links for 2009-06-24

• Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
  Good source of information on workers' struggles in Iran
  (tags: middleeast workers union)
• The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: ABC of Iranian developments
  "Rafsanjani (the wealthiest and most corrupt man in Iran) represents refrom, and Moussavi (who led one of the most repressive eras in the Iranian revolutionary era and who sponsored Hizbullah in its most horrific phases) represents democracy."

  via: http://arabist.net/arabawy/

  (tags: blog middleeast elections media)
• Suspected U.S. Strike Kills at Least 60 in Pakistan – NYTimes.com
  "An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said."
  (tags: news southasia war imperialism)
• Researcher: Indian Malasians dominate lowest-paid jobs — Malaysia Kini
  "The Indian community in this country is ailing and no argument by any Barisan Nasional (BN) leader can rebut this fact, according to one researcher."
  (tags: news southeastasia race)

links for 2009-06-21

• fluency and coalition : Flip Flopping Joy
  "When folks ask why are women of color in coalition with one another. Why are woc, from various backgrounds, model immigrant meets indigenous, meets slave descendent meets immigrant slave, in coalition. The answer is simple: We believe that those of us under the heavy umbrella of being a person who is racialized have ‘common differences’.

  While as a descendent of slaves and indigenous persons I can understand what it means to be taught a history that is not my history. To be taught a cartography that is not my map. I still see that those who are more recent immigrants, those who identify more strongly with mestiza than I, those who speak in alterations of the standard American English. Have something to teach me."

  (tags: blog northamerica race womenissues)
• infinite thØught: why are the iranians dreaming again?*
  "It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi."

  via: http://angryarab.blogspot.com/

  (tags: blog middleeast elections politics)
• The language that absolves Israel – Los Angeles Times
  "In the U.S., discussion of Palestinian politicians and political movements often relies on a spectrum running from "extreme" to "moderate." The latter sounds appealing; the former clearly applies to those who must be — must they not? — beyond the pale. But hardly anyone relying on such terms pauses to ask what they mean. According to whose standard are these manifestly subjective labels assigned?"

  via: http://angryarab.blogspot.com/

  (tags: news middleeast northamerica media politics)

links for 2009-06-19

• Iran: how can the movement go forward?
  I'm not sure what gives Alan Woods the right to claim there is a full blown revolution going on in Iran that is equal to the French Revolution of 1789.

  "Those most frightened of all of the idea of revolution are the men who are theoretically leading it. Yesterday Mousavi called on people not to demonstrate “in order to save their lives”. The result was another day of street protests. Today he is calling on the demonstrators to go to the mosques today “to mourn the people killed on Monday”. This is a transparent attempt to get people off the streets and take the steam out of the mass movement. But for now the movement shows no signs of running out of steam."

  (tags: middleeast elections politics)
• Al Jazeera English – Iran's power struggle behind the scenes – 16 Jun 09
  "On the face of it, the election in Iran was between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent president, and his main rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

  But a more significant power struggle is being played out between two other powerful men."

  (tags: news middleeast elections politics)
• Hands Off the People of Iran – Support for the mass protests against Ahmadinejad's re-election
  "we should not forget that Moussavi does not consider the nine previous presidential elections in Iran's Islamic Republic – most of them with very dubious results – a “charade”. In the 2009 election, he did not bat an eyelid when the Council of Guardians disqualified over 400 candidates. He did not think the process was a “charade” when the supreme religious leader intervened time and time again to defend Ahmadinejad."
  (tags: middleeast elections)
• Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty – Polling in Iran Shows Real Support for Ahmadinejad
  "The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election."
  (tags: news middleeast elections)
• LENIN'S TOMB: Iran vote and protests
  "[Mousavi] is a centrist allied to the 'Modern Right'. His solutions to Iran's problems of accumulation and development are impeccably neoliberal. This is why he got the backing of the old crook, cynic, capitalist and Iran-Contra arms dealer, Hashem Rafsanjani."
  (tags: blog middleeast elections)
• The Daily (Maybe): Iran: responses and reflections
  "The situation in Iran is moving very quickly and it's difficult at this point to know how things are going to turn out. We have a movement demanding that the will of the people is heard in support of an extremely conservative Presidential candidate who's main pluses appear to be that he's not as belligerent as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and whose wife says interesting things."
  (tags: blog middleeast elections)
• America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution « OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY
  "Twitter may be as irrelevant to Iran as it is good for the promotion of Twitter itself, and for the self-flattery of some ardent Twitter users who believe that their tweets and their green-tinted avatars will change the world, or at least Iran. The revolution will not only be tweeted, it will be fast and easy, and it will be led by Americans themselves, “for Iran”."
  (tags: blog middleeast web2.0 imperialism elections)
• FT.com / Europe – Hungary still vulnerable to economic shocks
  "Hungary’s central bank governor said the country was weathering the worst of the economic crisis thanks to international support and domestic reforms but remained vulnerable to possible future shocks."
  (tags: news europe capitalism)

Twitter & Iran

Click on the pic.

[Hat Tip: Hossam]

Marx and the Mode of Production

The Third International Comintern where some of the MPSF theory was hammered out.

On The Excerpt Mill I blog:

Looking beyond the Preface [to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] to other parts of Marx’s mature writing, the claim that MPSF accurately represents Marx’s theory of society and history becomes even more difficult to sustain because the theory is plainly incompatible with them.  In the introduction to the Grundrisse (1973), for example, Marx describes the relationship among various aspects of the economy and society as “organic,” and his historical analyses illustrate this.  Marx’s nuanced and multifaceted discussion of the development of capitalism in Britain in volume 1 of Capital (1967, pt. 8), for example, would be irrelevant if he hled a view of society and social change based on a simple expressive totality…In neither case does he approach the question from the perspective of how the social structure conforms to the necessity imposed by production technology.  Instead, he analyzes these situations in terms of the complex set of forces and factors that contest and shape one another…The basis for the expressive-totality ontology in Marxist theory is found not in Marx but rather in Engels.

Debt and Deficit in Historical Perspective

Now I’m not a fan of Obama, but, considering this chart he’s not holding the greatest debt in the history of mankind, as some conservatives are pointing out.

Honestly though, I really don’t get the Republican Party sometimes. When it comes to managing the economy and the American Empire in general the Democratic Party seems to play it a lot smarter. The Republicans, if they know what’s good for them, need to just shut the fuck up cause Obama is the best thing that could happen for Washington D.C. No huge animostiy toward the president, no protests in the street, the fractured left is having a hard time rallying people against the war and bailouts, etc.

Larger image here.

[Hat Tip: Dr. Brad DeLong]

Fanon on Ontology and Hegel

Here’s a short excerpt from a recent blog post I did:

“He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me.  In a fierce struggle I am willing to feel the shudder of death, the irreversible extinction, but also the possibility of impossibility.”

links for 2009-06-08

• Lenin Rediscovered by Lars T. Lih
  "This substantial new commentary, based on contemporary Russian- and German-language sources, provides hitherto unavailable contextual information that undermines these views and shows how Lenin's argument rests squarely on an optimistic confidence in the workers' revolutionary inclinations and on his admiration of German Social Democracy in particular. Lenin's outlook cannot be understood, Lih claims here, outside the context of international Social Democracy, the disputes within Russian Social Democracy and the institutions of the revolutionary underground. "
  (tags: literature northasia communism marxism history)
• Re-establish Peace, Defend People's Movements and Resist the Crackdown on Rural Poor in Punjab — Communist Party India (ML-Liberation)
  "Punjab is burning once again in the flames of sectarian frenzy, sparked off by the murder of a Sikh spiritual figure, the vice-chief of the Dera Sachkand in Vienna.

  Meanwhile, hidden from the eye of the mainstream media, Punjab’s agricultural labourers and rural poor – mostly Dalits – are facing an unprecedented – and continuing –crackdown, with several hundreds, including a large number of women and children, being jailed – in the course of a struggle for NREGA job cards and homestead plots promised by the SAD-BJP State Government. CPI(ML)’s entire state leadership is also behind bars, and Comrade Swapan Mukherjee, General Secretary of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) was released on 25 May after being in jail for four days. The SAD-BJP Government launched this offensive immediately following the Lok Sabha elections, where the results reflected the disenchantment of the rural poor with the government."

  (tags: southasia caste religion)

Jewish Resistance to Zionism

An excerpt from a recent blog post:

unlike Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire’s book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press, 2003), which challenges this malicious weapon head on, the editors of Prophets Outcast and Wrestling with Zion adopt a different, more subtle and richer strategy that allows them simultaneously to take part in the political and ideologicalal fray that developed after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and to transcend it.

links for 2009-06-06

• 'NYT' (Finally) Issues Corrections on Botched Front-Page 'Gitmo' Story
  "A May 21 piece in The New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller revealed that a not-yet-released Pentagon report declared that 1 in 7 prisoners released from Gitmo had returned to waging “jihad.”

  Today, the Times, finally issued a weighty Editors’ Note correcting the article’s two main assertions, long after bloggers and others had attacked it."

  (tags: northamerica journalism terrorism)

Capitalist Economists

William Gropper, "Black Thursday", click on the pic for the whole blog post.

“The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work done in the 1950s and 1960s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science.” The capitalist ideology that undergirds economics in the United States has led the profession to be detached from reality, rendering it incapable of understanding many of the crises the world faces.

links for 2009-06-04

• Free the SF8 – Committee for the Defense of Human Rights
  "Eight former Black community activists – Black Panthers and others – were arrested January 23, 2007 in California, New York, and Florida on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown out after it was revealed that police used torture to extract confessions when some of these same men were arrested in New Orleans in 1973."

  Free the San Francisco 8!

  (tags: northamerica race politics law)
• The Penal State in an Age of Crisis – Monthly Review
  "As a rule, crime and social protest rise in periods of economic crisis in capitalist society. During times of economic and social instability, the well-to-do become increasingly fearful of the general population, more disposed to adopt harsh measures to safeguard their positions at the apex of the social pyramid. The slowdown in the economic growth rate of U.S. capitalism beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s — converging with the emergence of radical social protest around the same period — was accompanied by a rapid rise in public safety spending as a share of civilian government expenditures. So significant was this shift that we can speak of a crowding out of welfare state spending (health, education, social services) by penal state spending (law enforcement, courts, and prisons) in the United States during the last third of a century."
  (tags: northamerica capitalism class race history)

Marx on the Rate of Exploitation

Over at my new blog The Excerpt Mill I post a quote from Karl Marx:

The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.

links for 2009-06-03

• Introducing Books Series
  Great illustrated books on complex subjects and thinkers from Jung to Freud and Foucault to Critical Theory.
  (tags: literature)

Overcoming a Series Through a Group

Over at my new blog The Excerpt Mill I have a post up on Sartre’s view of class:

Sartre stated a Series was a group of people in relation to each other but with no common goal while a Group was a group of people in relation to each other, who know they are in relation to each other, and have a common unified goal and that Parti communiste français (PCF) erred in seeing the working class as a Group instead of seeing it as a Series.