A little late, but this was posted this past October to the revleft.com forum, on a breakaway from the RCP of certain "brigaders" (RCP youth wing). Although the critique is centered on how to be more effective as a wacky political cult, some ideas may have merit.

Read it here:

http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=71551&st=0

[Space in NYC. Same ole story.]

Dear friends,

I have been avoiding writing this letter for quite some time. For the past couple of months I’ve attempted to write a few lines but I just couldn’t do it. Where do I begin? How can I write in one single letter all I want to say to you about Carlitos? And how can I tell you that it has come to an end? But, it’s getting close to our final days so here it is……

It is with so much sadness and tons of tears that I write to let you know my Carlitos, your Carlitos, our Carlitos Café y Galeria will closing on November 29th. I have given everything I am and everything I have to this small entrepreneurship and although it is breaking my heart to let the space go, our lease is up! It is time to move out. I know Carlitos will re-open somewhere, some day, once we find the right place, but its current location is where it was born and took shape, and is and will always be its first home, and will always be special. The owner is either selling the building empty or has decided to rent it for a ridiculous amount of money, taking advantage of the money and time we have invested in renovating the space and the business traffic that now exists.

by Lizzie Widdicombe, from The New Yorker - October 22, 2007

The fortieth anniversary of Che Guevara's death went by quietly last week unless you count a party at the Brecht Forum, in the West Village, where skirmish erupted between the organizers over mojito pricing. Colin Robinson, Brecht Forum board member and an editor at Scribner, found himself on th losing side of a philosophical rift. "I told them, 'When we sell the drinks, let' sell them at decent prices, so we break even,' " said Robinson, who, in 1995 published Che Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries" and will publish Fidel Castro' dictated autobiography this December. "They said, 'But people can't afford decent prices!' So we ended up just giving away the mojitos for free and asking for donations.

The ongoing acrimonious political factionalism taking place at WBAI, involving the "Justice and Unity" slate and an "Independents" slate ...and just about everyone else- continues as a fresh election to Local Station advisory Board approaches. The LSB is a sort of advisory council in addition to approving the budget for the station, as well as determining a pool of candidates for the General Manager position at the station, among other responsibilities. The JUS currently holds a majority on the board.

The Justice and Unity slate is heavily populated by Marxist-Leninists and Nationalists of various backgrounds (a very racially diverse group), belonging to a slew of organization, several of which are affiliated or tied closely with the International Action Center (Sara Flounders, a JUS candidate, is the co-director of the IAC) and well experienced in the political intrigues on the left in the city, all brought together in political coalition against a slate of "Independents" of various hard to discern political tendencies (including a few out Liberals) and primarily a white group (and heavily populated by wing-nuts, with some serious issues with meeting decorum).

[The historic development of Primitivism, and its popularity in North America, should be of particular concern to all those anarchists who follow the true legacy of the anarchist tradition. The following essay by Brian Oliver Sheppard from 2003 is still the best case against identifying Primitivism with anarchism.]

Read the full text here

________

The Demonology of Primitivism: Electricity, Language, and other Modern Evils

Brian Oliver Sheppard

Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute journal, The Edge, and critic of modem technology, recently complained to journalists, "I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity." He added: "I don't think a lot of electricity is a good thing. It is the fuel that powers a lot of multi-national imagery." When asked why lack of electricity - a hallmark of poverty - ought to be considered advantageous, Smith said, "The idea that people are poor doesn't mean that they are not living good lives." He added, "there is a lot of quality to be had in poverty."

Just to fill in those revolutionaries who have been living under a rock for the last year, there is currently an historic housing crisis in the USA (increasingly worldwide), as the subprime mortgage market has tanked following record defaults. We should care because most of these early defaulters, and we're talking millions of people, are poor, working class, and middle class families that have been fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have the opportunity to buy into the "American Dream" by owning their own home, only to have them repossessed after they fail to make the exorbitant interest payments that kick in after a few years.

Spend a few moments reading THIS BLOG and you'll see the crisis as its unfolding.

A friend not so long ago asked me if I could recommend any good historical works on the Chinese Revolution (and by implication of course Mao and the history of Maoism), specifically from a non-Leninist point of view, generally any history not writen by the RCP. Interestingly enough as I have reviewed my own bookshelf and asked around for other suggestions I could only initially come up with maybe two or three definitive works on the subject under this criteria.

(The problem of course is the difficulty in finding any single work that sums up the major features and issues of any great and all encompassing revolution as the Chinese Revolution. As anything, if you want a full view understanding of events of such importance, you need to have a good reading list, access to the works, and a great deal of time on your hands.)

By "occam"

[Please see original post and comments: HERE ]

The Communist Party (CPUSA) recently donated their extensive archives to NYU's Tamiment Library, a radical history archive. With their archives now housed at NYU, the CPUSA is renovating and renting out their 8-story building on W. 23rd St to commercial tenants -- potentially generating millions of dollars in annual income.

It's an open secret that the CPUSA plays a leadership role in various left-liberal organizations (most recently, UFPJ) out of all proportion to their actual membership size or political influence. What is (and what should be) their role in larger movements? Do they have any accountability to those movements?

NOTE: I'm not an expert and short on time, so some of what I write below will be incomplete. Hopefully people can add information in comments. Please let's have a solidly political discussion of the PRESENT, not a rehashing of decades-old grudges. Thanks.

THE BURNING FOREST or "HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA" (1978)

Simon Leys

(This essay was originally published in 1978.)

How much of this is known in the free countries of the West? The information is to be found in the daily papers. We are informed about everything. We know nothing.

-SAUL BELLOW, To Jerusalem and Back

On the question of human rights in China, an odd coalition has formed among "Old China hands" (left over from the colonial-imperialist era, starry-eyed Maoist adolescents, bright, ambitious technocrats, timid sinologists ever wary of being denied their visas for China, and even some overseas Chinese who like to partake from afar in the People's Republic's prestige without having to share any of their compatriots' sacri-fices or sufferings). The basic position of this strange lobby can be summarized in two propositions: (1) Whether or not there is a human-rights problem in China remains uncertain-"we simply do not know"; and (2) even if such a problem should exist, it is none of our concern.

Notes on the Ecological Dimension: Marxists and the Environment: Is Marx’s Critique of Science and Technology Radical Enough?

By Mitchel Cohen

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

For years, as I’ve been active in social justice movements I’ve worked with people who call themselves Marxists. I taught an underground course at Stony Brook for 15 years called “Marxism for Beginners”. And the group that I founded with other students at Stony Brook in the late 1960s, the Red Balloon Collective, saw itself as an anarcho-marxist direct action organization.

And yet, as I became more and more involved in environmental and related issues, I found that the Marxists with whom I marched in antiwar demonstrations and social justice protests were nowhere to be found on certain issues and indeed were hostile to my attempts to raise these issues with them. I also found that as I wrote about these issues for various Marxist journals they would invariably be rejected, even though many of my articles and essays were being published by other publications and books. I had to find out why.

The WSF was smaller than usual. It was dominated by NGOs (the stalls) and the churches (the opening march). Some Christian fundamentalists even protested demanding that a statue depicting a pregnant young woman be removed from the cross it hung upon (the statue was in support of reproductive rights for women). The latter incident prompted some comrades to include in the statement of the social movements that organizations not in line with the WSF politics should not be allowed to attend.

The WSF was visibly commercialized with the cellphone company Celtel doing the registration and linking this to comrades buying a Celtel simcard. Celtel adverts were all over the show. The worst part is that it is more expensive in Kenya to use Celtel than the other cellphone company Safaricom. The restaurants inside the WSF precinct were pretty expensive and there were many vendors selling water that at times cost at least double the usual Kenyan price.

There's a good discussion going on over at NYC Indymedia on the UFPJ sponsored march in Wash DC, on Jan 27th.

[Incidetally RedFlags is having the same discussion, with many of the same posts]

Of particular interest is this comment from Max at Left Turn magazine:

Getting serious about building the anti-war movement
Jan 29, 2007 02:09PM EST
max@riseup.net http://www.leftturn.org

"I appreciate what WCW is doing trying to spearhead an upsurge around impeachment. But I think the question of how different the EFFECTS of its demands end out being from UFPJ's involves a move from protest to resistance."

Just got back from DC, been following the conversation above but have not been able to slip away from work to comment.

I have to say that it feels a little bit like im living on bizarro world, trying to figure out how my friend BM tries to re-package the message of the WCW campaign into something that has not already been said a million times before (all by good and sincere people).

[Or how not to commit yourself to the fight, an "anarchist-moronist" primer- TFGC]

MUNI SOCIAL STRIKEOUT

By Kevin Keating

A critique of our efforts to foment a mass "self-reduction" movement on San Francisco's Muni public transit system.

INTRODUCTION:

In early 2005, bureaucrats in San Francisco's Municipal Transit Authority announced plans for a fare increase and service cuts for Muni, SF's main public transit system. Fares had been hiked in 2003 from $1.00 to $1.25, and the 2005 fare hike, slated to begin Sept.1st, was to be from $1.25 to $1.50. Several dozen bus lines would see drastically reduced service; other lines would be cut altogether. Plans were also announced for mass layoffs of Muni employees, focusing in particular on bus drivers.

In response, a small group of anti-authoritarians initiated an effort aimed at uniting Muni riders and drivers in large-scale action that could spike the attacks.

Ron Taber's book A Look at Leninism is a critically important work detailing the ethos and practical applications of Leninism. It is a MUST READ for any student of revolutionary theory and action, on any side of the Leninist debate.

Please send me an email if you'd like a copy (it's currently out of print, although Open City Collective happens to have a box in their basement).

Jan 9th, 2007

Last night a group of NYMAA members went out for drinks after the Open City / NEFAC panel on Anarchist - Communism, an event rather well attended and overall informative and lively.

So we manage to find ourselves boozing into the wee hours with a member- actually one of only TWO members, of the NYC branch of the International Bolshevik Tendency , who had stood up at the panel to give the usual wingnut diatribe about Lenin and the efficacy of the Bolshevik party organization, blah blah blah.

Nice guy. Seriously, though, we tend to write off these small political sect members as if they're all just mindless dredgers of doctrine (which of course they usually appear to be) formulated some 80 years ago by some "ye ole koot" who no one cares to remember anyhow (and not to downplay the danger of suffering from such nonsence ourselves).

By Loren Goldner

[Goldner is one of the most prescient commentators on the left, and a brilliant Marxist of the "autonomous" vein - TFGC]

“We were living in times innocent of world war, of fascism, of nazism, sovietism, the Fuehrerprinzip, the totalitarian state. Nothing we were talking about had ever been tried. We thought of political democracy with its basic rights and freedoms as good things permanently secured. Planting ourselves on that firm basis, we proposed to climb higher to industrial or “real” democracy.”

Max Eastman
Love And Revolution (1964)

Thus did Max Eastman describe the climate of the pre-World War I era of The Masses magazine, which he edited in its heyday.

In these bleak times, it is still remarkable how the international revolutionary surge of 1917-1921, right after World War I, can still resonate as a moment of almost apocalyptic hope. 90 years on, this moment—in retrospect the high-water mark to date of the international working-class movement, with revolutions and insurrections and general strikes in 20 countries—retains an ability to inspire like no other. All across the left spectrum, whether Social Democratic, Stalinist, Trotskyist, left communist, anarchist or Third Worldist, militants (whether they know it or not) are still shaped by questions set down in that period and its immediate aftermath. The Russian revolutionaries (more revealingly than they knew) constantly checked course by consulting the history of the (bourgeois) French Revolution, and however much contemporary “new social movement” activists and post-modernists wish to treat the working-class radicalism of the 1910’s and 1920’s as ancient history, we have not yet fully exited, for better or for worse, the magnetic field of those years.

Dec, 2001 NYC

Yellow Overalls Must Rise! (in order to lay down again)

By Mira Jovanovich

MJ: I'm wondering if you can give us a little background on Ya Basta and the yellow overalls, as it has played out here in North America.

TFGC: The New York City Ya Basta! Collective formed just a few weeks after the pictures and stories from the protests in Prague [IMF meetings, Sept 2000] were transmitted across the Atlantic. Like many people inspired by these communications, we were interested in understanding the dynamics of this relatively new and somewhat poetic tactic of civil disobedience, and attempted, as far as possible, to gather intelligence on the efforts of the "tute bianche". We had the fortunate privilege of having an Italian activist as a member of our local collective, one who was more than familiar with the developments of the white overalls and the Ya Basta Association, specifically as things evolved in cities like Milan and Genoa. We received greatly informed reports as developments would happen.