[Marxism-Thaxis] Chavez on Gramsci
Check this out ! Comrade Gramsci would be proud. CB ^^ Subject: Chavez on Gramsci Chavez Dismisses International Disapproval of Venezuela's Media Policy Hundreds of Thousands March in Support of Chavez By Gregory Wilpert - Venezuelanalysis.com Jun 05, 2007 As several hundred thousand Chavez supporters rallied in Venezuela's largest avenue on Saturday, President Chavez rejected all international interference with his decision not to renew a television station's broadcast license. Referring to the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, Chavez also spoke at length about how private media maintains a cultural hegemony that must be broken. Go to hell, representatives of the global oligarchy, we are a free country! said Chavez to wild applause, once marchers reached the Avenida Bolivar in the center of Caracas. The demonstration converged on the avenue from two starting points, one in the east of the city and the other towards the city's south. Unofficial estimates of the number of demonstrators ranged from 300,000 to 500,000. Chavez said he did not care that the world media was presenting him as a new Hitler or Mussolini. What I do care about, said Chavez, is the sovereignty of the Venezuelan homeland. The international elite are worried, they fear that the example of Venezuela will extend to other countries where they believe that they are the masters of everything, continued Chavez during his relatively short one and a half hour speech. Every destabilization plan, warned Chavez, will be responded with a new revolutionary offensive. Chavez also said it was sad that university students have been demonstrating in support of RCTV. It continues to be sad that some students take to the streets - to defend what? ... On whose side will they place themselves, on the side of the people or of the oligarchy, of the homeland or of the North American empire? adding that the vast majority of students are on the side of the people. The images of student protests are just part of a giant manipulation, a gross media spectacle. For Chavez, what is happening in Venezuela is very similar to what the U.S. has helped organize in eastern European countries, in the so-called colored revolutions, such as in Ukraine, where demonstrators succeeded in overthrowing the government. Chavez also reminded his supporters that his reelection on December 3rd was merely the beginning of a new phase in his presidency, of creating socialism and that so far much had been achieved. Chavez mentioned that the re-nationalization of the oil industry had been finalized and that the new Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) has been launched and announced that until now 4,735,000 Venezuelans have been registered as applicants to be activists in the new party. Antonio Gramsci as Key for Understanding Events in Venezuela The thought of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci is fundamental, according to Chavez, for making sense of what is happening in Venezuela today. I want to refer to the thought of Gramsci, to use his ideas, using the light of his thought, every day we understand better what is happening here today in Venezuela. Thus Chavez launched into one his longest and most detailed talks on the thought of Gramsci, explaining Gamsci's concept of historical blocs, in which a particular class manages to acquire hegemony that is expressed in structures and super-structures. The super-structure, explained Chavez, consists of two levels, of the institutions of the state and of the civil society. The civil society, according to Chavez's explanation of Gramsci, consists of economic and private institutions, through which the dominant class spreads its ideology. The conflict in Venezuela can thus be understood as one between the institutions of the state, which used to be controlled by this civil society, but no longer is, and the old civil society. To this old civil society, according to Gramsci, belong the Catholic Church hierarchy, the mass media, and the education system as the principal institutions. The dominant classes use these institutions to disseminate their ideologies, explained Chavez. This ideology of the dominant classes is disseminated in a variety of levels of abstraction, with philosophy being the most abstract. Below this level are belief systems such a neo-liberalism, the free market, the thesis of freedom of expression, of bourgeois democracy, of division of powers, representation as foundation of democracy. These are Big lies! exclaimed Chavez, with which for over a 100 years hegemony has been exercised. On a third level is common sense, which is the product of being bathed in the dominant philosophy and of the ideology in different forms, via soap operas, movies, songs, propaganda, billboards... said Chavez. The fourth level is folklore, whereby people simply express a preference as a result of manipulation, without knowing why. According to Chavez, the Bolivarian movement has been liberating the state,
[Marxism-Thaxis] Victoria Gotti: the real mob is in Washington, DC
Victoria Gotti: the real mob is in Washington, DC NY Daily News, Monday, June 11th 2007, 4:00 AM The real mob's in D.C.! Fuhgeddaboud the Mafia my hubby, take a look at Iraq war: Gotti widow By MIKE JACCARINO and ADAM LISBERG DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Victoria Gotti visits St. John's Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, final resting place for her husband, John Gotti, on the fifth anniversary of his death. Mob widow Victoria Gotti yesterday used the fifth anniversary of her infamous husband's death to make an impassioned plea for peace - in Iraq. It's disgusting that people are still obsessed with Gotti and the mob, she said outside the Queens mausoleum where one-time Gambino crime boss John Gotti is entombed. They should be obsessed with that mob in Washington, she continued. They have 3,000 deaths on their hands. Worry about that mob in Washington. John Gotti died of cancer in federal prison five years ago yesterday, after the FBI finally brought him down. His widow wore a black dress, black sunglasses and a dark scowl - but instead of ripping into federal prosecutors, as she has in the past, she attacked the men at the top. People should ask Bush and Cheney if they have any of their relatives on the front lines, Gotti said. That's what I want to know. Every time I watch the news and I hear of another death, it sickens me. It's disgusting. She said she wants U.S. troops out of Iraq yesterday - but fears Bush is getting the country into more trouble. There isn't a country this man hasn't started with, she said. Now he's going to start with Russia? Fugheddaboudit! Gotti arrived at St. John's Cemetery in Middle Village in a silver Buick at 11 a.m., heading to the third-floor wooden crypt with the name Gotti emblazoned in gold. The Dapper Don is interred there with beloved son Frank, who was struck and killed by a neighbor's car while riding a motorcycle at age 12. The neighbor disappeared four months later and is believed to have been murdered. Gotti sat on a bench in front of the crypt, bowed her head and spoke quietly to herself for about 20 minutes. Her daughter, reality-TV celebrity Victoria Gotti, paid her respects a day earlier. Yesterday, her three sons from the Growing Up Gotti show arrived separately - one in a Hummer, one in a BMW, one in a Cadillac. But there was no sign of namesake son John A. (Junior) Gotti - who once ran the Gambino crime family, served six years in prison and is now a free man after publicly renouncing the Mafia life. His father, though, is mobbed up for eternity: He rests in the same cemetery as Carlo Gambino, Joe Colombo and Lucky Luciano. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Juneteenth - today is June 19 - (2)
II In 1938, the courts ruled that state colleges had to admit Negroes if segregated schools were not available to them. The solid wall of re action was beginning to crack. Under the conditions of the fascist of fensive within the USNA, the militant National Negro Congress was formed in 1936. The Congress pioneered the idea of a coordinated drive by a united front of Negro organizations. They met with some notable successes. This left progressive motion forced such traitorous elements as the rightwing socialist A. Phillip Randolph and Walter White to attempt to take the hegemony of the Negro movement away from the left. The result was the 1941 March on Washington and the resulting Fair Employ ment Practices Commission appointed by Roosevelt. At the end of the war, the NAACP, speaking in the name of the Negro people, pre sented its famous “Appeal to the World, a Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States” and an “Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.” An embarrassed USNA government through the state department conceded that if it were to continue the ideological struggle against Communism, it would have to lend a more sympathetic ear to the demands of the Negro people. The gutter politician, Truman, was forced to appoint a Com mittee on Equal Rights. Some independent struggle on the part of the trade unions as well as favorable rulings by the courts, broadened the employment oppor tunities for Negro workers. The 1954 school decision, Montgomery Alabama 1955, the anti-lynch law and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, just about completed the victories in the legal and trade union field. Then came that massive wave of rebellions and riots across the next two decades. Black Generals and Admirals no longer caused a stir by their presence. Negro politicians were to be found in the Senate and the House. Negro Mayors were elected in the large cities of the North and in a number of small southern towns. Two Negro Lt. Governors were elected in states with less than 5% Negro vote. Bull Connor is dead and Governor George Wallace has appointed a Negro to his Executive Committee. To any fair-minded outsider during the 1970s and 1980s, it would appear as if the battle was won. No wonder the African American Liberation Move ment began to fragment and entered into disarray. Legally everything has been won. In fact, little had been won. When the fight for fair housing began, every city had scant pockets of poverty-stricken African Americans locked into areas of poor sanitation, no hospitals and poor schools. The so-called Fair Housing Act have failed to prevent the transformation of huge sections of cities into stinking putrid proletarian slums where police murders and organized gang violence have far stripped the best the Klan could do. The so-called integration of armed forces has not removed the Black soldier from the doing the labor battalions, but has converted him into a murderous infantryman. The struggle to gain the equality, a necessary struggle, only added a black hand alongside of the white hand dropping bombs of innocent peoples. One can be sure that the Iraqi peoples cannot see any progress in their children and folks being murdered by blacks rather than whites. Is it not clear to all that these goals of the struggles of the masses have had the tendency to turn into their opposite? It is not clear that the underlying cause is the colonial position of the old Black Belt Nation under the political grip of generations of reactionary Southern politicians? It requires no special thinking to understand that the plight of the African American in our history begins in the South under slavery and as long as the South as a region lags behind the North economically and remains the bastion of political reaction, there cannot be a broad and stable basis for real equality. The greatest and longest history of inequality in American has always been regional, North and South, with the blacks being on the very bottom of the economic, political and social ladder. To this very day Southern reactions devises newer and newer means to deny the vote to Blacks and this was made perfectly clear in Florida during the Presidential election of 2000. In this instance hundreds of thousands of blacks were simply purged from the voter rolls. Nationwide blacks are incarcerated and given long felony sentences to deny them the vote. Bitter history of the struggles of all oppressed peoples proves that unless the chain of imperialism is broken, oppressed and oppressor peoples cannot be integrated except on the basis of continued inequality. There of course have been some gains, especially for the African American bourgeoisie, which the government has made an effort to buy and to a great extent has succeeded. If the
[Marxism-Thaxis] Juneteenth - today is June 19
Juneteenth 19, 2007, comes at a period of time with sharp Congressional struggles over immigration policy; matters of war and peace; happening in the unionized industrial sector of the economy and the new players- the equity boyz. History cannot be undone. Juneteenth cannot be undone. Indian genocide cannot be undone. Mexican denial, with the historic theft of over half of her territory cannot be undone. Wrongs can be made right, but only on the basis of what exists. The history of what happened . . . no matter how horrible, can never be undone. Not simply because people remember and pass information from one generation to the next, but because the living systems of rule and governing the grew out of, and took shape to justify, regulate and legalize conquest, no matter how wrong and harmful, can only be sublated and never vanquished by political decree or with the wave of a hand. America embraces an ideology of the rule of law. Simply because it was legal at one point in America, to not respect the marriage bond between man and women and sell their children into slavery, did not make it right, which is why millions always protested the slavery system. On the other hand millions who opposed slavery did nothing because it was the law. Today we are faced with unjust laws, designed to safe guard corporate wealth while ruining millions of people in our country, and little is said because it is the law. Well, unjust laws and unjust government is meant to be overthrown or we would still be under slavery. The past cannot be changed but laws can be undone. It is increasingly difficult to speak of African American Liberation and Social Revolution in the United States without speaking of all the social ills of our society. The African American question has undergone great change since the end of World War II. Few people today even attempt to describe the question. Historically this description has been a question of caste because of slavery, a special question of class because of the color factor, a national question or a national-colonial question. All of these descriptions are sound and correct for the periods in which they emerged. Some political activists assume that there has been no change in the dynamics, and organizations continue to embrace be these various conceptions. These descriptions were based on observation over a long period of time. What were some of these observations? The first was that since the color line was the dominant factor, all African Americans regardless of education or wealth were subjected to the same oppression, segregation and discrimination. Secondly, that segregation had produced the essential elements of a distinct culture expressing an African American people. The conclusion by the Left was that segregation and racial discrimination could not be overcome except by the destruction of the capitalist system and the reconstruction of society on a socialist basis. Although plenty of old fashion racism exists, Jim Crow segregation (birthed in the North and exported South as the post Civil War and Reconstruction era way of life) as the salient feature of American life, has been dismantled during the past forty years. From its Galveston, Texas origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th - Juneteenth, is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States, although during the 50's, 60's, and 70's, it seemed as if Juneteenth would be pushed out of official American history. After the long battle to make Martin :Luther King Jr. a national holiday, and its passage, Juneteenth experienced a national resurgence. The struggle of the African American people and the response of our government to this struggle is a complex thing. . For instance, Negro History Week, then Negro History Month and finally Black History Month, was proclaimed by the government in order counteract and divert the powerful and growing National Liberation Movement of the Negro people in the 1940's. Not only did Negro History Week momentarily take the place of the militant holidays of Juneteenth (when slavery was outlawed in the territories) and the traditional January 1st Emancipation Proclamation Day, but close behind this, the stirring Negro National Anthem was retitled Lift Every Voice and Sing and finally shelved. Every manifestation in culture and politics of the national character of the Negro peoples was slowly and carefully isolated and liquidated as official government policy. Behind government policy were real structural changes in the economy and the tendency of bourgeois imperialism to simultaneously create nations and group people into national clusters, more than less isolated and structurally separated from the oppressing peoples; while on the other hand creating powerful economic impulses and state
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Juneteenth - today is June 19 - (3)
III The African American people of 2007 are not identical to the African American people of 1930, which has given rise to the question: Does A Black America exist today? A lead article from the Black Agenda Report, titled Why Barack Obama Needs a Whuppin’ : Honest Abe, He Ain’t, stated the following: Obama, the political twin of Hillary Clinton and the corporate Democratic Leadership Council her husband helped found, is determined to liquidate Black politics as an independent force in the United States, having already proclaimed, ‘There is no Black America‘. There is no Black America. Interesting. Is there a white America? Changes in the struggle of the African American people as a people, has been described and the logic involved outlined. The logic is the logic of the rise and fall of classes and their changes as technology change and the tendency of imperialism to disperse nations and national clusters of people. The question of the existence of a White America is not the issue at all. There are of course huge communities and vast stretches of inner cities that are black. “There is no Black America” is a political statement, demanding political unraveling. The black elite is a real elite and as an elite must represent the black masses to the black masses themselves and as an elite serve as power broker between the black masses and the power structure. There is no Black America is Clintons way of saying that he also understands, perhaps better than most, that the days of the exclusive African American representative of the African American community and consequently Black Power are numbered or effectively over as a growth institution. This is basically true. Mr. Clinton’s passage of welfare reform and the virtual silence of the black political establishment was not lost on him. It was the moral and political support the black masses extended to him that saved his political career during the various media created scandals of his administration. This fact was not lost on him and in an eerie was makes Ms. Clinton’s run for President possible. One way or another the black masses remain at the center of much of American history and this places the black elite and black representative in a delicate position. The leaders of the black masses cannot raise one single demand that is not in the interest of the poor of all colors, and against the system that keeps everyone poor and the most wealthy outside the law, no matter their color. Clinton is saying, “I understand this” and can represent the poor better than the current chorus of pathetic black leaders. Does this mean that racism is o the decline? Not at all. It simply means that racism is changing its form. The cutting edge of the new form of chauvinism is clear, - anti-Islamic or anti-Moslems in International politics and anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant, anti Spanish language domestically, along side the always present white chauvinism. New elements of this chauvinism is directed against the most poverty stricken sectors of the proletariat white, brown and black. Its not just “the blacks” anymore but “ghetto blacks” and “trailer trash.” Today what we face is the emergence of the class struggle and this is a very complex things much different than the concept of one big class against one little class, or as it is states worker against capitalist. The more economically stable sector of the working class is in permanent competition to hold its place in society and understands it is economically stable because millions are not. Because the blacks entered industry behind the whites, their social position has always been the “last hired, first fired,” which only means the working class is permanently split and this split takes the form of the color factor in our history. Nevertheless, the struggle of the poorest workers - the real proletarian masses Lenin and Marx spoke of, is a spontaneous struggle against the state and all forms of capital and not just an employer, or bank, or mortgage company, because they are increasingly shut out of the system. Yesterday’s national and color factor appears today as the direct question of the circumstance of the poorest proletarian masses. This is true not just amongst the blacks but the Mexican immigrants, nationals and Chicano and amongst all the Indian nations. The specific problem we face is that unity cannot be fought for and won except on the basis of the poverty that binds this new proletariat together, as a class. The political elite, the professors and professional conveyors of what is deemed the peculiarity of “my people” cannot carry the fight any further. History cannot be undone and the ever intertwining dynamic of the national factor and the clarifying of the meaning of proletarian revolution, on the basis of our own history, reveals a movement of the
[Marxism-Thaxis] Things Fall Apart: China and the Decline of US Imperialism
Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/view/5044/ Things Fall Apart: China and the Decline of US Imperialism By Gerald Horne Archives - Dates and Topics 2007 April click here for related stories: Imperialism/Globalization 3-27-07, 1:00 pm http://www.pww.org/subscribe When historians of the future look back, they may very well conclude that 2007 marked the time when the crisis of US imperialism became so obvious that even the dimmest bulb could detect it. For it is evident that imperialism is about to suffer a staggering and transformative defeat in Iraq as this illegal and criminal invasion has stretched the military to the breaking point, alienated allies and emboldened the lengthening list of foes of US imperialism. At the same time, China, still ruled by a Communist Party, has accumulated an eye-popping $1 trillion in foreign currencies, a figure never before attained by any nation. This sum is so formidable, so huge, that there is a palpable fear in Washington that Beijing may develop a version of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, rendering both of these imperialist dominated vehicles irrelevant. In the so-called backyard of Washington, socialist Cuba has not been slowed down by the hospitalization of President Fidel Castro and continues to move from strength to strength. Cuba and China in turn serve as anchors for Africa, Asia and Latin America in their ongoing attempt to break the chains of imperialist bondage. All this suggests that the crisis of US imperialism continues unabated. The declining prestige of Washington was no better revealed than when the human rights watchdog of the United Nations rebuked the US for violations of international law at home and abroad, especially in connection with its so-called war on terror. Adding to a growing cascade of criticism, singled out were the secret detention facilities where torture is the norm and the failure to provide prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba with due process of law. But what really captured attention were the sharp criticisms of US domestic policy. Washingtons draconian asylum and immigration policies, the promiscuous deployment of the death penalty and life imprisonment and police brutality, were all condemned in no uncertain terms. This international body of experts seconded by the UN oversees implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and chose 2006 to examine US compliance with this document for the first time since 1995. Predictably Washington reacted angrily to this rebuke. Ironically, the nation that has taken it upon itself to evaluate nations near and far and the extent to which they have complied with Washingtons version of democracy and freedom, now cries foul when the script is flipped. US imperialism finds it hard to ignore this complaint from the UN for George W. Bush recognizes that it is precisely his malfeasance in the global arena that may very well jeopardize not only his legacy but his freedom of movement as well. For as the noted University of Virginia law professor, Rosa Brooks, put it recently, the US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, concerning a so-called enemy combatant, suggests that Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with al Qaeda. But more than this, the high court holding makes high-ranking Bush administration officials including the president - potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act. What this suggests is that US imperialism cannot escape the grasp of global forces, no matter how well it is able to bludgeon domestic opposition. More than this, even sectors of the US ruling elite have come to recognize that conservatism, which has served this class so well to this point, may be very well incapable of protecting its interests as the 21st century unfolds. For example, how can one expect the US right wing to subdue the rudimentarily conservative force that is so-called Islamic fundamentalism when historically they have been in the same trench, e.g. during the war in the 1980s in Afghanistan that turbo-charged religiosity? The bold posture of the UN is emblematic of how the international community has come to recognize that US imperialism is a primary threat to international peace and security. Similarly, this is suggestive of how the erosion of the strength of US imperialism has made Washington more susceptible to being influenced by global trends. In the first place, the tax cutting mania of the Republican right without the concomitant muscle to slash social programs proportionately has made this nation more dependent on capital flows from Asia in particular to curb escalating deficits. As foreign nations have grabbed a larger stake in the US government and economy, understandably they have
