[Marxism] does the western left have an African problem?

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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In 1983, Audre Lorde wrote
 that, "among those of us
who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children,
there can be no hierarchies of oppression," and that the act of placing
oppressions on a scale of hierarchal importance is an oppressive act in
itself. Of course, most on the left -- particularly those in Western
countries who espouse anti-imperialist, antiwar, anti-colonial politics --
would agree with this in theory, but many seem to fall short of this
analysis of anti-hierarchal political sentiment when it comes to the
continent of Africa. There seems to be a deficit of caring -- or rather,
caring enough to self-educate, research and act -- within the Western left
on the current movements, histories and activism within African countries.

…..

As we begin to peel back the layers of this hierarchical placement of
importance and solidarity, we must understand that it involves not only the
current events that are allowed to dominate public leftist discourse, but
also the histories and movements commonly studied and revered as well.
While many can name the works of Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Luxemburg, Lenin,
Trotsky and other big-name left thinkers, few on the broader US left can
name more than a handful of African revolutionaries. Similarly, few take
the time to self-educate on the revolutionary uprisings and states which
flared in places like Benin
, the DRC

, Ghana 
, Zanzibar , Algeria

 or Senegal
,
and rarely are they familiar with the decolonization work of people like Walter
Rodney

, Frantz Fanon , Thomas Sankara
 (known
as "the African 'Che'"), Patrice Lumumba

, Steve Biko

, Julius Nyerere

, Sékou Touré

, Kwame Nkrumah

 or Winnie Mandela

.

The vast histories of modern movements, struggles, revolutionaries and
politics on the African continent are nearly erased by the Western left,
rarely spoken of except when used to make a cross-point. That is, African
countries and their politics are often used and weaponized when making
points about imperialism, or China, but never in conversation about the
country itself. The lessons we can learn from them and the need to bring
attention to their plight are seen as less important, placed lower on the
hierarchy of oppression. This lack of caring, or lack of caring enough,
reproduces the same white supremacist logic that cast them into their
exploitive plights in the first place.

As leftist academics and organizers, we have failed our African siblings.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/42275-does-the-western-left-have-an-african-problem
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[Marxism] The Addicted Warmonger in the White House (US President Trump would not certify the Iran nuclear deal)

[RKOB via Marxism]

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https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/the-addicted-warmonger-in-the-white-house/

--
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
ak...@rkob.net
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314


---
Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

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[Marxism] Tony Norfield on finance and the imperialist world system today

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/interview-with-tony-norfield-on-finance-and-the-imperialist-world-system-today/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Greg Palast | Investigative Reporter: I went to school with the Vegas shooter

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.gregpalast.com/went-school-vegas-shooter/
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[Marxism] Gravitational wave detection of merging neutron stars

[Jeff via Marxism]

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You may already have heard on the news that a new gravitational wave 
detection was made, this time not only by the two LIGO detectors but 
also by the VIRGO detector in Italy; this allowed it to be roughly 
triangulated to a position on the sky where the event was then found  by 
telescopes. As a result the same event (termed a "kilo-nova", the first 
ever observed) has been detected as electromagnetic radiation at 
wavelengths all the way from microwaves to gamma rays. This is 
summarized in the following lengthy press release from the LIGO 
gravitational wave observatory:


   http://ligo.org/detections/GW170817/press-release/pr-english.pdf

Nobel prizes were recently awarded to scientists responsible for the 
detection of gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein a hundred years 
ago. But the following concerns more the detection of the same event by 
telescopes and includes full-text links to the resulting astronomy 
papers that are being published in Nature etc.:


https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/

eso1733 — Science Release
ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source
Merging neutron stars scatter gold and platinum into space
16 October 2017

ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible 
counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations 
suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two 
neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — 
long-predicted events called kilonovae — disperse heavy elements such as 
gold and platinum throughout the Universe. This discovery, published in 
several papers in the journal Nature and elsewhere, also provides the 
strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused 
by mergers of neutron stars.




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[Marxism] Attitude of some Canadians to the US

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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http://www.theprovince.com/news/local+news/canadians+trips+have+been+decline+five+years/15192106/story.html
 


Incidents of mass violence and racial rhetoric from the White House are 
discouraging some Canadians from travelling to the United States.

“Boycotting attending international teachers’ conferences in the US until such 
time as my Latino and Muslim colleagues can attend without fear!”

“The empowerment and entitlement he brings to the border guards combined with 
the ‘anything anti-Trump is anti-American’ scares me.”

“I have travelled to many countries and lived in developing countries, but the 
USA is the only one I am truly afraid to be in.
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[Marxism] Applebaum on enablers of Stalin's genocide in Ukraine

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/?utm_source=pocket_medium=email_campaign=pockethits
opinions?
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[Marxism] COMMENTARY BY SCOTT CAMIL ON KEN BURNS VIETNAM WAR 10 PART SERIES

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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http://www.vfpgainesville.org/articles/commentary-by-scott-camil-on-ken-burns-vietnam-war-10-part-series/
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[Marxism] Russian state-run TV marks revolution's centenary with surprise series recounting rise and fall of Leon Trotsky | The Independent

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russian-revolution-centenary-leon-trotsky-biopic-channel-one-ussr-bolshevik-marxist-joseph-stalin-a8002636.html


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] COINTELPRO 2 and BLM as "Black identity extremists"

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/16/cointelpro_2_fbi_targets_black_identity
?
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[Marxism] Fwd: OCAW’s Tony Mazzocchi and his campaign for a Labor Party in 1989: Some lessons for today

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Here are segments of a video of an important union meeting that was held 
in 1989.


In that year, AFSCME Local 444 in Oakland, CA, sponsored a meeting for 
Tony Mazzocchi, national secretary treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and 
Atomic Workers (OCAW) to speak on the need for a labor party in the US. 
Mazzocchi later said that the success of that meeting and a similar one 
in New York was what inspired him to start a national organization 
called Labor Party Advocates, later called the Labor Party. In 
actuality, it never became a real party and, in fact, never really got 
full lift off. The main reason was that Mazzocchi was unwilling to make 
an open break with the rest of the national union leadership. However, 
that meeting has some small historical importance. Also what was said at 
it is significant and helps give a sense of the times and how they 
differed from today.


full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13712
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Re: [Marxism] To Inspire Young Communists, China Turns to ‘Red Army’ Schools

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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In the online version there's a link to a previous article about the
rulers' disdain for Lu Xun:
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/19/books/china-s-greatest-dissident-writer-dead-but-still-dangerous.html?pagewanted=all
... and their more general contempt for the modernizing ethos of the May
4th movement. (Modernizing is all well and good when technology and
technique are the focus, just not when it comes to learning the lessons of
free thinking historically).
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[Marxism] To Inspire Young Communists, China Turns to ‘Red Army’ Schools

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Oct. 16 2017
To Inspire Young Communists, China Turns to ‘Red Army’ Schools
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

YUQING COUNTY, China — With the fiery zeal of a preacher, Xie Hong 
addressed her class of 50 fourth-grade students, all in matching red 
tracksuits.


“Today’s life is rich, blessed, happy and joyous,” she said. “Where does 
our happy life come from? Who gave it to us?”


In Ms. Xie’s classroom at the Workers and Peasants Red Army Elementary 
School, there was only one correct answer, and she had worked tirelessly 
to ensure her students knew it.


“It comes from the blood of revolutionary martyrs! From the Red Army!” 
said a 9-year-old boy, Li Jiacheng. The class burst into applause, and 
Ms. Xie beamed.


For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has pushed a stiff regimen of 
ideological education on students, requiring tedious lessons on Marx and 
Mao and canned lectures on the virtues of patriotism and loyalty. Now, 
amid fears that the party is losing its grip on young minds, President 
Xi Jinping is reshaping political education across China’s more than 
283,000 primary and secondary schools for a new era.


Textbooks are getting a larger dose of Communist Party lore, including 
glorified tales about the party’s fights against foreign invaders like 
Japan. Schools are adding courses on traditional medicine and Confucian 
thought to highlight China’s achievements as a civilization. The 
government is scaling back discussion of iconoclastic writers like Lu 
Xun, amid concerns that exposing students to social criticism may 
inspire disobedience.


In a stern directive issued last month, the party ordered schools to 
intensify efforts to promote “Chinese traditional and socialist culture” 
— a mix of party loyalty and patriotic pride in China’s past. Under this 
new formulation, the party is presented less as a vanguard of 
proletarian revolution and more as a force for reviving China and 
restoring it to its rightful place as a world power.


But the demands have run into opposition, and even mockery, from some 
parents and educators, and not just the so-called tiger moms. Many see 
political indoctrination as an anachronism in an era when China’s more 
than 181 million schoolchildren need a modern education in math, science 
and liberal arts to get ahead.


They complain that Mr. Xi, who is expected to strengthen his hold on 
power at a party meeting this month, is turning public education into a 
self-serving propaganda exercise. Some say the president seems more 
concerned about defending the party’s legitimacy than educating the 
skilled work force that China needs to compete in the global economy.


Such frustrations recently came to a head in Zhejiang, a wealthy coastal 
province, where parents protested a decision by education officials to 
make traditional Chinese medicine a required course for fifth-grade 
students.


Deng Zhiguo, 40, a software programmer who has two children in primary 
schools there, said he worried that the changes would come at the 
expense of instruction in subjects like biology and chemistry.


“It’s like learning Darwinism in the morning and creationism in the 
afternoon,” he said. “How do you expect children to process that?”


Mr. Xi’s campaign has also extended to universities, where officials 
have banned textbooks that promote “Western values” and punished 
professors for straying from the Communist line. Some scholars describe 
restrictions on free speech in the classroom as the most severe since 
the aftermath of the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989.


Critics say Mr. Xi may be raising the volume in patriotic education for 
fear that the party’s message is getting drowned out in younger 
generations immersed in social media and the internet. But he faces 
significant challenges. A study this year by Chinese and American 
researchers found that students appear to be tuning out shrill propaganda.


The study, based on the results of a 2010 national opinion survey, found 
that the “incessant ideological indoctrination by the Chinese government 
turns out to be counterproductive,” with trust in the government 
actually falling among those who received higher levels of education.


Carl Minzner, an expert in Chinese law and governance at Fordham 
University in New York, said the party’s socialist rhetoric had become 
“water-cooler banter and fodder for jokes” among educated Chinese.


“The party of revolution is now the party of the wealthy and powerful,” 
he said. “They’ve got to stand for something. They’re worried about the 
moral void at the core of Chinese society.”


Mr. Xi has passionately defended his push for positively 

[Marxism] Fwd: Robert Mercer, Trump’s Sugar Daddy, Is Being Sued | Vanity Fair

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/robert-mercer-david-magerman-lawsuit
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[Marxism] when a liberal radio host politely refuses to question a war criminal's history

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/16/when-a-radio-host-interviews-a-war-criminal-is-it-churlish-to-ask-about-his-war-crimes/
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[Marxism] Facebook and Russian exploitation of white racism

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, after initially denying that
Russians had exploited the company’s system, has reversed course and
admitted

that
groups backed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia paid Facebook to
influence voters
 last
year with ads designed to inflame and exploit racial, political and
economic rifts in the United States. Russian-backed Facebook pages promoted
anti-immigrant rallies, targeted the Black Lives Matter movement and
focused attentions on critical election swing states like Wisconsin and
Michigan.


As black activists tried last year to focus attention on police brutality,
unfair treatment before the law, inequality and white supremacy, social
media giants like Facebook were being commandeered by Russian intelligence
agents to turn white voters against them.


Shortly after the meeting with Ms. Sandberg, Representative Cedric L.
Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana and the chairman of the Congressional Black
Caucus, said he was concerned that the F.B.I. may have bought into Russia’s
exploitation of African-Americans with its new class of threats called
“Black Identity Extremists.” Mr. Richmond said that he feared that the
F.B.I. may now go after black people who protest unfair policing practices
and discriminatory policies based on false information peddled on social
media.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/us/politics/black-lawmakers-russia-facebook-racial-division.html?_r=0
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[Marxism] Fwd: Richard Wilbur, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Winner, Dies at 96 - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Mr. Wilbur went to Amherst College in 1938, where he contributed poems, 
essays and cartoons to the campus newspaper and magazine. In 1942 he 
married Charlotte Ward and got his bachelor’s degree, and it seemed to 
him that he might become a journalist and write poems as a diversion.


First, though, there was the war. He had wanted to serve as an Army 
cryptographer but was denied the necessary clearance because his leftist 
views had raised an official suspicion of “disloyalty.” Indeed, he later 
said, he once attended a Marxist function at Amherst, and slept through 
it, but his politics were nothing much more radical than the Roosevelt 
New Deal policies.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/obituaries/richard-wilbur-poet-laureate-and-pulitzer-winner-dies-at-96.html

Two Voices In A Meadow
by Richard Wilbur

A Milkweed

Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.

A Stone

As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
Up to the ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of Heaven would founder,
Did such as I aspire.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her. Then Her Job Moved to Mexico. - The New York Times

[Erik Toren via Marxism]

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The article mentions my area of residence:

"Shannon and her co-workers had gotten the news back in October: The
factory was closing. [..]Roller bearings would go to McAllen, Tex. About
300 workers would lose their jobs."

My assumption that the owners moved it to my city is that Texas is a Right
of Work State, South Texas has lower paying jobs, and it is two hours away
from Monterrey, Mexico.

McAllen has a high poverty rate which is on par with the region. But there
is not much in the way of manufacturing industry around here. Tourism,
import/export, agriculture (rapidly dwindling), service, and health
industries are our mainstays.

Erik
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[Marxism] Harvey Weinstein analysis

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Forwarded from Anthony Brain.

https://defendtrotskyism.wordpress.com/2017/10/16/why-the-revealations-about-harvery-weinsteins-abuse-of-woman-has-deepened-the-feminist-radicalisation-contrary-to-what-some-conservative-bourgeois-including-fascist-elements-in-whipping-up-anti-semi/
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[Marxism] Graeber attacks Kurdish independence referendum

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/syria-isis-kurds.html?_r=0
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[Marxism] Fwd: Revolution Deferred: What Lessons Can We Learn From October 1917?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Review of China Mieville book.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/42265-revolution-deferred-what-lessons-can-we-learn-from-october-1917
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