Montreal-North is Burning

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Kersplebedeb blogs:

Montreal-North is burning. After the murder of Fredy Villenueva by the Montreal Police (SPVM), and the riots which broke out to express the people’s anger, the community of Montreal-North remains angry. The time has come to organize a social and political offensive against the local elites who are trying to cover up this state of affairs.

Montréal-Nord Republik (Montreal North Republik) is a new voice in the neighbourhood. It intends to put forward another view of the recent events around the death of Fredy Villanueva and the riots which took place in Montreal North. The group also intends to dispute the dominant discourse which is insinuating that the rioters and protesters are just apolitical hooligans. Montréal-Nord Republik hopes to bring together the neighbourhood community along with all the population of Montreal in order to denounce police repression as well as economic, social, cultural and political oppression.

“Your hands are full of blood.”

“…even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”
-Isaiah 1:15

While searching through picture’s from Ed Kashi’s book Curse of the Black Gold I came across this:

I couldn’t think of a more damning portrait of Christianity than this pic right here.

None shall be barren

Empowering families and generational leaders for global impact

To the left it says:

It’s a session of…

• Salvation
• Deliverance
• Healing miracles with God

This is the bullshit that makes me absolutely sick to my fucking stomach.  This is the type of shit I used to encounter at my ex-girlfriends church, Shiloh Christian Fellowship (in Oakland); talk of “outpouring encounters,” “generational movements,” “no longer being [spiritually] barren.”  There will no doubt be a special place in hell for people like “Bishop” Sam Amaga and Mrs. “Dr.” Sam Amaga and “Bishop” Jolomi.

One thing that is routinely brought up in the Nevi’im (book of prophets in the Hebrew Bible) and in the Christian New Testament is essentially God’s siding with the poor and oppressed.

I remember my Hebrew Bible professor once saying, “Wanna read some of the most ‘anti-Semitic’ stuff in the world? Read the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible]! That has some of the most anti-Israeli stuff ever created!”

And indeed it does, there is nothing more damning to religious and political leaders whom bring up the Bible and “Biblical values” than the actual fucking Bible itself.  As we can see in the quote I opened up God is essentially saying he will no longer answer Israel’s prayers because the leaders and priests of that country have the blood of the poor and oppressed on their hands.

As we can see with the picture here we have the contrasts and contradictions of reality here on earth and a fucking billboard proclaiming “None shall be barren!” while the people in front of the billboard more than likely have had barren stomachs and empty pockets quite a few times in their life while the two bishops have so much money overflowing from their pockets they can afford nice suits to showcase on their own private billboards.

To give an example of what happens in these “outpouring encounters” one of the pastors described what had happened when he was in Nigeria during a “revival.” He described the church being packed with poor and working class folks experiencing miracles at the hands of pastors and elders (church folk, a step bellow a pastor or priests) and during this whole event the people where actually stuffing trash cans filled to the brim with money from donations.  The pastor was describing money being piled up on the fucking stage and being shoveled into large bags and bins.

Why, you ask, would poor folks do this?  Well, it’s not that surprising as when people are desperate and on their last rope they will do anything to attain any kind of salvation.  As Marx stated:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people. [Emphasis mine]

Marx is not knocking religion per se nor is he knocking poor people for taking to religion like a drug.  The lives of people are so fucking miserable that they need something to take their mind off the pain; this comes in form of drugs, alcohol, religion, etc.

I myself am not knocking Christianity or the concept of God either (for one, I’m getting my masters in theology and studying to be a priest for the Episcopal Church) but what I am upset about is the fact that people whom claim to be followers of Jesus are actually the ones exploiting the poor they are so intent to “save.”

Religion has become a selling point, like the capitalist who exploits the worker the priest exploits the follower.  The worker creates commodities and gives the capitalist wealth while the capitalist (whom can’t create anything without the worker) hoards most of the profits (to further turn into capital); the parishioner goes to church for spiritual salvation and forks over money to the priest while the priest does nothing to actually organize and help uplift the poor and working class from their oppressive chains.  The priest in this form is nothing more than a drug dealer making his customer sink further into obliteration because she or he is trying to forget his or her problems in the material world.

These priests and modern day pharisees would rather spend money on fancy suits and billboards than rather actually take up the Bible literally and speak truth to power and help working class and poor communities organize for the distribution of power and wealth.

I ain’t sittin in your pews less you helpin’ me resist and refuse
Show me a list of your views
If you really love me
Help me tear this muthafucka up
Consider this my tithe for the offer cup

-Boots Riley, The Coup

[Hat Tip: Hossam]

Latest from Mahalla Textile Workers

Hossam blogs:

The following statement has been distributed few hours ago by the Textile Workers’ League activists inside Ghazl el-Mahalla factories, during the (Saturday) third night shift… The statement, written in a satirical form, denounces corruption and the deterioration of medical services in the company’s hospital, and was signed by “The Mahalla Textile Morgue Workers’ League”…

Image by:
Gaber

The West and Intervention

I read an interesting (but ultimately trivial) opinion piece in today’s Finnancial Times by Chrystia Freeland titled “The new age of authoritarianism.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with the piece as long as people realize that it’s essentially given from the bourgeois viewpoint that the West inherently looks after the good of the world and that free market globalization is something that (while it gives huge profits to Western corporations) is ultimately good for the rest of humanity.

This quote more than sums up her take on the last 20 odd years or so:

the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.

I’m not going to argue with this point (you all can read my other blog posts to see what I think), it’s just to illustrate her point-of-view.

Most of what we have been reading in the news about the authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, Iran, etc. have been whole heartidly from the view points of those who espouse a liberal bourgeois capitalist mindset (whether they bee slightly left, right, or center) while there has been very little room for the opinions of radical labor organizers, anti-capitalists/globalization organizers, home grown Third World activists, etc.  This essentially gives the reader of mainstream news a very narrow outlook on global affairs and ultimatly stiffle critical thinking as there is much more out there than the capitalist bourgeois mind set and there are more ways to analyze the situation of global affairs (especially when it comes to the South Ossetia conflict).

This piece by Freeland is a perfect example of this mindset that dominates the mainstream media (print and TV).

In it she essentially parrots the views of those who came before in saying that the end of a Soviet dominated Third World brought freedoms to untold millions (I’m no fan of the capitalist degenerated state that was the Soviet Union mind you) and that poverty has been reduced world wide.  She goes along the classical neo-liberal (as supposed to realist) line of authoritarian China and Russia and their imperial endvours around the world and how the West should stand up to them, etc. but does not turn her analysis on the West itself.

One thing I find liberating about Marxian/Marxist political thought (as supposed to Smithan and Ricardian or neo-classical lines of thought) is its grounding in class analysis and how the capitalist class essentially shapes the economy and the world.  With this line of thought we don’t need to look at the world in a Black and White Western imperial adventures = good and non-Western imperial adventures = bad.  We can look at the world in a different light to broaden our analysis.

White by the Numbers

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Tammerie, who is pursuing a dissertation on anti-racism and Christian theology, blogs:

By the numbers, white people still hold a preponderance of the positions that count, out of proportion to our presence in the population, from which I would argue we are able to maintain white-privileging control over the systems and institutions that shape our society, including business, legislative and judicial systems, property sales and management, education and health care. (Note that the percentages of non-white, non-male legislators was considered too small to be tabulated.)

Of course, not all white people are employed in positions that afford economic power and privilege. Whites represented 44 percent of the 37 million U.S. citizens living below the poverty line in 2006. The (historically constructed) sad thing about that is that most of the white people living in poverty think they have more in common with wealthy white people than they do people of color also dealing with poverty. And that keeps folks from banding together and working together to insist on change in an unjust reality.

Chomsky on Pornography

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Lenin posts a video of a short interview on Chomsky’s views of pronography:

I am particularly impressed with the way he just trashes the free market arguments of the pornographic industry (as in, ’she chose to do it’).

Social Class and White Privilege

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

I just got the book by Chip Smith. The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism. Once I finish it (which might take a while as I’m reading Capital, Vol. I by Marx) I’m gonna write a review.

While flipping through the book though I found this great paragraph from Chapter 16: The Reality of White Privilege that I’d like to share:

We are trying to get a sense of white racial privileges - distinct from the surplus taken by the white ruling class through exploitation. To do so, we want to focus as much as possible on differences within the broad working class. As described in earlier chapters, the white owning class in the United States exploits both white workers and workers of color. At the same time, the system affords white workers certain racial privileges that they have often jealously defended despite their exploitation. The white ruling class exploits both white workers and workers of color - and uses racial privileges to sustain their rule. White workers benefit - in comparison to workers of color - while at the same time being exploited for their labor power. This distinction is crucial. It points to the fact that ending exploitation - and the system of racial privileges that support it - is in the interests of white working class people as well as people of color. (italics are Smith’s, bold mine)

In order to truly take up true class consciousness, in order to shed the oppressive bourgeois mindset that paralyzes many workers (especially many workers at my job who would rather support management than the union), a white worker must shed her or his whiteness and all privileges that come with it (or, perhaps, a more appropriate term would be reject).

Which reminds me. If any of you can find it out there, the book (out of print) Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai would be a good complementary read along with The Cost of Privilege. (Some Marxists and anti-racists take issue with Sakai’s analysis, some even call Sakai slightly mad, but hey, good read and informative).

Fannie and Freddie Get a Helping Hand

While individual citizens get shitted on by the government.  The New York Times reports:

Alarmed by the sharply eroding confidence in the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, the Bush administration on Sunday asked Congress to approve a sweeping rescue package that would give officials the power to inject billions of federal dollars into the beleaguered companies through investments and loans.

…

While senior Democratic and Republican officials in successive administrations have for many years repeatedly denied that the trillions of dollars of debt the companies issued is guaranteed, the package, if adopted, would bring the Treasury closer than ever to exposing taxpayers to potentially huge new liabilities. The two companies could face significant new losses this year as the wave of housing foreclosures continues.

From Clive Crook’s blog:

Covering the agencies’ losses on their loans and guarantees is going to require an actual outlay, which will fall on taxpayers. You could plausibly call the rest – namely, bringing these “government-sponsored enterprises” explicitly inside the public sector – just a bookkeeping entry. But what an entry! It would surely shake financial markets, raise the government’s cost of funding and put heavy downward pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile, the turmoil impedes or paralyses the GSEs in their crucial life-support role for the housing market.

So we can afford “socialism” for mutli-billion dollar corporations but not the masses?

So we’ve got corporations divesting capital from America and interjecting it into developing countries, further exploited Third World peoples and causing Americans to loose good paying jobs, we’ve got gas ready to hit $6 a gallon within the next half year, and there was a near food riot in Milwaukee plus a 20% increase in demand for food at food banks.

The only reason why most of the American petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat are able to afford certain amenities is through exploiting the labor-power of Third World workers.  We’re all going to hell in a gift-wrapped hand basked made by a young Cambodian child for 5 cents (via Nike).

Permanent Revlution in the Middle East

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Farfahinne blogs on a speech she attended in London during the Marxism 2008 festival sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party:

Alex Callinicos, is a leading figure on the left internationally and a major Marxist theoretician. He is a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and has participated in every major anti-capitalist mobilization since Seattle.
his talk was very interesting, it was titled : the Permanent Revolution in the Middle East. one of the most important things he said, that the struggle of the Palestinian People is not limited to the Palestinians themselves. It’s a broader one that involves the struggle of workers against the Arab Local Regimes who are the agents of Israel and imperialism. the conflict’s way out is the permanent Revolution that breaks the bounderies of individual societies.

Green Party and Class Politics

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Dave Marlow blogs:

Fellow blogger Renegade Eye put it best: “I don’t believe the Green Party is the alternative party formation, since it lacks a program and class basis.” The Green Party is incapable of leading a successful workers revolution, at least in its current manifestation, because of its inherent ties to reformism and its separation from class struggle. They are not a genuine proletarian party and so any progress achieved through the Green Party will be limited to the confines of a non-revolutionary framework.

Racial Makeup, Neighborhoods, and White Fear

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Macon D blogs:

What C was feeling, without quite realizing what it was, was a collective white fear of and disdain for the neighborhood and, especially, for the people living there. This common white attitude toward largely non-white neighborhoods was pressuring her in ways that she hadn’t realized were really about race, and racism.

Freedom and Labor in Latina/o USA

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Profe, of LatinoLikeMe.com, blogs on democracy, freedom, and labor:

It is through this process of analysis that I make sense of the daily experiences of immigrant labor in this nation. When I say this, I do not only mean undocumented labor. The Southern Poverty Law Center provides a beautifully-detailed report on legal guestworker programs in place in the United States. “Close to Slavery” is a reminder of the brutal ways a government’s protection of the “rights” of an elite group of business interests–in the name of free market capitalism–sacrifices the humanity of hundreds of thousands of others.

Gentrification

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

I read this Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago and wanted to blog on it:

The Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council is one of 88 neighborhood councils created in Los Angeles in the last nine years. Each is a junior varsity city council of sorts, with the ability to pass judgment on new development and other things, but its power lies largely in advising politicians who have real power….(Read More)

Poor White Folk and Poor Black Folk

Malik blogs:

I think the analogy of the house negro and the field negro is better applied to the relationship between poor Black folks and poor white folks than to the relationship between poor Black folks and “Black conservatives”. Poor white folks are the ultimate house negros. They are only marginally better off than poor Black folks (the “overwhelming advantage” is a well-maintained illusion), but because they inhabit the same psychological house as their rich white masters, and get a few extra favors, they wholly identify with their masters. Think about it.

Whiteness is a Trick

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

Via Zuky via Eric Stoller