frankfrontbottom:

Our predicament at the present time throws up new
questions… Sometimes if a person gets trapped in a previous moment of
history, you find it hard to carry on a conversation with him or her
because they are still out to defend something that you’re not against,
but you’re not with because it is no longer the relevant thing. … [It
was] necessary at a particular point in time, when we were still within
the whole identity crisis, when we were trying to evolve a peoplehood. …
But the moment we move beyond that, neocolonial man [and woman] can’t
talk about the Vietnamese in the singular or the African or the
Guyanese, etc. We must look at real life. In real life, Guyanese live in
certain different ways, have contradictions among themselves, have a
relationship with the rest of the world.

Walter Rodney, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”

Identity is the primary source of social and political capital in
“left-wing,” establishment politics. It’s the lever the “professional
activists” and “community leaders” use to extract grants from the
monopolies, the respect (and payouts!) from their Democratic Party
patrons, and railroad a good deal of like-minded, middle-class people
into pitiful mobilizations for state reforms that never have a chance of
passing, or – lord help us, some pathetic attempt to pitch in to a
national protest. The other thing is, the old, white vultures who run
the show want them up front, to deal these people out to their friends
like trading cards. Better PR that way. There are hundreds, if not
thousands, of them in “grassroots” organizations all over the region.
They are the class base of neocolonialism.

As a result, we have a monstrous, little garrison society of all
colors, all nations, all genders, and all sexualities united by a single
aim: parasitism from the margins.

The pigs ask you your preferred pronouns before they arrest you; they
gun down Black men and kidnap working Latin@s in the street. The DIY
venues all proclaim themselves “safe spaces”; the volunteers grope
teenage girls and shame survivors into silence like they always did.
Semi-popular chillwave artists try to solicit a hitjob on a 16 year old
lumpen for retaliating against the rape of his friend before the perp
splits town for Memphis. Up-and-coming, trans Latin@ activists pilfer the
treasury of a migrant worker’s org. Ambitious, young, and “woke”
Democratic Party employee turns out to have systematically preyed on
multiple young women, then isolated them by saying he was the
victim. A perfect oasis of liberalism and inclusion, but always remember
to smother resistance on your way up to the fucking big leagues!

Take your identities, your stagnant PACs and NGOs, your sterilized
communities (if they haven’t already turned that shit into an empty
acronym), and throw them in the fucking garbage. In a place like this,
there’s no such thing as civil resistance or unity across class lines,
only cash and connections. Exploitation and oppression have all
been pinkwashed, whitewashed, beautified with expertly-crafted “optics,”
suffused with grants from the Waltons, the Tysons, and the State Dems. That’s Clinton House rules.

Our line is this: eliminate parasitism from the margins with proletarian unity from the margins. Organize
the most oppressed workers, tend to their needs, engage their
militancy, intelligence, and creativity, help them carve out political
power through struggle, and unite them in real, proletarian
organizations that can keep the garrison society and their fucking
corruption at bey. Then they can really fight.

The left has chided us in the past for confronting liberalism and
neocolonialism. They think this is too ultra, too militant, when it’s
been the point all along. Instead, people talk big about the fascists
and the “Alt-Right.” The left’s sense of proportion on this matter, in
our opinion, is totally fucked. The truth is the fascists have very
little organized presence in the region because they’re so universally
reviled by the overwhelming majority of people. They pose a very small
obstacle to our work, which can be overcome by sheer force. Our greatest
political obstacle has always been neocolonialism and its
misleadership, which disarms and stifles genuine rebellion,
organization, and resistance from oppressed and exploited communities —
not with open terror but with discourse.

A lot of people seem to think we’re dealing with brutal, racist
“white trash,” when we’re dealing with a more sophisticated,
cosmopolitan kind of racism. They think we’re dealing with roving gangs
of fagbashers, when we’re dealing with people who buy our silence with
cash and flattery. They think we’re dealing with drooling, sexist pigs,
when we’re dealing with “woke” people who have weaponized “identity
politics” in order to dodge reprisal and punish survivors who assert
verifiable allegations of sexual violence. Old reality, new reality;
hard power, soft power. Less Birth of a Nation, more Get Out.

This is our situation: The fucking lynch mob is coming for us. They
haven’t snatched us yet, but they’re inching their way down the road.
We’re slowly waking up to the fact that neocolonialism has tied our
hands, dumped us in a nearby ditch, and left us for dead. The thing we
have to figure out is how to break free and escape, figure out how to
free all the revolutionary people. We have to help each other learn how
to stand up again, and struggle for a new world.

The fundamental problem isn’t that all the old terror — reactionary,
settler, and fascist or just plain, old imperialist — still exists,
grows, and haunts us, because us Communists know how to deal with it in
broad strokes: organize the united front, meet reactionary terror with
revolutionary terror. The problem is that neocolonialism and the legal
left have left the most oppressed and exploited communities wide open
and pacified to bear the brunt of the violence with absolutely no
recourse. We don’t have any good solutions for that.

Above all, this is what needs to change by any means necessary.

(x)

frankfrontbottom:

“Class is a human dimension in which we are both hammer and anvil, when most want to be neither. On this primal level of human society there is nothing but class and class elements, where classes are simultaneously the user of the tool, the hammer itself, and the object being changed. Just as class is the wielder of the knife, the weapon itself in its arc, and the present being cut open. Everything is made of classes and class strata, and class is the landscape and those moving on it and the atmosphere itself all at once. Our goal is simple, to improve our ability to identify the broken up class terrain that we are moving across, so that our step is more sure.”

J. SAKAI, “THE DANGEROUS CLASS AND REVOLUTIONARY THEORY”

Theory is, above all, a weapon. A “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” wielded for the purpose of conquering political power within society. Every class, strata, interest group, and groupuscule has one, each varied in its significance and scope, whether they realize or acknowledge it at all. Each one has their own little subjective twist on the uncharted course of events in the real, objective world, and on the appraisal of this world. The esoteric fascist has one; the capitalist has one; the radical egoist/individualist has one, too.

Marxism, or dialectical materialism, or scientific socialism, differs from all other theories in that the subjective thought is explicitly interrelated with its apparent opposite, objective reality; by correctly identifying objective circumstances and interacting with them in practice, shaping and reshaping our own thoughts in the process, real changes become possible, and practicable, within the objective world. Marxists grasp reality to make revolution.

Keep reading

frankfrontbottom:

Value is the foundation of all societies, from the caveman era up until now. We live and breathe value, and we exist to produce things of social value for one another – even if these things are as abstract and complex as love. This is the basic principle of us, as individuals, relating to each other and engaging with each other as human beings. I’m talking about all societies.

As for the society we live in – I’ll paraphrase J. Sakai on this: “In Marx’s analysis, the exchange of commodities is the fundamental relationship in capitalist society. A commodity is anything that has both use-value, that fulfills a human want or need, and exchange-value, a product of human labor for the open market. So, the oxygen we breathe has use-value but no exchange-value, since we take it ourselves from the atmosphere. However, that same oxygen in an oxygen tank has been separated, compressed, packaged, and transported by human labor, so it’s definitely a commodity. The most important commodity is the labor-power of workers, their ability to work, which is the commodity that more than reproduces itself in the hands of the capitalist.

“The value of commodities will inevitably express itself in the open market as price. Surplus value is the share of value not consumed in the production of the commodities or given to the workers as wages to sustain and reproduce their labor-power. Surplus value arises on the open market in the form of profit. Marx says that there’s no direct correlation between the value and surplus value created by some worker or some factory and the amounts of prices and profits that result. It’s a theory that’s pretty indirect and averaged out. Marx’s goal wasn’t to write a cheatsheet to the stock market but to radically grasp the dynamics of the capitalist system.”

Keep reading

Beginner’s Kata: uncensored stray thoughts on revolutionary organization, by J. Sakai:

frankfrontbottom:

“Beginner’s mind” is a zen phrase. It reminds us that when we first
took this path as beginners, we approached it almost with awe.
Self-conscious of knowing so little—knowing nothing, really—we were open
for seeing anything. Aware mostly of how unimportant our own little
knowledge was. But as we became much more experienced, even became
“expert,” it was different. We could separate useful from scrap, what we
judge is good from bad, so automatically we hardly needed to pause over
it. Our journey became a polished routine. And now we sometimes ask
ourselves, is it still a journey?

i was reminded of “beginner’s mind” all over again once, in a very
different context. Accidentally tuning past an ongoing discussion
between a few marxists and anarchists about the pros and cons of
leninism vs. “horizontal” spontaneity in revolutionary organization. It
was like people at a dinner party having a familiar argument across the
room from you. You can’t catch everything being said, but you know where
it’s going anyway.

femoids:

(IMAGE SOURCE)

I’ve combined a lot of resources and information about world poverty, hunger, economic imperialism, terrorism, and society at large to do this, all which are from reliable sources that will be linked in this post.

Death under capitalism as a result of capitalism is not discussed much. No one is going to say, “Why do you support capitalism? It killed [amount of people]”. Or if they do, someone will say those deaths are unrelated to capitalism. So here is some research counting the death toll of capitalism in similar ways communism would be.

Keep reading

The ethics of seeing – Re-Picture – Medium:

Years
before I became a photojournalist, I was a geologist in awe of
landscape photography. To hone my shooting skills, I began attending
weekly meetings of photography enthusiasts at a local camera club in the
Boston area.

In
the first few meetings, I noticed the club was dominated by wealthy men
who spent enormous amounts of money on the latest gear and “photo
expeditions” to foreign countries. The equipment they owned and the
countries they visited seemed like status symbols among this circle.

I
often wondered, what if the “subjects” from the countries they visited
showed up in the United States to snap pictures of them mowing their
front yards or of their grandkids jumping on a trampoline?

At
the Missouri Photo Workshop two years later, that imagined scene became
a reality. On the first day of the workshop, when photographers were
out in the town of Troy photographing daily life, a local woman became
angry about the presence of Showkat Nanda,
a workshop participant. Nanda, a brown man who sports a beard, was not
taking pictures, but quietly sat on the periphery of a playground with a
camera around his neck.

Though
he explained that he was a part of a workshop documenting the
community, which was being conducted with support from the town, the
woman continued to express suspicion and disdain in an angry tone and
asked him to leave.

“In
that moment, I felt like I was not a human being. I felt hurt,” Nanda
recollected. “Westerners consider Kashmir conservative and third world,
but we treat people with dignity, especially outsiders.”

femoids:

The True Extent of Global Poverty and Inequality–and Why Capitalism Is Not the Answer

We hear about global inequality increasing quite often over time. Recently, a new report was released showing that the world’s richest 1% are on course to control as much as two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030. This wealth often results from investments, stocks, and other financial assets. I prefer to use the term “ruling class” instead of “1%” because it implies that these people rule the world, which is true.

Anyway, onto inequality. This wealth is not money alone. As mentioned in the article:

The wealthy also invested a large amount of equity in businesses, stocks and other financial assets, which have handed them disproportionate benefits.

They are often just making money from having lots of money. As mentioned in this post:

Let’s start with the most ridiculously conservative version of where Jeff Bezos keeps his money. (Also let’s lose a quick $5b and say he has $100b rather than $105b, for simplicity.) Now, let’s say he keeps $100b in a savings account that earns 1% interest, compounded annually.

So, that means, at the end of the year, he’ll have “earned” a billion dollars just for having this much money in this particular savings account.

I put quote marks around “earned” because he didn’t work for it. He got money for having money. He got a billion dollars for having a hundred billion dollars.

A person with $100 billion could spend $10 million a day, every day, for his whole life, and that person would die with more money than they had when they began spending $10 million a day.

However, it’s worth mentioning that this is not as innocent as it sounds. Economic imperialism under capitalism is the core reason wealth is so concentrated, and that imperialist countries have significantly larger amounts of wealth despite not working any harder. Economic imperialism involves things such as Operation Condor, Banana Republics, installing dictators to defend capitalism, keeping labor cheap, and mass industrial slaughter (these are only a few notable examples). Economic imperialism is responsible for extortion of resources in poor countries by wealthy multinational corporations, unstable political climates, and millions of deaths with no sign of stopping. You may be familiar with the concept through terms such as “protectionism” and “free trade”, neither of which solve the problem in capitalism. 

So, you’re probably wondering: How much of the rich rely on such horrific practices? I’ll give you an answer: The majority of products you buy are a result of it.

The garment industry is an example:

The garment industry is one of the oldest and largest export industries. The industry exemplifies the challenges associated with global manufacturing: low wages, “flexible” contracts and sweatshop conditions. Informal garment and textile workers often experience isolation, invisibility and lack of power, especially those who produce from their homes.

In the garment sector, production can be dispersed to many locations across and within countries. In developed countries, this is associated with outsourcing production to developing countries. In developing countries, production moves within and between countries in search of cheaper/faster labour.

Transnational companies can move their capital across borders in search of cheaper labour. Small enterprises and individual workers do not have this mobility, and must compete in an increasingly insecure and competitive environment.

Global production and trade are controlled by relatively few corporations. Large retailers, marketers, and manufacturers set up decentralized production networks through which they order the goods and supply the specifications—often with just a click. Tiered networks of contractors produce the finished products for foreign buyers.

Garment production in poorer countries offers needed investment and employment, but there is a competitive requirement “for poorer countries to offer the cheapest workers and the most flexible (unregulated) conditions” (Delahanty 1999: 4).

• Child Labor in the Garment Industry
• Mass Industrial Slaughter in the Garment Industry
• Fast Fashion

Corporations and Terrorism

• United Fruit Company – Banana massacre, 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, death squads
• PepsiCo and Pinochet
• IBM and Nazi Germany

Global Poverty

1) Nearly ½ of the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day.

2) 1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.

3) 805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat. 

4) More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Diarrhea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally, or approximately 2,300 people per day.

5) In 2011, 165 million children under the age 5 were stunted (reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic malnutrition.

6) ¼ of all humans live without electricity — approximately 1.6 billion people.

Here’s where capitalists do perhaps one of the most evil things you could do in such a situation–manipulate statistics on global poverty to make it look better than it is.

Full paper by Jason Hickel here.

A poverty line is supposed to reflect the total cost of all of the essential resources that an average human adult needs to survive. The poverty line in the United States is an annual income of ~$22k. The international poverty line (IPL)? A dollar a day. Where did that ridiculously low poverty line come from? It came from Martin Ravallion, an Australian economist at the world bank, who noticed in 1990 that poverty lines of some of the world’s poorest countries clustered around $1 per day. The World Bank now uses the dollar a day statistic to determine absolute poverty around the world.

As a result, the IPL makes poverty seem much less serious than it actually is. So what’s the reality of life under the IPL?

In many countries living just above the IPL means living in destitution. Economist Adam Wagstaff has shown that in India a child living just above the IPL has a 60% risk of being underweight. In Niger babies born to families just above the IPL face an infant mortality risk of 160/1000, more than three times the world average. In such cases $1.25 per day is insufficient to achieve the ‘adequate’ standard of living that is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states in Article 25: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care’. Even establishment institutions are beginning to recognise this.

In 2014 the Asian Development Bank (ADB) conceded that the $1.25 line was too low to be meaningful, and discussed nudging the line up to $1.50 to more accurately account for basic food needs. Even this minor shift would see the number of people in extreme poverty rise by more than one billion. If the ADB does this, it will inflict severe damage on the global poverty reduction narrative, which relies heavily on gains from Asia.

Using this standard, the poverty headcount is 1.5 billion people, which is 50% higher than what the UN claims using the $1.25 IPL (about one billion). Of course, some national poverty lines are actually below the IPL; this is the case in about 25 countries. If for these countries we measure poverty at the IPL instead, we get an additional 188.7 million poor people, and a global poverty headcount of about 1.7 billion people – 70% higher than the UN’s official figures.

As shown here, simple changes to statistics can make global poverty seem significantly better or significantly worse. By shifting the IPL, the World Bank can mislead massively.

Using the IPL, the World Bank announced in its 2000 annual report that global poverty was getting worse: ‘the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015. This was alarming news and it projected a troubling future trend

In 2004, the World Bank published its new official estimates, which stated that poverty reduction was actually twice as successful as Wolfensohn had suggested: a grand total of 400 million people were rescued from extreme poverty between 1981 and 2001. As the statistical story continued to improve, the World Bank’s PR crisis was averted. The World Bank had shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to a new IPL of $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which was introduced in 2000. Suddenly it, appeared that fewer people were poor, even though nothing had changed in the real world.

The UN wants to end world hunger in 2030. We know capitalism cannot do such a thing.

North Korea proposed creating neutral state in 1987: declassified dossier:

juchechat:

In the late 1980s, North Korea proposed creating a neutral state on
the Korean Peninsula that could serve as a buffer zone in the region,
declassified diplomatic documents showed Friday.

Then Soviet
Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev delivered the North’s secret proposal to
then U.S. President Ronald Reagan during their summit in Washington on
Dec. 9, 1987, according to the documents disclosed by the foreign
ministry.

Under the plan, the North wanted to create a
federation-style republic consisting of two different governments
representing the two Koreas and declare it as a neutral state that could
serve as a regional buffer zone, the documents said.

The
North also called for the two Koreas to sign a nonaggression treaty and
replace the current armistice with a peace treaty, while suggesting the
new entity would join the United Nations under a single name.

In addition, Pyongyang sought to scrap all agreements or treaties
reached with third parties deemed to be running counter to their pursuit
of reunification, a demand interpreted as a way to put pressure on
Seoul to walk away from its mutual defense treaty with the U.S.

The North suggested the two Koreas reduce the number of their
respective troops to fewer than 100,000 as a step toward building a
peace mood and called for the withdrawal of any nuclear weapons and
foreign troops from the peninsula, apparently targeting U.S. troops
stationed in the South.