Professor-rat's Blurty

Huge apologies
Whoops!

Looks like there is such a thing as left-wing fascism after all.
Venezuela’s Chavez annuls spy law after backlash
CARACAS, Venezuela - Hugo Chavez has tossed out a controversial intelligence decree that would have forced Venezuelans to become informants and spy on their neighbors or face prison time.

In related news Alan Woods has been placed on suicide watch.

The presidents rat is missing
They must be reading my mail

Helen Thomas and Cartoonist Chip Bok Collaborate on Children’s Book
NEW YORK In an interesting pairing, liberal columnist Helen Thomas and conservative-leaning editorial cartoonist Chip Bok have teamed up for a children’s book. “The Great White House Breakout” is scheduled to be released in mid-August by Dial. It’s a 32-page hardcover aimed at readers 9-12. In the book, a woman president’s young son — frustrated with constant Secret Service surveillance — leaves the White House with his cat and rat to tour Washington, D.C. Adventures ensue. - MAKETHEMACCOUNTABLE

Land of the lotus-eaters
Martin Bernal and his Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 1987)
I have not even googled this yet but on the face of it , it appears to tie in with what our erstwhile anarchist campadres were saying before they plumped for autonomy. ( Sear Slackbastard )
Now what is a true myth is that Odysseus spent nine years in the land of the lotus-eaters ( Egypt ) then all his numerous adventures described in the Odyssey occurred in the last year of his exile.
Then was the lotus a metaphor for hashish?
Magic mushrooms are found in Greece.
These are just idle thoughts at this stage - but if we get a grant at the Institute on the unified field theory of fissured ceramic sects - it could be a good little bunsen. Like the hydroponics and home-brew store.

A queer turn in the restaurant at the end of the universe
Reviewing Marxism there appears to be a break - Gramsci's hernia? - or rupture between so-called ' scientific-socialism' and the cultural turn...the long march through the institutions that culminated in the rise of the new left peaking in 1968 and then the Thermidor of post-modernism. ( This is a back of a napkin schematic for the sake of the argument for more funding. Creating a revolution these days requires millions of Euro's donchaknow. The RAT Institute is not a charity.)
Nothing may be more essential to political resistance and intellectual autonomy today than not taking for granted texts and discourses, from Marxist literature and ideological propaganda. Grounds for action and subversion will be found in the undecidability of meaning, in the construction of a text by the ever-changing community of its readers, in the leeway still to be found in interpreting a canonical work like Capital, even in the deliberate stretching of the gap between text and context, signifier and uses, the worship of classics, and the tricks of applying the hermeneutical reaction of mentos and diet-coke in order to attract the waiters attention.
Reactionary politics and the locking up of the existing social order will always require, on the contrary, a submission to essentialized Platformist texts, to unquestioned Irish canons, to interpretation understood as the revelation by others of a one-sided meaning of kissing his Blarney stone. Where interpretation is obvious, where it is not a question, ideological power reigns supreme; where blue flame is wavering, flickering, opening its uncertainty to unpredictable uses, empowerment of the powerless may be finally possible in the thunderdome.

Letter to a Frenchman on the present crisis
French letter
MON CHER - Incoherence, fragmentation, relativism -- up to and including the dismantling of the very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been too poor); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are made fashionable. The death of the revolutionary subject and the crisis of scientific representation.
Marxism. Originally a theme within socialism, it has colonized ever wider areas, according to Condi Rice, "until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience." "The growing conviction," as Francis Fukuyama has it, "that human culture as we have known it...is now reaching its end."
Marxism today is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, "the new realism." Signifying nothing and going nowhere, this actually still existing Marxism is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of the technological totalizing of universal imperialist ideology.
Che Guevarist consumer narcissism and a comic Cuban "what's the difference?" mark the end of Marxist philosophy lived as such and the etching of a landscape, according to sex-tourists, of disintegration and decay against the back- ground radiation of parody, kitsch and burnout. 'Cleanest and best educated whores my arse.'
Marxist professor Barry O'Bama concludes that "for Marxists, it is simply too late to oppose the momentum of the military-entertainment complex. 'Surface, novelty, contingency - there are no democrat party grounds available for criticizing our crisis. No grounds for Chimpeachment'.
If the representative Marxist 'new boss' resists summarizable conclusions, in favor of an alleged Kumbaya pluralism and openness of wallet perspective, it is also reasonable (if one is allowed to use such a word) to predict that if and when we live in a completely STASI culture, we would no longer want to say so.

Perhaps it isn't paradoxical that "the fetish of the organization," as Bob Black judged, "beckons in an age when anarchists are dispossessed of their words." Language is more and more debased; drained of meaning, especially in its public usage. ( sear Orwell ) No longer can even words be counted on, and this is part of a larger anti-anarchist current, behind which stands a much larger defeat than the '60s: that of the whole train of Enlightenment rationality. We have depended on language as the supposedly sound and transparent handmaiden of reason and where has it gotten us?
Gilead Amerikkka crawling with Trotskycons - the worst of capitalism and the worst of communism. Like its evil Siamese twin, totalitarian China.
The immediate antecedent of Janus faced Marxist Imperialism, reigning in the '50s and much of the '60s, was organized around the centrality it accorded the Leninist model. Democratic centralism provided the premise that pseudo-revolutionist language constitutes our only means of access to the world of food objects and torture experience and its extension, that meaning arises wholly from the play of differences within Chekist sign systems.
Sartre, for example, argued that the key to female anthropology lies in the uncovering of unconscious social laws (e.g. those that regulate open marriage ties and kinship), which are structured like gibberish.
It was the cunning linguist Marcuse who stressed, in a move very influential to psychoanalysis, that meaning resides not in a relationship between an utterance and that to which it refers, but in the relationship of two crackpot psuedo-scientific theories to one another.
This shared belief in the enclosed, self-referential nature of state socialism implies that everything is determined within a police station environment, leading to the scrapping of such quaint notions as freedom of movement, civil rights, human rights, etc. and concluding that Freudian language and Marxist-Leninist consciousness are virtually the same.
Please give my love to Bridgete xxx

Autonomy must be destroyed
As a political entity and/or phenomenon Autonomy joins seamlessly with all those schools of Marxism that basically align with anarchism. ' Ultra-left', 'Libertarian Marxist', 'Council communist', 'Luxemburgist', Situationist and so on. Most of these 'flavors' emerged during the twenties and the trend was clear by 1928...fifty years after Fanelli took ' The idea' to Spain. Many otherwise intelligent seeming anarchists seem flattered that so many Marxists appear to agree - better late than never! - on the surface with us.
Uri Gordon for example suggests that while it may appear a little odd this is not something we should make a fuss over.
I fundamentally disagree with this analysis because, not only is it very rude, it's a longstanding Marxist-Leninist tactic to ignore majorities and loudly proclaim yr chosen faction as the majority. Marxists are not to be trusted in other words. Anyone who merely glances at the terrible history of the last 90 years hunting down, torturing, raping and killing of anarchists by Marxists would know this.
Autonomy has also had its day , peaking in the late seventies and early eighties, in Europe so those hooking up with it now are taking a big gamble it will rise again...maybe with the Plats it is in a way...even if the Plats appear allergic to actually existing activism. And we have no idea how fast the Plats are spreading. They can't organize a piss-up in a brewery from the look of it.
To sum up - at the risk of invoking those Honky Cracker Romans clamping down on Carthage - autonomy must be destroyed...by any memes necessary. It may appear weak and worthless made up as it is of lamer loser leftists...but look at the havoc a few Trotskycons caused recently. Kill them all. Nuke them from orbit. Its the only way to sure.

Going back in time
Pance Stojkovski wrote:
> I found this quote by Lenin:
>
> "We must raise the question of piece-work [8] and apply
> and test it in practice; we must raise the question of
> applying much of what is scientific and progressive in
> the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond to
> the total amount of goods turned out, or to the amount
> of work done by the railways, the water transport
> system, etc., etc."
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm

Right. And in the very same article, Lenin described such a practice as
a *step backward* from the ideals of socialism. ( Louis Proyect )

'...Cubans will also
be encouraged to work harder. Quite where this is in conflict with the
socialist motto of "From each according to his ability, to each
according to his work" is difficult to tell, but it is likely to be the
media spin that the story attracts in the west...'

Walter Lippman

' From each according to their gullibility - to each according to their greed ' - RAT Institute wests motto

Our last best hope
Our last best hope for egalitarianism is now very clearly assassination markets

Michael Berrel - Technically Raul Castro is correct.

The Marxist prescription "From each according to his ability to each according
to his need" is applied in the highest phase of Communist society, one that is
characterised by unprecedented material abundance.
The prescription "To each according to his work" is applied to Socialism which
is an intermediary stage between Capitalism and Communism.
The reforms being carried out by Raul Castro at this time are exactly the same
as those attempted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the first phase of Perestroika in the
years 1985 and 1986.
What is in fact happening is that the economic reforms that were carried out in
Hungary from 1968, China from 1978, The Soviet Union from 1985 and Vietnam in
1986 have finally come to Cuba. END

Islam is more obviously miles more 'communist' than any of this stinking Marxist bullcrap.

Sound executions policy
When the Bolsheviks came to power one of the first things they did ( in Lenin's absence ) was to abolish the death penalty. Lenin reacted furiously,' beside himself with indignation,' in Trotsky's description.
' How', he demanded to know,' can a revolution be made without executions?
From official Bolshevik sources, statistical summaries of the number of executions in each year of Lenin's rule.
Estimates based on these figures range from 200,000 to over 1,500,000 shootings during Lenin's period of leadership. Even taking the conservative figure for shootings that may be quickly rounded up to over a million with the first terror famine under the Bolsheviks. Lenin invited in overseas aid even as he sold wheat to Sweden.
When Lenin felt forced by events to retreat a few steps with his new economic policy ( NEP ) he could not simply admit that other revolutionists had been correct on this one point. ( In fact Lenin reversed himself against the bitter opposition of many members of his party ) That admission would weaken the exclusivity of Bolshevik leadership, the one thing that was never to be questioned.
Accordingly Lenin developed a rationale for shooting these potential opponents. Of the ' Mensheviks and social-revolutionists who advocated such views,' Lenin wrote that they, ' wonder when we tell them that we are going to shoot them for saying such things. They are amazed at it, but the question is clear: when an army is in retreat, it stands in need of a discipline a hundred times more severe than when it advances because in the latter case everyone is eager to rush ahead. But if now everyone is just as eager to rush back, the result will be a catastrophe. And when a Menshevik says: ' you are now retreating but I always favoring a retreat together,' we tell them in reply: an avowal of Menshevik views should be punished by our revolutionary courts with shooting, otherwise the latter are not courts but god knows what."

Snowballs chance
Tony Jones bff Christopher Hitchens - whats up with THAT!
I have a theory to run by youse but first remember this...Mogadon man promised us a real live scoop...something to do with spy situated in Optus Singapore...this would have proved he really was a journalists arsehole...but darlings it never flopped out. ( Maybe his sole source had an anyreusm taping the segment...we can only speculum) The man who wasn't there has a little mate whose always soused dear.
Hichens always wrote stuff that was original and interesting...only the stuff that was original consisted of arsesucking Burchett level praises of Trotsky and the stuff that was interesting was all ripped off.
Hitchens ought to be paying all the filthy lucre he gets off bff Jones to Sy Hersh and a Greek and Irish real journalists. Now we have the net ourselves maybe we can figure out a way to keep these arseholes honest.
Truth is a great disinfectant... as is sulphuric acid.

Obscene executive pay levels
Lenin did not stress socialism per se. He pushed for nationalization, state ownership and control of the means of production. Where the workers and peasants had taken over the land and factories for themselves and begun to institute true socialism, Lenin took a step backward by asserting state supremacy. Much of the struggle in the civil war was due to Lenin's efforts to subordinate the spontaneously created workers councils, trade unions and peasants organizations.
Maximoff quotes Lenin: " We leave to ourselves the state power, ONLY TO OURSELVES...It is necessary that everything should be subjected to the Soviet power and all the illusions about some kind of ' independence,' on the part of detached layers of population or workers co-operatives should be lived down as soon as possible..."
" ...there can be no question of independence on the part of separate groups...'
Lenin made a principle of re-instituting one man management rather than the new collective management that the workers and peasants had developed in the interests of responsibility to state supervision. He re-instituted higher pay and privileges for specialists and managers, as against the equality of pay in the industrial democracy that the workers themselves had promulgated. He also re-introduced piecework, the Taylor system ( more precisely elements thereof ) and others of the most hated elements of capitalism. Because, to his way of thinking, the party represented the real interests of the workers, it was also acceptable to outlaw strikes. Only counter-revolutionaries, he believed , would ever want to strike against a workers state.

The long march
Earlier bourgeois fascist thinkers, most notably Engels and Marx, suggested that a different language or a changed relationship to language might somehow bring new and important insights.

Marx an Engels, 15. August 1857

"Es ist möglich, daß ich mich blamiere. Indes ist dann immer mit einiger Dialektik zu helfen. Ich habe natürlich meine Aufstellungen so gehalten, daß ich im umgekehrten Fall auch Recht habe."

'It is possible that I could disgrace myself. But there's always a bit of Dialectic to help out. I have naturally expressed my statements so that I am also right if the opposite thing happens.'

With the Owellian linguistic turn of more recent times, even the concept of an individual who thinks as the basis of knowledge becomes shaky. Marcuse discovered that "language is not a function of the speaking subject," the primacy of language displacing who it is that gives voice to it. Ted Grant, whose career joins the structuralist and poststructuralist periods, decided "It is language that speaks, not the author," paralleled by Alan Woods's observation that history is "a process without a subject."

And in 'actually existing' Marxist run states the secret-police just got on with ripping out tongues.

If the torture subject is felt to be essentially a function of language, its stifling mediation and that of the symbolic order in general ascends toward the top of the amnesty agenda. Thus does Marxism flail about trying to communicate what lies beyond language, "to present the unpresentable."

Just you try and say ' euletheria' without a tongue.

Meanwhile, given the radical doubt introduced as to the availability to us of a referent in the world outside of ideologically imperialist language, the real fades from consideration. Louis Proyect, the pivotal figure of the post-Trotskyite ethos, proceeds as if the connection between words and the world were arbitrary. The object world plays no role for him. Certainly no 'comrades'.
Post-Trotskyism and the death of scientific-socialism raises questions about inner sect communication and death-cult meaning, so that the category of the aesthetic, for one, becomes problematic. For Gramscian modernism, with its slightly sunnier belief in representation, art and literature held at least some promise for providing a vision of fulfilment or understanding. Until the end of modernism, "high proletarian culture" was seen as a repository of moral and spiritual wisdom.
Now there seems to be no such belief, the ubiquity of the question of language perhaps telling as to the vacancy left by the failure of other candidates of promising starting points of human imagination. In the '60s modernism seems to have reached the end of its development, the austere canon of its painting (e.g. Sit signs and signals, old Russian posters) giving way to underground comics pop art critical espousal of the consumer culture's commercial vernacular. Puritanical Marxism, and not just in the arts, is modernism without the hopes and dreams that made modernity bearable.

Max Pain
DIGBY - Courtesy of Think Progress:
– In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that the Bush administration had no jurisdiction to strip habeas corpus rights from detainees. In 2005, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced legislation overturning this decision and thus stripping detainees of their rights. McCain voted for the bill, which passed 49-42.
– The Military Commissions Act of 2006 denied anyone Bush labeled “an ‘illegal enemy combatant’ the ancient right to challenge his imprisonment in court.” McCain weakly pushed to strengthen the torture restrictions in the legislation, but ignored the lack of habeas rights. In the end, he voted for the Military Commissions Act.
– In 2007, Senate conservatives successfully filibustered legislation that would have “given military detainees the right to protest their detention in federal court.” In a 56-43 vote, the chamber fell just four shy of the 60 needed to cut off debate and proceed with the bill. McCain was part of the conservative filibuster and voted against moving forward with the legislation.
Today, the McCain campaign blog also approvingly cited Justice Antonin Scalia’s exceptionally extreme rhetoric on the consequences of the decision.
He also recently voted against making the entire government follow the Army Field manual, effectively making it legal for the CIA to torture...' AND

'...There's also a report out today of an inmate at Guantanamo being tortured with a knife.

The U.S. government has photographic evidence that a Guantanamo Bay inmate was tortured with a knife after being taken to Morocco by U.S. forces, a British human rights group said Tuesday.
Reprieve said their client, Binyam Mohamed, had his genitals slashed repeatedly with a doctor's scalpel while in custody in Morocco after he was flown there from Pakistan by American officials in 2002. It also said his U.S. captors later took pictures of the abuse to show authorities that his wounds were healing....'

Morocco is a monarchy. Sear ' Throne out '.

Cultural revolutionaries
For some the loss of a sensible narrative voice and reasonably science based point of view is equivalent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically. For Marxists today this loss is a kind of liberation. Wayne Price, for instance, glories in his next fiction that "will also be seemingly devoid of any meaning...deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and incoherent."
Fantasy, on the rise for decades, is a common form of Marxist inner-cult communication, carrying with it the reminder that the fantastic confronts civilization with the very forces it must repress for its survival. But it is a fantasy that, paralleling both Trotskycon ideology and high levels of cynicism and resignation in society, does not believe in itself to the extent of very much understanding or communicating.
Marxmail writers seem to smother in the folds of language, conveying little else than their ironic stance regarding more traditional political literature's pretensions to truth and meaning. Perhaps typical is Louis's 2001 slander of Bakunin, whose title and content reveal a retreat from living and an inversion of the anarchist Dream, in which things can only get worse.
The celebration of impotence
Todays cynical and nihilistic Marxism subverts two of the over-arching tenets of Enlightenment humanism: the power of language to shape the world and the power of consciousness to shape a self. Thus we have the abyss talking to the abyss, the void. The general notion that the yearning for emancipation and freedom promised by humanist principles of subjectivity can be satisfied is squelched under the jackboots of the mercenary police forces of the various peoples states. Marxism views the self as a linguistic convention; as Proyect put it, "Your `I' is a completely illusory concept."
It is obvious that the celebrated ideal of individuality has been under pressure for a long time. Leninism in fact has made a career of celebrating the individual while destroying him/her. And the works of Marx and Freud have done much to expose the largely misdirected and naive belief in the sovereign, rational Stirnerian self in charge of reality, with their more recent structuralist interpreters, Mao and Pol Pot, contributing to and updating the effort. But this time the pressure is so extreme that the term `individual' has been rendered obsolete, replaced by `photo subject', which always includes the aspect of being subjected (as in the older "a subject of the king," for example). Even some psuedo radicals, such as the WSM group in Eire, join in the post-Trotskite chorus to reject the individual as a criterion for value due to the debasing of the category by ideology and history.

Lay back and enjoy it
Capitalism was, to both Lenin and Marx, an inevitable stage of historical evolution.
It was not possible to move from a fundamentally feudal system to a socialism of abundance without an intervening period of capital accumulation and centralization. Lenin's understanding of history and economic development convinced him that a transitional stage of state capitalism, ( he did allow that the period of private capitalism could be omitted ) was an historical necessity.
Lenin recommended we ' learn about state capitalism from Germans, to assimilate their methods, not to spare any dictatorial methods in order to accelerate the westernization of barbarous Russia, not to recoil from using barbarous methods of struggle against barbarism...govern with with greater firmness than the capitalists did. Otherwise you will not win. You must remember: your administration must be more stringent and firm than the old administration...this discipline included harsh stringent measures , going as far as shootings, methods, which even the old government did not visualize."

A world to win
So imperialist ideology now reveals that scientific autonomy has largely been a myth and cherished ideals of mastery and will are similarly misguided. But if we are promised herewith a new and serious attempt at demystifying authority, concealed behind the guises of a bourgeois humanist `freedom', we actually get a dispersal of the subject so radical as to render it impotent, even nonexistent, as any kind of agent at all.
Who or what is left to achieve a liberation after the billions of peasants are wiped out and the smoke clears, or is that just one more pipe dream?
The Marxist-Leninist stance wants it both ways: to put the thinking person "under erasure," while the very existence of its own critique depends on discredited ideas like starvation. Acknowledging the widespread appeal of contemporary anti-humanist Marxism, has to warn us that the primary casualties are reflection and a sense of values. To assert that we are instances of police-state language fore- most is obviously to strip away our capacity to grasp the whole, at a time when we are urgently required to do just that.
Small wonder that to some, Marxism amounts, in practice, to merely a fascism without the race subject, while feminists who try to define or reclaim an authentic and autonomous female identity would also likely be unpersuaded by examples such as Chile and Nicaragua.
The Marxist subject, what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological capital at the service of this imperialistic ideology, described as a dispersed, decentered network of lumpen-proletarian attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of kulak consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion.
If this definition of today's non-subject as announced by Marxmail is unfaithful to their point of view, it is difficult to see where, to find grounds for a distancing from this scathing summary. With Marxist totality even alienation dissolves, for there is no longer a subject to be alienated!
Contemporary fragmentation and powerlessness could hardly be heralded more completely, or existing anger and disaffection more thoroughly ignored.

First Holodomor
It is not surprising that revolutionary workers revolted against Lenin's programme which appeared to to combine many of the worst abuses of capitalism with an ' iron discipline' only justifying the regime to which the workers had to bend by proclaiming that it was issuing these orders and decrees in the name of the workers as a government of workers.
Lenin's programme of replacing factory management by the workers themselves with party committee management and the subversion of the trade unions, robbed the workers of most of the gains they felt they had earned through struggle. The peasants felt no less betrayed. Maximoff angrily assigns to Lenin's account the millions of deaths caused by famines that his policies of terror entailed: " ...by his policy of terror, by the destruction of the peasant economy, by exiling thousands of peasants from their native places, by the policy of grain requisitions, etc.,Lenin prepared one of the ghastliest famines in the history of Russia.
The famine of 1921 that carried away millions of lives and crippled, physically and morally, tens of millions.

Tarred and feathered
Dirty birds nest
The latest Harris Poll finds the nation in a foul political mood. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all register their worst ratings ever. More people than ever also think the country is on the wrong track.
But this does not seem to help the Democrats. The Democratically-controlled Congress gets even worse ratings than the President and Vice-President, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ratings have also fallen to their lowest point.
These are some of the results from the latest Harris Poll of 1,001 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone between June 4 and 8, 2008 by Harris Interactive®.
Some key findings are:
* President Bush’s latest ratings are 24 percent positive and fully 75 percent negative. Previously, his worst numbers were 26 percent positive and 72 percent negative in April of this year. His ratings are substantially worse than those of any president, except for Jimmy Carter (22%-77% in July 1980), since Harris first started measuring them in 1963.
* Vice President Cheney’s ratings are even worse, 18 percent positive and 74 percent negative, compared to his previous low of 21 percent positive, 74 percent negative last July.
* Secretary of State Rice’s ratings are much better than those of the President and Vice President, but also have fallen to their lowest point ever, 39 percent positive and 54 percent negative, compared to 42 percent positive and 51 percent negative last October.
* Only 14 percent of the public think the things in the country are going in the right direction and fully 80 percent think they are on the wrong track. These compare to the previous worst numbers in President George W. Bush’s term, 75 percent thought things were on the wrong track in April. The highest number of people who said the country was on the wrong track was 81 percent in June of 1992 during the term of the first President Bush.
However, this dismal news for the administration has done nothing to help the Democrats. Most people seem to wish “a plague on all your houses”. Congress, which of course is controlled by the Democrats, gets its worst ratings ever, only 13 percent positive and fully 83 percent negative. Its previous low point was in December of last year when it was rated 17 percent positive and 79 percent negative. And, Speaker Pelosi’s ratings have fallen to 24 percent positive, 57 percent negative compared to her previous low of 25 percent positive and 61 percent negative in February.

THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS FOR ANARCHISTS! ( Provided we're not conflated with Marxist scumbags like the Anarkismo Borg)

An island somewhere
Proyect announced that Marxmail "instigates the subversion of every kingdom." In fact, Marxmail has remained within the safely academic realm of inventing ever more ingenious textual complications to keep itself in business and avoid reflecting on its own political situation. Consistent with this, albeit to his discredit, in my opinion, was Proyect's tortuous commentary on Castro's Stalinist collaborationist period from 1959 - 2008: in sum, "how can we judge, who has the right to say?" A shabby testimony for Marxism, considered in any way as a moment of the anti-authoritarian.
One of Proyect's most central terms, dissemination, describes sect language, under the principle of difference, as not so much a rich harvest of meanings but a kind of endless loss and spillage, with meaning appearing everywhere and evaporating virtually at once. This flow of Zinovievist language, ceaseless and unsatisfying, is a most accurate parallel to that of the heart of Cannon's capital and its endless circulation of non-significance. Proyect thus unwittingly eternalizes and universalizes dominated life by rendering human communication in its image. The "every kingdom" he would see Marxism subverting is instead extended and deemed as absolute as the deformed workers state covering much of Cuba today.

Th demands of dictatorship
Maximoff follows in the footsteps of Bakunin in tracing back the Leninist policies to ' political marxism' itself. Russian socialism had always been distinguished by its libertarian and progressive character,' writes Maximoff in opening his book. ' Political marxism is an anachronism, a vestige of the dying past and is altogether reactionary in its essence.
The communist manifesto of Marx and Engels is a reactionary manifesto and is in striking contradiction to science, to progress in general and humanism in particular. The demands of dictatorship, of absolute centralization of political and economic life in the hands of the state, of forming industrial armies, especially for agriculture, of a regimented agriculture in accordance with a single plan, of raising the state to the position of an absolute and the remaining stulification of the individual, their rights and interests - all that is nothing but the programme of reaction that is incompatible with human progress, with freedom, equality and humanism.
The realization of these demands carries with it state slavery."
Lenin was only able to introduce ' political marxism' onto the Russian scene by proclaiming other ideas
( bait and switch )
" If he had come out in 1917 with the ideas of the communist manifesto,' Maximoff argues,' he would never have attained success and like Tkachev, the Jacobin, he would have remained a rather inconspicuous figure throughout the revolution.'
Lenin adopted the anarchist slogans in 1917 for tactical purposes proclaiming the libertarian positions that were clearly the most popular among the Russian masses.

Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as their method is inevitably forced to take the lie as their principle.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Slated and Gordoned
Friday, June 13, 2008
Suspects' Right to Court Hearing Affirmed;
Obama Advisors Clash on Troop Strength
If you liked the Supreme Court's reinstatement of Habeas Corpus, vote Obama. McCain did not like it and will be in a position to appoint a justice who will vote with the four dissenters.
Bush dismissed the ruling as that of only 5 against 4. (Wasn't that the margin that made him president in 2000?)
The US Constitution says, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

The Constitution diary says,

"The basic premise behind habeas corpus is that you cannot be held against your will without just cause. To put it another way, you cannot be jailed if there are no charges against you. If you are being held, and you demand it, the courts must issue a writ of habeas corpus, which forces those holding you to answer as to why. If there is no good or compelling reason, the court must set you free. It is important to note that of all the civil liberties we take for granted today as a part of the Bill of Rights, the importance of habeas corpus is illustrated by the fact that it was the sole liberty thought important enough to be included in the original text of the Constitution" - INFORMED COMMENT

David Hick would appear to have a good case to appeal for compensation. Slater and Gordon sometimes take on big cases like this on a ' no-win, no-fee' contingency basis so...DEVELOPING

The audacity of this dope
http://leftthought.blogspot.com/2008/06/chinese-revolution-as-one-of-most.html

John Maddy on the Chinese revolution...to take massive casualties and almost be destroyed while being hunted over half of China...this is Johns idea of how to make a revolution.

'...I was extraordinarily surprised at the level of thought and analysis that had gone into the problems of making a socialist revolution in a country that was one of the model examples of feudalism. One of the classical examples. A country that had had a reputation for being one of the most conservative on the planet with regards to reform and to social change. Instead of doctrinairily applying Stalinist analysis they created a point of view that took into account the relations that had developed between China and the outside world since the mid 19th century, the reasons for the fall of the Imperial system, in what ways capitalism could be said to have developed in China, the interplay between colonialism and the development of capitalism, lots and lots of stuff. Extensive. Enough of an analysis to effectively carry out a Revolution...'

Personally I was surprised a squalid little fascist torturer and Stalin Toady survived the long march...I mean Mao, John...not you mate...keep up the entertainment-journalism!

Alternative histories
'...Further: Question for Anarcho & Prof. Rat
by Wayne Friday, Jun 13 2008, 2:32am
A further thought, and a question for Anarcho and Prof. Rat. If you put "the [final] date" at 1918, then do you think that the anarchists were mistaken to give support to the Bolshevik side against the White counterrevolutionary armies? For that matter, do you think the anarchists were wrong to be a part of the organization of the overthrow of the Provisional Government, in alliance with the Bolsheviks? ...'

I've already written that we may have to unwind our Makhnovista position due to his visit to the Kremlin around this time 90 years ago. In his own description of this visit he acknowledges the repression against the Petrodgrad and Moscow anarchists. Naturally there are many reasons why a young man would act like he did and a tactical case could be made for him...at that time. Makhno really slips the knife in with the ridiculous Platform stab-in-the-back gibberish. You believe him ( and Arshinov) then this is real blame-the-victim stuff.
Now Makhno undertook some great campaigns and did some great deeds and it is interesting to speculate what might have been if he'd protected Denikens left flank instead of attacking it. Perhaps Lenin would have been done away with there and then and Russia might have muddled through without Stalinist levels of fascism. Certainly the core of Lenins support were the Lettish mercenaries and only an army could beat them. In situations like the Ukraine (and Spain) the choices were nearly always equally bad. No one could tell the future so Lenin looked like the lesser of two evils - from a close reading of the anarchist literature we now know, or should know, better. I do think the anarchists were wrong not to give the CA a go. They should have sided with the SR's on the spot...the fact they didn't makes them part to blame for their own suppression that happened a month or two later. The lesson for the future is obvious - never turn yr back on a Marxist. Marxists began mass killings in 1918. The first victims were anarchists. People can draw their own conclusions from that.

Ace of spies
' The Letts are the only soldiers in Moscow. Whoever controlled the Letts controlled the capital. The Letts were not Bolsheviks; they were Bolshevik servants because they had no other resort. They were foreign hirelings. Foreign hirelings serve for money. They are at the disposal of the highest bidder. If I could buy the Letts my task would be easy...' - Sydney Reilly

Page 34, ' KGB - The inside story'

Sons of Cain
Every member of the Congress that approved the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act, now correctly reversed by the Court, will have the moral stain of having been a party to it besmirching their careers and their legacies forever. History will be only slightly less unforgiving to the Congress which allowed the grave abuses of the Constitution by the Bush administration than it will be to Bush himself.

Wanted in 16 states
Honky cracker Barry O'Bama's outlaw parents
Happy Loving Day
by Devilstower
Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 02:10:23 PM PDT
Today is Loving Day, the anniversary of the day in 1967 when interracial marriage became legal across the United States.
The seemingly appropriate name actually comes from a court case, one started by Mildred and Richard Loving, who were forbidden from marrying in their home state of Virginia. At the time, Virginia was one of sixteen states that had laws making it illegal for couples to marry across racial lines. The Lovings were married in Washington in 1958, but as soon as they returned to Virginia, the couple was arrested. The Lovings spent time in jail for violating Virginia's state law against people of different races "cohabitating as a man and wife."

It wasn't until nine years later that the Supreme Court set aside their conviction and ruled that the Virginia anti-miscegenation laws, and all other such state laws, were unconstitutional. Loving Day is not remembered as a victory for Civil Rights, and there are commemorations of the day in several states.

Whether or not you're celebrating Loving Day, it's a good day to remember that this kind of discrimination is not the distant past. Barack Obama's parents would have been criminals in sixteen states when he was born, for the simple act of being married.

It's also a good day to remember that this kind of legislation, including the "Defense of Marriage Acts" now in effect in more than half the states, will one day be looked on with the same distaste as the law that put the Lovings in jail.

* Permalink ::
* Discuss (145 comments) - KOS

Foucaults bs
Foucault, typically pomo, rejects originary thinking and the notion that there is a `reality' behind or underneath the prevailing discourse of an era. Likewise, the subject is a delusion essentially created by discourse, an `I' created out of the ruling linguistic usages. And so his detailed historical narratives, termed `archaeologies' of knowledge, are offered instead of theoretical overviews, as if they carried no ideological or philosophical assumptions. For Foucault there are no foundations of the social to be apprehended outside the contexts of various periods, or epistemes, as he called them; the foundations change from one episteme to another. The prevailing discourse, which constitutes its subjects, is seemingly self-forming; this is a rather unhelpful approach to history resulting primarily from the fact that Foucault makes no reference to social groups, but focuses entirely on systems of thought.
A further problem arises from his view that the episteme of an age cannot be known by those who labor within it. If consciousness is precisely what, by Foucault's own account, fails to be aware of its relativism or to know what it would have looked like in previous epistemes, then Foucault's own elevated, encompassing awareness is impossible. This difficulty is acknowledged at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), but remains unanswered, a rather glaring and obvious problem.
Poststructuralist titans, like Foucault, attained renown as critics of reason and metaphysics. But in academe, aside from committed disciples, that standpoint never really seemed to take hold. After all, if students and professors could no longer rely on the powers of reason to raise critical questions, muster evidence, and critically think through problems, one might as well shut the entire enterprise down.
The dilemma is this: how can the status and validity of theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How can we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to share such an understanding? Foucault's insistence on a Nietzschean perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his own opinions.

All power to the soviets my arse
1917 - Lenin was a brilliant politician and he pulled off this total about face, when it was necessary to do so, even though it meant turning his back on virtually everything his party had stood for. Indeed the other Bolshevik leaders thought Lenin had lost his head. The deception worked though. It was in some cases, a number of years before it hit home with other revolutionists that Lenin had never meant the things he wrote in, for instance, ' The state and revolution ' that had convinced many that he was honestly in support of the movement of the people.
In fact though, Lenin had not changed for any other than temporary and tactical considerations
( reasons of state )
Maximoff makes abundantly clear that Lenin never intended to change and that he employed Machiavellian political tactics to consolidate himself and his party in power. Once established in power he moved firmly and unhesitatingly against the only real threat that was likely - a threat from the Left.

Come back Jean Baudrillard
All sins forgiven

In the early '70s Jean Baudrillard exposed the bourgeois foundations of Marxism, mainly its veneration of production and work, in his Mirror of Production (1972). This contribution hastened the decline of Marxism and the Communist Party in France, already in disarray after the reactionary role played by the Left against the upheavals of May '68.