“For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival. In the words of Fidel Castro in December 2009: “Until very recently, the discussion [on the future of world society] revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive.””

“[Hobsbawm] share[d] with the Eurocommunists the contention that the working class alone was not a sufficient social basis for socialism to advance, and that an alliance with progressive sectors of the middle class was necessary. This was because that sector of the working class which was ready to support socialism was too small. The working class, even if it formed a majority, was too conservative in the main to swing behind a more radical alternative, so any attempt to create one amounted to dangerous adventurism…. I wish to establish that two sorts of arguments used to bolster reformism – ‘middle class majority’ and ‘conservative working class’ – are in error. The former, I maintain, rests on a conflation of class with status, while the latter makes illegitimate inferences from the outcomes of class struggles to establish the supposed conservatism of workers.”

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! (Final warning)

Young people entering the world of work today live less well than preceding generations–and think more radically about the world around them. Adam Turl examines the evidence and the reasons for it.
Also: One story from “Generation Debt”

Adam Turl analyzes the deteriorating conditions facing young workers.
“The coming generation of young workers faces much more difficult conditions–but their ideas are being shaped by a broad discontent with capitalism.”

“Their propagation of myths and untruths contrasts starkly with reliable information provided just last month by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) which stated that the Cuban state has successfully eliminated any form of severe malnutrition in children – it is the only country in Latin America to do so. José Juan Ortiz, UNICEF’s representative in Havana, stated that in the limited cases where health problems do emerge, they are “very controlled” and immediately addressed by the government. UNICEF also reports that Cuba boasts a global under-5 mortality rank nearly at par with the Canada, the percentage of its population suffering from HIV is only one-sixth of the percentage suffering in the USA, and the average life expectancy for Cubans is at the same level as it is for Americans. In the field of employment, Cubans, like Canadians, are free to choose what careers they pursue. The difference, however, is that in Cuba all education (including at the post-secondary level) is provided free of charge.”

Alex Callinicos explains the role of the Leninist party in the self-emancipation of the working class. He debates anarchist Michael Albert.

Callinicos: “We of the revolutionary Marxist tradition don’t seek the seizure of power by a particular party, not by ourselves in particular. The seizure of the state by a political party, however committed its members, however radical its program, would in the end simply reproduce the existing hierarchy of domination and exploitation… By taking power we mean something radically different. We mean the development of workers’ councils; the working class self-organized. Spreading networks of workers’ councils across countries, indeed across the world, ultimately, that wrest power away from the corporations and the state, and take over the running of society. [We mean] creat[ing] a radically democratic self-run society on ultimately a global scale. The role of a revolutionary party in the Leninist tradition… is not to substitute itself for this council democracy, but to help to knit together the different struggles in a focused struggle for power.”

By Judy Rebick | Black Bloc vandalism in the middle of a big protest is not only a diversion from the issues but puts everyone into unnecessary jeopardy without their consent.

Umberto Eco, in his discussion of “eternal fascism,” also argued that any updated version of fascism would not openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of authoritarianism would appropriate some of its elements, making it virtually unrecognizable from its traditional forms. . . Eco contended that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise, although it will be no less destructive of democracy.

Gary Leupp provides an excellent history of the revolution in Nepal for readers of Counterpunch.

“THE DEATH of Howard Zinn has generated an outpouring of tributes and praise from around the world, celebrating the life and work of this great historian and activist.

Meanwhile, the right wing, not surprisingly, has attempted to use the occasion of Zinn’s passing to do the exact opposite. Even some liberals have seemed keen to join in: In its obituary, National Public Radio, for example, gave conservative nut job David Horowitz a platform to spew his vitriol against Zinn.”

-Socialistworker.org examines the claim that Zinn oversimplifies history by focusing on class and oppression.

“The first US graduates of Havana’s Latin American School of Medicine are already healing victims of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Cuban state media reported at the weekend… [the] young doctors had responded to a call last January by the US-based Pastors for Peace, urging US graduates from the prestigious Havana university to join a 350-strong Cuban medical brigade that had been working in remote Haitian communities for the last 10 years.

Pastors for Peace activist Reverend Lucius Walker hailed Elsie Walter, Nylon Manning, Wing Wu, Keyshia Covingtoa, Melissa Babie, Melissa Rose Michell and Martina Pierre as “dedicated and skilled young doctors who are ready to serve.”

“The Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj žižek – most centrally in his Revolution At The Gates – has made it his business to reintroduce the Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin to a new generation of activists. This in itself is a worthwhile project. Most believe that in building a new left we have to “leave the Leninist legacy behind” and greet any attempt to resurrect Lenin with “sarcastic laughter”… This article will challenge žižek’s interpretation of the relationship between Lenin and democracy, Lenin and violence, and Lenin and Stalin. The net effect of žižek’s analysis is not to resurrect Lenin, but to resurrect Stalin – an utterly irresponsible project given the nightmare of Stalinism from which we have only just emerged.”

-An article by Paul Kellogg, who you can also read here.

“How is it that we could be facing a crisis of empire, of imperialism, of war, of conflict internationally, we could be facing an environmental crisis on a scale that threatens the whole planet as we know it, and we could be facing at the same time being in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression? And how do we deal with all these problems simultaneously? Is it simply coincidental that all these problems arise at the same time? I think that we have to consider the possibility — in fact for me it’s more than a possibility — that what we are facing is the crisis of capital, the crisis of capitalism.”

-He may not be the most charismatic speaker, but his argument is certainly brilliant.

“”The economic action plan has been working, and we must see it through,” Harper said. “Second, we have been told, start planning now for deficit reduction when the recession ends.”"

-I’m betting the deficit will be reduced through cuts to the social services, and not by reversing corporate tax cuts. I recommend reading:

Thom Workman, (1996). Banking on deception: The discourse of fiscal crisis. Fernwood Publishers, Halifax. More information here.

Slavoj Zizek’s presentation at Marxism 2009. “We need to stop dusting the balls of capitalism and cut them off.”

“The narrow-minded rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-term calculus of profit and loss, is intrinsically contradictory to the rationality of the living environment, which operates in terms of long, natural cycles. It is not that “bad” ecocidal capitalists stand in the way of “good” green capitalists. It is the system itself, based on pitiless competition, demand for return on investment, and the search for quick profits that is the destroyer of ecological equilibrium.”

“the problem of industrial capitalist civilization is not—as is often claimed by some environmentalists—“excessive consumption” by the masses, and the solution is not a general “limitation” of consumption, not even in the advanced capitalist countries. The problem is the prevailing type of consumption based on “false needs”: display, waste, fetishism of commodities. What is needed is production aimed at the satisfaction of genuine needs, beginning with those that might be called “biblical”: food, water, shelter, garments.”

“How can these real needs be distinguished from their artificial and meretricious counterparts? By the fact that the latter are produced by the system of mental manipulation called “advertising.” Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintenance of planetary ecological equilibrium.”

–This article is full of gems.

Also see Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition | MR Zine

Canadian socialists must organize to lay the preparatory groundwork for a new International. We will require committees in every region of the country to send delegates to the founding conference, and prepare for national and local conferences that will organize a course of action here.

In this interview with the Venezuelan newspaper Correo del Orinoco, Chilean writer Marta Harnecker insists on the preponderance of social movements in order to mature ideas, and considers the accumulation of progressive forces in Latin America irreversible.

Towards a sociological-theory of universalism.

“[W]hat allows Hegel, Žižek and Badiou to see what they like in Christianity — Christ’s death and resurrection as the reversal of negativity into positivity for Hegel, or the pure positivity of Paul’s fidelity to Christ’s resurrection for Badiou — is the dualistic structure of Christianity that Islam does not share. … That said it is worth considering the Iranian revolution of 1979 as the exemplary case impossible to understand within the rubric of the foreclosure of Islam’s emanciatory potential proposed by Žižek, Badiou et al.”

Chavez’ proposal for a Fifth International is “a political thunderbolt and should initiate new and broad discussion of the role of internationalism in the struggle against imperialism and for socialism. Such a discussion can only contribute to our ideological and political consciousness. We are at the very beginning of a process and it would be wise to reserve any tendency to hasty judgment.”