinks he is “self-made.” But in fact we are social animals, and we are only happy or productive together. Rather than separateness, what we need is harmony — that is, to get along with each other in comfortable relationships of respect, understanding, caring, and sharing.
  • And “democracy” looks better than oligarchy, but it’s still no solution to our problems. Democracy is a milder form of “might makes right,” encouraging a misinformed 51% to overrule the 49% without caring or understanding. Really we need to work toward understanding and meeting each other’s needs in consensus.

We are heading toward paradise if we find wisdom, or extinction if we do not. We need huge change in how we see the world, how we see each other. Find your best feelings inside yourself and your friends. Let’s make those the basis of our new world, a different and better world. The first step is to get more people talking about it.

——-

2018 June 14, version 3.15. The printed version fits on two sides of a “legal” (8.5 x 14 inch) piece of paper.

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  ERIC SCHECHTER, Senior Contributing Editor, Citizens Outreach • Eric Schechter is an American mathematician, retired from Vanderbilt University with the title of Professor Emeritus. His interests started primarily in analysis but moved into mathematical logic. In retirement he has become a full-time political activist and radical educator. His conversion to anti-capitalism in recent years transformed Eric’s life. By temperament a progressive and iconoclast, his study of social and environmental conditions, domestic and international, rapidly led him through various stages from standard liberalism to a far more radical critique of the corporate status quo, which he regards as unreformable. 
* Eric’s main blog—Eric’s Rants—is at http://leftymathprof.wordpress.com

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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