The Socialist Response

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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Sounder » Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:50 am

Elvis » Sat Jan 13, 2018 2:26 am wrote:

DrEvil wrote:
- Strong unions and collective bargaining.
- Strong safety net for those who fall outside the norm.
- Free healthcare.
- Free education.
- Subsidized childcare.
- Government ownership of important industries (telecom, energy, infrastructure etc.).

So basically all the things the republicans (and to a degree the democrats) have spent the last 30 years dismantling and/or demonizing.



Yes exactly!

And in the U.S., at least, the first objection is that someone will be denied the "right to make a profit." Followed by the myth that nothing gets done unless someone makes a profit from it.



Dr. wrote....
Those two points are some of the most frequent complaints we hear from the free market zealots over here too, and of course they're complete horseshit. Doing business is just as easy here as in the US and with the same productivity levels.

We have a free market economy just like the US, but with all the stuff I listed on top of that to temper the worst excesses.


This is where I lean also. Capitalism, an economic category set in a political frame, seems to thrive in communist as well as 'democratic' societies.
(Big people get big money and little people get little money.)

The European countries have long been admired by some for decent vacations and the social safety net. I fear the forces always trying to dismantle these modest attempts at fair distribution of communal productivity.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Karmamatterz » Fri Jan 26, 2018 10:24 am

@Mentalgongfu,

I've not deliberately ignored your questions. An oversight on my part and lack of time to reply in a thoughtful way without being a snarky ass. I was feeling snarky yesterday and it obviously came through. I need to set aside a few minutes and reply back. Thanks for the reminder.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 29, 2018 9:48 am

http://newpol.org/content/solidarity-af ... ry-attacks

Solidarity with Afrin, al-Ghouta, Idlib Against All Military Attacks


by the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists January 29, 2018


We, the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists, oppose the various military attacks on Afrin, Idlib and Eastern Ghouta and support all the innocent civilians in Syria. . . There has been a consensus between all the international and regional powers on the necessity to liquidate the revolutionary popular movements initiated in Syria in March of 2011 . . .


Solidarity with Afrin against Turkish military intervention

January 23, 2018


Since January 20, 2018, Turkish military assisted by pro-Turkish Syrian opposition militia groups have launched a large scale air and ground offensive, dubbed "Operation Olive Branch" on Afrin province located in northwest Syria with a Kurdish majority population and controlled by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its People’s Protection Units (YPG). At least 30 civilians have been killed since the beginning of the operation.

Afrin has welcomed many Internaly Displaced Persons from other regions of the country which has led to a doubing of its population to 400,000 and 500,000, because it was relatively spared from the war and agressions of the Assad’s regime forces.

This attack comes after months of tensions and agression by the Turkish military against Afrin. The Turkish army used as a pretext, an announcement by a military spokesman for the US-led global coalition against the Islamic State (IS) to build a 30,000-strong border force under the command of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) led by People’s Protection Units (YPG). In Ankara’s opinion, the US decision meant that the US-YPG partnership would not end with the collapse of the IS, as the Turkish government had hoped.

Ankara considers the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and PYD in Syria, as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which the United States, the European Union and Turkey have labeled a terrorist organization.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Afrin operation would be followed by another against Manbij. Erdogan also threatened any critical voices in Turkey against the "Operation Olive Branch," notably stating in reference to the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), "that wherever you go out on the streets our security forces are on your necks." With the exception of the HDP, the rest of the main parties in Turkey, including the fascistic National Movement Party (known as MHP) and the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (known as CHP), support Turkey’s military intervention.

Despite a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry expressing “concern” and calling on the parties "to show mutual restraint," Moscow, which controls large large parts of Syrian air space, has actually given Turkey the green light for this invasion and has withdrawn its forces from the areas targeted by Turkish forces. Russian officials had demanded that the YPG hand over Afrin to the Syrian regime to "stop" the Turkish attacks on the region.

The USA has remained rather passive, only urging Turkey to exercise restraint and ensure that its military operations remain limited in scope and duration. At the same time, Russian, Iranian and Turkish diplomats met to prepare for the Syrian "National Dialogue Congress" to be held in Sochi, Russia on January 30, and seek to consolidate a so-called peace process in which the Assad regime’s structures would be maintained.

The Syrian National Coalition Of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces (known as the Etilaf), composed mostly of liberal and Islamic conservative and fundamentalist groups and personalties, have not only supported the Turkish military intervention and continued their previous chauvinist policies against the Kurds in Syria, but are also participating in this operation by calling on Syrian refugees in Turkey to join the Syrian armed opposition groups fighting in Afrin.

The current Turkish military operation against Afrin and the very recent failed Kurdish independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, have shown that international and regional powers have no willingness to see any Kurdish national or autonomist aspirations come to fruition. It is evident that the previous support of Moscow and and Washington for the YPG, and the YPG’s support for the Russian air and military campaign alongside the Assad regime launched at the end of September 2015, did not prevent Ankara’s military aggression against Afrin.

More broadly, the Afrin operation reflects the weakness of all democratic and progressive actors in Syria in the face of the Assad regime and its allies’ destruction of the Syrian revolution, and the consequent renewed power of this regime which has received acceptance by all International actors.

Solidarity with Idlib and al-Ghouta against the attacks by the Assad regime and its Russian ally

At the same time, we condemn the Assad regime’s attacks on Eastern Ghouta and Idlib, areas which are supposedly considered “de-escalation zones” according to the Astana "peace" negotiations, led by Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Since mid-November 2017, the nearly 400,000 people in Eastern Ghouta have been subjected to airstrikes, shelling and bombardment on an almost daily basis by regime forces and its allies. At least 21 civilians have been killed by regime airstrikes and shelling of Eastern Ghouta between January 20 and 22. This brings the death toll to more than 200 civilians since the regime escalated its offensive against this area on December 29. According to the local Civil Defense, regime forces reportedly fired nine shells carrying suspected chlorine gas on Douma city on January 20 and injured 21 people. As a reminder, this region has been under siege by the Syrian regime and allied militias since 2013.

Opposition groups in al-Ghouta have also shelled various districts of Damascus, resulting in the killing and injuring of a dozen civilians these past few weeks.

In addition to this, following regime advances, in southern Idlib and northern rural Hama, over 200,000 civilians have been displaced in the past month. while more than 100 people were killed in the fighting.

In both Idlib and al-Ghouta, socialists need to stand in solidarity with the civilians against the authoritarian rule of Salafist and Jihadist movements, respectively Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam.

There has been a consensus between all the international and regional powers on the necessity to liquidate the revolutionary popular movements initiated in Syria in March of 2011 and to stabilize the murderous and authoritarian regime in Damascus with Bashar al-Assad at its head in the name of the "war on terror." It is this consensus which has given the latest "carte blanche" for these crimes.

In the face of this counter-revolutionary consensus, what is desperately needed is solidarity between all (Arabs, Kurds and all other ethnic minorities) revolutionaries who are against the Assad regime and all the regional and international imperialist powers and support the struggles for social justice, women’s rights and the rights of oppressed minorities.

The Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists supports the right of self-determination of the Kurdish people in Syria and in other countries. This does not mean that we take an uncritical stand on the policies of Kurdish parties leading these struggles, whether the PYD or the Kurdish Democratic Party or others, notably regarding violations of human rights against civilians.

Oppose all forms of sectarianism and racism

Our destinies are linked


Join the Alliance’s Campaign in Solidarity with Middle Eastern Political Prisoners:

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/14964/
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 30, 2018 1:31 pm

‘One thinge that ouerthroweth all that were graunted before’: On Being Presidential

Image

by China Miéville

The stricken punditocracy agrees that Donald Trump is missing a crucial quality, a je ne sais quoi necessary for his office. He may be president, but he is not presidential. The liberal world is in mourning for this dispositional quiddity, presidentialness.

According to one recent poll, 70 per cent of Americans surveyed held that Trump has – particularly in his genuinely startling use of social media, his deliberately offensive provocations – acted ‘unpresidentially’. Plucking examples from vast reserves, the LA Times decries Trump’s ‘self-indulgent and unpresidential demeanor’; the Village Voice his ‘unpresidential’ ‘antics’; the Atlantic ‘the unpresidential things Trump says’. And the angst is global. The Irish Times lists ‘[a]ll the unpresidential things Trump has done since he got elected’; according to The Guardian, asserting a taken-for-granted antipode, Trump is ‘tyrannical not presidential’; indeed for the Toronto Star, ‘Donald Trump defines the meaning of “unpresidential”’.

It’s common on the Left to point out what has apparently not counted as unpresidential: slave-owning; massacre; imperial butchery. What is there for which to hanker?


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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby dada » Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:15 am

Delicious article, AD. Like eating rich food. Maybe too rich - I think it gave me heartburn. Seriously, though, good one. Thanks.

I think the author's thought process is the real takeaway from the piece. But here's a bit I like, even out of context:

"Today, naked avowal of Carlyle’s ‘Great Man’ theory of history, hero-worship as philosophy, would appear rather too unreconstructed and unseemly. But the presidentialness paradigm is a polite modern iteration – for which ‘persuasiveness’ operates as a vital legitimating mediator between mass and elite.

And that model’s shading into the original undiluted formula is called to mind in Carlyle’s own critique of his own critics. ‘[I]n no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men’s hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration … Hero-worship endures forever while man endures.’

...For this ideology, in the failure of presidentialness, it is persuasion itself that has broken down [...] And while the president doesn’t escape censure for such a loss, still less do those on the other end of the ‘persuasion’ model – the demos [common people]. Here, the worst dereliction is that of those at the bottom, who won’t know their limits or place (as in the notorious New Yorker cartoon of an angry passenger calling for the takeover of the plane from smug elitist pilots). They scandalously refuse to play their allotted role – obedience, being persuadable, and persuaded.

When reality fails the model, the electorate refusing to do what they are told, the result is an epistemological crisis which throws up various and variously wild speculations."
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby SonicG » Wed Jan 31, 2018 7:07 am

Can't argue with that last bit..."epistemological crisis" is a good fit and accounts for the fracturing on various levels happening throughout the world, not the least of which is political ideologies...bully for that...
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 31, 2018 2:19 pm

I'm glad that I enjoy Ultra/anti-Politics sensibilities (at least on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays), just as I enjoy a subcultural perspective more generally (though I hear about what's happening in the mainstream through the radio I keep on in the background).

This means I get to appreciate the delicious ironies of the Spectacle without getting overly caught up in it. Better yet, as we swing from crisis to inevitable crisis, it means I am already prepared for a good weenie roast..




Not even the dog
That pissed against the walls of Babylon
Shall escape I wrath!
Jah strong and mighty in battle
Cramp weak heart!

Babylon's burning
Babylon's burning
Babylon's burning
But there's no water

Fire, fire
Fire, fire
Fire, fire
But there's no water

All dem a jump and reel
All dem a jump and reel
If dem crawl like snail
Rasta gwaan clip them tail

Babylon's burning
Babylon's burning
Babylon's burning
But there's no water

Fire, fire
Fire, fire
Fire, fire
But there's no water




dada » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:15 am wrote:Delicious article, AD. Like eating rich food. Maybe too rich - I think it gave me heartburn. Seriously, though, good one. Thanks.

I think the author's thought process is the real takeaway from the piece. But here's a bit I like, even out of context:

"Today, naked avowal of Carlyle’s ‘Great Man’ theory of history, hero-worship as philosophy, would appear rather too unreconstructed and unseemly. But the presidentialness paradigm is a polite modern iteration – for which ‘persuasiveness’ operates as a vital legitimating mediator between mass and elite.

And that model’s shading into the original undiluted formula is called to mind in Carlyle’s own critique of his own critics. ‘[I]n no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men’s hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration … Hero-worship endures forever while man endures.’

...For this ideology, in the failure of presidentialness, it is persuasion itself that has broken down [...] And while the president doesn’t escape censure for such a loss, still less do those on the other end of the ‘persuasion’ model – the demos [common people]. Here, the worst dereliction is that of those at the bottom, who won’t know their limits or place (as in the notorious New Yorker cartoon of an angry passenger calling for the takeover of the plane from smug elitist pilots). They scandalously refuse to play their allotted role – obedience, being persuadable, and persuaded.

When reality fails the model, the electorate refusing to do what they are told, the result is an epistemological crisis which throws up various and variously wild speculations."
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 31, 2018 6:53 pm

11 Theses on Possible Communism

C17 January 31, 2018

Image
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Composition, 1921

In January 2017, comrades from across the globe gathered in Rome to assess the conditions of contemporary capitalism and to plan communist strategies for our present. Viewpoint, as a co-sponsor of the conference, participated in discussions locally and translated interviews with key participants. Today, one year later, we present our translation of “11 Theses on Possible Communism,” a manifesto written by the Collettivo C17 and rooted in the contributions of the wide range of militants and theorists who converged in Rome.

Introduction

The following “Theses on Possible Communism” are the fruit of a common labor, which kicked off with the Rome Conference on Communism last January held at ESC Atelier and the Galleria Nazionale, and was then developed, in writing, by the “C17” collective. The Theses are not a balanced synthesis of the conference. The Theses simply try to repeat the power of those extraordinary days, in quality and in participation. But they do take a stance. Partial, assertive, just like the hastened, even provisory, present form. They are not a matter, indeed, of concluding a debate, but of relaunching what has only just – with the conference – been opened. With the theme presented, it is then a matter of insisting on variations and, when it will be possible again in person, to improvise ceaselessly. Only in this way will the Theses have had a non-marginal function. If the Theses are already, as they undoubtedly are, the way chosen by the “C17” collective to celebrate October, then above all – and in view of a new Conference on communism – they call for response and for disagreement: they call for the future.

1. Specter. Wherever the Communist Party is in the state [al potere], communism is long gone. There is a market and there is exploitation, but without parliaments and free speech. Communism is a degenerate, defeated, and obliterated history; in Europe and in the world. It rarely occurs that a defeat is also a specter, with the capacity to frighten again; such is the indeed rare case of communism. The word is unpronounceable, its meaning or project difficult to clarify. The enemy, however, continues to have clear ideas; surely it is not as terrorized as it was in 1848, and certainly it has learned to preempt. Contemporary capitalism frightens in order to not be frightened. We know, from Hobbes on, that fear constitutes the sovereign: today fear, the permanent blackmail of precarious lives, makes exploitation possible. But if this is so, there is something that does not return: lives, while precarious and always at work, are a danger, in addition to being in danger. Communism is the name of this excess that, despite everything, continues to frighten. The victory of capital, as a nemesis, does not cease producing this excess (of relations, mobility, inventive capacities, productive cooperation, etc.). The victory of capital, as a nemesis, does not cease producing the objective conditions of communism: the reduction of “necessary labor” to the social reproduction of labor-power.

2. Neoliberalism. “Capitalize the revolution”: from 1968 on, this is the sign of the great transformation in which we are immersed. If with the struggles, life leaves the cornerstones and the factory, it is necessary to follow it everywhere, to valorize its unique and unrepeatable traits, to do business with aesthetic tastes and the behavior of each life, transforming machinery into prostheses of the “social brain” (digital and communication technologies: from the PC to the Web, from smartphones to social networks), and the general intellect into an algorithm. This has happened while globalization was running fast and a violent accumulation assailed the global South and East. Thinking the two processes separately, or in opposition, is an error laden with fateful consequences: neoliberal globalization is a weave of multiple and heterogeneous temporalities, a common space that is separated. We understand Silicon Valley with the economic zones of China or Poland, and vice versa. Neoliberalism, more precisely, is the counter-revolution, the capitalist response to 1968, an event of struggle that was – from the Sorbonne to Vietnam, from Berkeley to Prague, from Rome to Tokyo – completely global. Thinking globalization without having understood the decolonial uprisings means not thinking it at all. To focus on the economy of knowledge without paying attention to the student movements or the workers’ refusal of (repetitive) labor means entirely surrendering technological innovation to capitalist command. Neoliberalism has reintroduced – on a global scale, with differing intensities, rendering them chronic – phenomena of primitive accumulation: the dispossession of millions of people by way of land grabbing as much as the enclosure of knowledge by patents; the erosion of indirect wages through regressive taxation and welfare cuts as much as the compression of the direct wage via processes of the precaritization of labor; the mass incarceration of the poor as much as the use of migrant labor-power to destabilize wage rigidity; the association, always morally condemned, between the criminal economy and “clean” business; the impoverishment, but generalized access to consumption, to technologies; renewed mobility and the diffusion of borders; the exaltation of differences and radicalization of exploitation: neoliberalism is the combination, always re-activated, of these processes.

3. Crisis. The economists say that the crisis we have continued to plunge into for the past ten years is a Great Depression, like that of the 1870s or that which exploded in 1929 and subsided, only after the death of tens of millions of people, in 1945. Taking up the lesson of the 1930s, several economists speak of “secular stagnation”: decades of low growth, low wages, high unemployment, high poverty. Always something to hope for… In this sense, crisis is no longer just an illness, but the “treatment” received each day because the disease flares up. The question imposes itself: why, if capitalism has won everywhere, is there a need for crisis to govern the world? A first answer shows us that the world is anything but governed: American hegemony wanes; a new multipolarism presents a threat; war kills in the periphery and the center, and is made with weapons, attacks, money, and trade. A second answer, instead, tells us that crisis is a form of governing labor-power. Precisely because the victory of capital does not cease producing, in spite of itself, the objective conditions of communism, the command of capital relentlessly renews that extra-economic violence that had characterized its origins since the 16th century. The more robots replace human labor, the less capitalism can afford social justice and democracy. The more subjects incorporate productive instruments, the more it will be necessary to demoralize, impoverish, and discipline them. The neoliberal management of the crisis connects the control of behavior with the renewal of discipline, whether it takes the form of the division of labor, masculine violence against women, the repression of the poor and migrant (from internment to expulsion). The best-known face of the capitalism-crisis is Donald Trump: a billionaire close to Goldman Sachs, and therefore Wall Street, he does not scorn but defends and, when he can, foments the nationalist and racist right. Neoliberalism, which for years has rhymed with globalization, strengthens its aggressive and authoritarian pole; the space of finance is combined with that of borders, discrimination, the fatherland. And what’s more: in the crisis, the archaic of Sovereignty, the civil war waged against the poor, reemerges. In this scenario, if the neoliberal left – the one in vogue in the time of Clinton, Blair, and Schröder – shrinks almost everywhere, the (neoliberal) chauvinist right is rediscovered, and this does not exclude fascist rhetoric.


Continues at: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/31 ... communism/
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 12:54 pm

Our official response to the 2018 State of the Union address:

The wealthy have taken everything from us, and continue to find ways to take even more. It is never enough for them. And, year after year, their political puppets in both capitalist parties ensure that their rivers and avenues of unfathomable, flowing wealth never dry up or close down. When needed, they construct more. Always at our expense, and always through our collective (and manufactured) misery. The wealthy create or produce nothing of value, barely lift a finger in their daily routines, and get richer and richer directly through our labor, our exploitation, our indebtedness, and our mass dispossession of land and resources.

Barack Obama was the empire fully clothed, hiding these horrors with impressive displays of eloquence and articulation. Donald Trump is the empire without clothes, naked and with all of its horror on full display. With or without clothes, the horrors exist. With or without clothes, these horrors have disastrous consequences for billions of people worldwide, which are viewed as nothing more than collateral damage sustained through coordinated resource extraction and [disaster] capitalism. For the majority, including most Americans, this reality has existed for centuries.

This "response" comes before tonight's address because we know that whatever words come out of Trump’s mouth are empty. They are inconsequential to us. They are nothing more than damage control, designed to instill false hopes through the vast wastelands of this country. Just as they were with Obama, both Bushs, Clinton, Reagan, and so on. No matter who stands and delivers this yearly address, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the bombs never stop falling. The working-class struggle also never ends, and has only become more and more difficult.
We have had enough.

Capitalism's predatory onslaught has run its course. America's bourgeois democracy is no longer a suitable cover for a nation that has committed systemic crimes against the global majority, including its own working-class citizens, and especially its indigenous people, its women, its immigrants, and its people of color. From constant war and never-ending exploitation to forced indebtedness and smothering repression, the people no longer believe in this charade. We know that governments in capitalist society are but "committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class."

The future does not belong to Presidents, Senators, bankers, executives, hedge-fund manipulators, speculators, investors, financiers, shareholders, police officers, landlords, bosses, owners, prison guards, ICE agents, and border patrol. It belongs to warehouse workers, carpenters, laborers, bus drivers, teachers, forklift operators, restaurant workers, nurses, social workers, firefighters, farmers, prisoners, the unemployed, the homeless, the disenfranchised, and all who have been forced into a hopeless existence only so a small percentage of the population can accumulate more wealth than they know what to do with.

The empire has been exposed. The "state" and the "union" are myths constructed to hide the class and racial divides that are deeply rooted in the country’s foundation. The American "middle class" was an historical anomaly that will never return, and is only kept alive as a carrot for politicians to dangle in front of us every election season. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are approaching their demise. The fascist tide that has reared its ugly head under late-stage capitalism is already being snuffed out in the streets by courageous, working-class warriors.

The people are rising, like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number. The future is ours. And your words, Mr. Trump, mean nothing to us.

All power to the people.



Hampton Institute
January 30 at 5:57pm
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 05, 2018 11:59 am

Nunes Memo: Tempest in a teapot or tip of the iceberg?
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON FEBRUARY 3, 2018

Trump and Republicans
Meanwhile, the Republican Party is close to being totally captured by Trump, meaning by the most extreme (and minority up until now) wing of the capitalist class such as the Mercer family. They bring in tow the religious fanatics, racists, crazed conspiracy theorists and those who are willing to accept this as long as they think it will get them a job. In other words, US politics-as-usual, which is geared to compromise between the various capitalist factions, is vastly weakened.

Now, Trump and the Republicans are creating a new threat, or rather are exacerbating an already-existing one, and this is what release of the Nunes/House Intelligence Committee memo represents. The intent is to help delegitimize the FBI in the eyes of their supporters, to lead to its being seen as a political instrument – not as a political instrument of the capitalist class as a whole against the working class, against people of color, against the left – but as a political instrument of one capitalist party against the other. Once this claim is spread, then Trump and the Republicans will try to move to do exactly what they claim the Democrats have done; they will try to seize the FBI as their own institution, to be used to protect their president. Or, more precisely, Trump personally will do this, just as he has more or less done with the Republican Party.

How can they do that?

Once that perception is developed among their true believers, then he will have grounds to get rid of Mueller possibly by first getting rid of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who would be replaced with somebody who is totally pliant to Trump. Also caught up in this would be FBI chief Christopher Wray, unless he swears fealty to King Trump. In other words, it would put the FBI under total control of the crazed Donald Trump. It would mean a major step in the direction of one-person rule. That is the meaning of the continued warnings about a “constitutional crisis” if Trump takes these steps.

The question is, “will he?”

It’s hard to see how he won’t. He is guilty of exactly what he’s charged with, and more. Not only did his campaign collaborate with a rival imperialist power, he personally has served as a money launderer for their capitalists for many years. And to this day, many of his policies reflect those links. Just recently, for example, he chose not to institute new sanctions against Russia, sanctions that were in fact required by a law passed by his own congress. Socialists should not support such sanctions, but this inaction by Trump once again reflects his links.

Trump: “ruling by fiat”
A secondary consideration is the characteristics of the political leader involved. Take, for instance, when US capitalism decided they could and needed to embark on military adventures around the world. They frauded the 2000 presidential election to ensure that a president was put in place who was willing and able to do that – George Bush. In this case, as the Washington Times has noted, Trump “expected being president would be… ruling by fiat, exacting tribute…”


How far will Trump go in playing the role of another Napoleon Bonaparte?
So it’s hard to see how Trump won’t walk further down this road. Along the way, he will continue to use his office to enrich himself, personally, at the expense of his class in general. He will pursue policies that are not those chosen by the majority of his class. In other words, he will act as the bonapartist that he is by nature.

Image

Read more: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/02/03 ... e-iceberg/
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby dada » Mon Feb 05, 2018 12:57 pm

Why not get it over with and make him Nero, already. The end is near.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:52 pm

Jordan Peterson’s Bullshit

BY
HARRISON FLUSS

Jordan Peterson's thought is filled with pseudo-science, bad pop psychology, and deep irrationalism. In other words, he’s full of shit.

Image
Jordan Peterson, 2017.

With his recent book’s success and with over 40 million views on YouTube, Jordan Peterson’s star is on the rise. His conservative and alt-right fan base is heralding his interview with Channel 4 News’ Cathy Newman as a victory against “PC Culture.” Newman’s attempt to refute Peterson through cordial debate failed after she conceded to elements of his worldview, including the need for corporate hierarchy and an ethos of competition. In response to Newman’s statistics about the wage gap, Peterson argued that this inequality was a necessary part of the capitalist dynamic. He even complimented Newman on securing a high-paying job thanks to what some people would consider “masculine” characteristics. Despite Newman’s relatively polite behavior, she soon faced a misogynistic backlash.

Peterson is often portrayed as an enigma. Those on both the Right and Left defend him against charges of fascism and membership in the alt-right. Mainstream pundits admire his so-called consistency and coherence — some even praise him as a great philosopher. This is certainly true of David Brooks’s recent New York Times op-ed, which extols Peterson as a public intellectual for the YouTube age.

Peterson’s fans argue that he is not a fascist, just a classical liberal; not a racist, just someone who acknowledges “ethnic differences”; not a misogynist, just honest about the real differences between men and women. Many of his fans see his arguments not only as commonsensical but also scientifically accurate, a belief supported by Peterson’s credentials as a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist.

With all of the focus on issues of free speech and how the Left allegedly has turned authoritarian, there is something missing in discussions of Peterson. Rather than being an “enlightened” and “scientific” critic of postmodernism, Peterson’s critique of the Left is fundamentally Nietzschean.


Consider the Lobster

Peterson’s empirical observations, which range from zoology to pop psychology, all share an aristocratic disdain for modernity. His worldview aligns with classical liberalism’s elitist and antidemocratic tendencies, as epitomized by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek’s respective praise for Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet.

But Peterson adds something to his predecessors’ economic liberalism: a tragic conception of Being (which he capitalizes, after Heidegger) in which the world is divided between winners and losers. This authoritarian worldview naturalizes domination, weaving hierarchy into the very fabric of existence.

Critics often mock Peterson for his comparison of lobsters and human beings. According to his most recent book, 12 Rules for Life, the sea creatures’ life-and-death struggle is a model of human society. Following battle, the combatants experience a chemical effect: the superior lobster begins to secrete more serotonin, while the weaker, or inferior, lobster is deprived of these happy chemicals. Echoing the worst features of nineteenth-century social Darwinism, Peterson uses this example of lobster hierarchy to analyze human society.

He reduces class conflict to a natural and eternal struggle for existence that no political or economic revolution could ameliorate. The individual lobster — sorry, human — must develop an aggressive, alpha-male attitude in order to climb the social ladder. Peterson bases his worldview on one example from the animal kingdom — an example belied by other instances in which animals engage in mutual aid and cooperation.

Peterson’s writings are a hodgepodge of Christian existentialism, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and E. O. Wilson. But the main philosophical issue is his Nietzschean conception of power. Only a strong will, exercising itself against a contingent and meaningless world — and against the weak — can ever hope to flourish.

Peterson’s philosophy presupposes a stark division between an atomized world of facts and a transcendent realm of meaning — what he describes as the tension between chaos and order. Peterson gives these principles of order and chaos Jungian significance as masculine and feminine archetypes. This is the dualism of existence that gives life meaning. But it is the rationalist tendency, starting with René Descartes and ending with Karl Marx, which denies the mystery of existence to forge a rational utopia. For Peterson, this rationalism is responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century and culminates not in an emancipated future, but in the gulag and Auschwitz.

After Stalinism crumbled, the old Marxism continued in the guise of what Peterson calls “neo-Marxist postmodernism.” Like Nietzsche before him, Peterson sees the metaphysics of reason, as embodied in the Enlightenment project and modern socialism, leading inexorably toward relativistic nihilism. Nietzsche called this condition “passive nihilism” and argued that it could only be overcome with an “active nihilism” that would create a new system of values based on new modes of slavery and mastery. When Peterson criticizes “neo-Marxist postmodernism,” he is merely repeating Nietzsche’s diagnosis of passive nihilism — that is, the slavish revolt of the masses.

Peterson’s positivism — the dualism between descriptive facts and values — makes his Nietzscheanism possible. If the world is an atomized chaos of facts, it needs a strong will to define it and impose order. In Peterson’s need for something that transcends this chaotic reality, he subjectively imposes a mystical solution for the alienation and suffering of humanity, grounded in a Nietzschean version of Christianity and original sin. The strong will inherit the kingdom of heaven, while the weak are destined to fail.

When we theoretically confront Peterson, we need to do more than refute his pseudo-scientific claims, his bad pop psychology, and his Cold War–inflected version of history. The real challenge is overcoming his fundamental irrationalism.


Continues at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/jord ... -alt-right
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 06, 2018 6:26 pm

It's sad that sometimes we can't even achieve liberalism, much less an argument informed by more radical principles:

Fox & Friends guest pushes myth that 3 and 4 year old trans kids are making "surgical and biological alterations" to their bodies

Jordan Peterson is revered by the "alt-right"

Video › ››› REBECCA DAMANTE

On Fox & Friends, Canadian psychology professor and "alt-right" darling Jordan Peterson pushed the anti-trans myth that "children as young as 3 or 4 can now decide what gender they are and then undergo the appropriate surgical and biological alterations." However, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's (WPATH) standards of health care for transgender and gender nonconforming people state that genital surgery "should not be carried out until (i) patients reach the legal age of majority in a given country, and (ii) patients have lived continuously for at least 12 months in the gender role that is congruent with their gender identity." The standards note that chest surgery for female-to-male patients "could be carried out earlier, preferably after ample time of living in the desired gender role and after one year of testosterone treatment."

The age of majority in most most states is 18 years old, and experts and practitioners in the field of gender affirmation surgery say that they generally practice the surgery on patients who are at least that age, though they sometimes perform breast removal on teenagers as young as 16. According to BuzzFeed, kids typically start puberty blockers, which "essentially hit pause on the physical changes that would occur during puberty" and are reversible, at "the very first signs of puberty -- usually in the ballpark of 14 or 15 years old." For instance, in a 2015 study, the average age in which patients started puberty blockers was 12.5 years old, and in some cases, this was followed by hormone therapy at an average age of 16.5. Rather than making "surgical and biological alterations," trans kids ages 3 or 4 would instead undergo social transitions, meaning they would begin styling, dressing, or otherwise living in congruence with their gender identity. Additionally, not all transgender people need or want transition-related surgeries. Aside from pushing misinformation about trans kids, Mic reported that "the mess of ideologies associated with the alt-right revere Peterson."


More at: https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018 ... cal-and-b/
Last edited by American Dream on Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:52 pm

Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics

Jules Joanne Gleeson July 19, 2017



The Hard Limits of Institutional Reformism

Despite her outstanding achievement as an influential thinker, Serano’s political priorities are set with hard limits which directly follow from her social analysis. Serano’s activism, while highly successful in its own terms, demonstrates of her ideological commitments to reform of capitalist society, and its existing institutions.

Serano has made a tireless effort to delegitimize the transphobic analysis of sexologists Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey, more recently advanced by popular science writer Alice Dreger.18 Her blog features a proliferation of articles written personally, and a continual cataloguing of research done from an informed viewpoint on trans women. For years she has particularly targeted the foremost practitioner of “reparative” (conversion) therapy, Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker. Zucker’s “reparative” approach was a holdover from openly homophobic therapies of the past, pioneered by Joseph Nicolosi (founder of NARTH). Nicolosi’s techniques were used unsuccessfully by psychiatrists in an effort to repress homosexual desire in adult men, while Zucker encouraged parents to refuse their children affection on the grounds of “inappropriate” gendered behavior. Understandably, ending the use of “reparative” practices on transgender children has been a consistent focus for activism by trans women, sometimes supported by other LGBT activists.

Between Serano’s writings and the efforts of local activists across many years, conversion practices were outlawed in Toronto in 2015, and Zucker’s Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic was closed in December of the same year. This can only be seen as a victory for Serano, as well as a clear sign of progress in reducing the harm done to gender variant children by the medical profession. Triumphs of this kind should of course be celebrated, on the rare occasions they do occur. But an ending regulatory violence enacted from generation to generation would require a revolutionary movement.

Serano’s activism political activity hinges on agitating for reform. This aim of discrediting actively destructive practices is not to be dismissed out of hand. Targeting the medical establishment has a long history in LGBT activism, from the direct action campaigns which saw homosexuality declassified as a mental illness to the (on-going) efforts by ACT UP to confront pharmaceutical company profiteering from STI medications, and slow peddling of HIV research.

The focus of Serano and other trans activists on improving the prospects of children passing through the care of medical institutions is reminiscent of intersex activism, with similar predicaments. Intersex activism remains focused primarily on the goal of ending the commonplace “corrective” surgery performed arbitrarily on infants and children born with “ambiguous” genitals. (Today termed Intersex Genital Mutilation.)19 On an international level, intersex activists have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in ensuring the EU and UN classify Intersex Genital Mutilation as torture, and a violation of “basic rights,” yet these medical practices remain widespread across the world (outlawed altogether only in Malta).20 It’s also unclear how effective any ban would be at actually preventing IGM surgeries. A worrying point of comparison is Indonesia, where legislation against Female Genital Mutilation (installed in the face of international pressure) did very little to end the widespread practice of childhood clitoral cutting. (Today the majority of these surgeries are performed by trained medical professionals, as with male circumcisions).21 Whether or not the legislation outlawing the practice is formally repealed, in Indonesia it has already become de facto void. Clearly state power and NGO complexes are unreliable allies, at best.

The “decentralized” nature of this medicalized violence demonstrates the pervasive nature of gender demarcation, and how undoing its harm extends well beyond defeating the state, passing the correct laws, or reforming the professions. For as long as gendered violence is performed through professional bodies and medical institutions, disputing their legitimacy (not simply drawing on it) will remain a practical priority.

Even in the case of official bodies radically transforming their approaches towards transgender and intersex children, intergenerational abuse will remain widespread. The bulk of gender-based neglect and violence during parenting will never be overseen by a medical professional. If the medical establishment halts conversion efforts, private “camps” run by amateur gender enforcers will remain available throughout the US for parents intent on curbing their children’s “deviant” behavior. Abuse arises not only from the instruction of the remaining psychiatric conversionists, but from the institution of the family itself. Gender substantiating violence is often performed by mothers fulfilling their unpaid obligations as the foremost reproducers of society across generations.22

Heterosexual families are prone to trying to recreate themselves in their own image. While Zucker doubtless encouraged some parents who otherwise would have proven more tolerant to mistreat their children through denying them affection, primarily his patients were introduced to him by parents hoping that their progeny’s supposedly deviant behavior could be made to desist. “Reparative” therapy certainly formalized and encouraged parental behavior which occurs irrespective of intervention from the medical profession. Even the most radical transformation of formally constituted institutions will serve a limited role in ending gender oppression, since much formative-developmental violence occurs through informal or “loose” organizations: families, peer groups, romantic relationships, and other social environments which make up the everyday; and inevitably also workplaces.


More at: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/07/19 ... -politics/
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:44 am

John Ganz, Steven Klein, February 7

A Serious Man

On Jordan Peterson


WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS IN CRISIS. Our faith in the Enlightenment—that bosom of our cherished values—has been shaken. Nefarious forces and groups are turning us against the very foundations of our society. So claims Jordan Peterson, who has recently capitalized on his internet celebrity by releasing a self-help book interlaced with these themes. Peterson went from being a relatively unknown psychology professor to being the leader of a burgeoning movement manned by adoring fans. All of a sudden, Peterson is everywhere: the BBC interviewed him, columnists weigh his potential social benefits, social media feeds are roiled by Peterson-mania. And he’s decided to cash in. His book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is at the time of this writing the number one bestseller on Amazon. Peterson is being cheered on by both David Brooks and Mike Cernovich. James Damore, the disgraced former Google employee and reactionary matinee idol, also considers himself a fan.

Peterson, a kind of secularized televangelist, styles himself as a culture warrior in a battle with the forces of “postmodernism.”
Peterson, a kind of secularized televangelist, styles himself as a culture warrior in a battle with the forces of “postmodernism,” a worldview which, he says, is “an assault on everything that’s been established since the Enlightenment — rationality—empiricism — science. Everything. Clarity of mind, dialogue. The idea of the individual.” Suffice it to say, the type of dialogue favored by Peterson’s fans on the web does not always quite live up to the esprit of an eighteenth-century Enlightenment salon. If you tweet critically about him, you can expect comments like this, “Your essence has been accurately distilled to a single syllable—Cuck.” But this is only natural. To understand human interactions, Peterson asks us to consider the lobster, and to consider it as a cousin. Like the pick-up artists who make a killing from male anxiety about dominance and status, Peterson thinks humans are fundamentally wired for battle and hierarchy—simply think of yourself as living a very dull and dour life aquatic in endless battle with other crustaceans.

According to Peterson, men and women can’t really talk or debate, because when men talk they are really implicitly fighting: “when men are talking to the each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation, and it keeps the thing civilized to some degree.” Men are at a disadvantage when talking to women; they are disarmed, presumably like a lobster with its pincers tied up with rubber bands. And, as we learn when we dip into Peterson’s higher-brow work Maps of Meaning, women are agents of chaos, constantly threatening male principles of order (which, for their part, risk becoming rigid). Sometimes this is creative chaos—as in women’s ability to create through birth—but often it is threatening, dangerous chaos—as in women’s ability to abandon their children.


More at: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein
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