Struggling with how to reckon with the sea of ghosts left over from our miserable rise into modernity, it's time to run into the bathroom and scream at my enemy in the mirror: Mao Zedong

Why pretend otherwise?

Living in the second great age of monopoly capital

HOW GOOD WAS THE SHIT. EXTREMELY? KINDA? NOT AT ALL?

Marxism is centered on the idea that classes can be abolished through the liberation of the proletariat.

Bound and gagged, a young man has been left to starve in the basement of his kidnapper. Though weakened from a lack of food and water, he manages to untie himself, and, arming himself with a nearby plank of wood, he lies in wait.

The youth unemployment debate generally ignores the rapidly changing nature of the US economy. Youth unemployment is the highest in recorded history.

the answer is creating a shadow state that delivers community services and then kicking out the state legislatures and seceding from the union, or at least renegotiating the terms of being a part of it.

Freedom means all different things to different people. One mans freedom is another mans oppresser. Every one wants to have freedom but our economy does not work without planning. It turns unequal. Here are three resaons that people can be free and have plans!

if you like sick burns, then "the imperial messenger" by belén fernández is where you want to go, she provides them by the spoonful, sometimes it seems as though they'll never end. you're caught up in a whirlwind of sick burns, ascending to heaven as she delivers killing blow after killing blow against the great mustachioed master of the new york times op-ed page.

So the question is, where does the United States go from here? The transnational capital class (TCC) has not just taken flight, it has turned the American population into a festering sore it can suck on whenever it needs to. OWS was great, but unfocused. It turned cannons on the TCC, rightfully so in some cases, but gave the government a pass. Many who were involved or supported it will no doubt vote for Obama again in the coming election. The major problem I can see is that the citizenry believes that the government is still accountable to the people, that it remains an impartial mediator between capital and labor.

Many first world communist parties have attached themselves to the "1% vs 99%" analysis of capitalist society. However, they have done so uncritically. A 99% v 1% analysis is fundamentally too vague to be useful as an analytical tool when looking at how policy is formulated and carried out in any political system. This is reflected by occupy's focus on campaign financing and relatively inconsequential legal fictions like corporate personhood.

In "Is The Red Flag Flying" (1979), Al Szymanski examined empirical research on the Soviet Union and came to the conclusion that the USSR was socialist, but that technical and professional intelligentsia (those "who develop and disseminate knowledge and skills and who provide professional services") had disproportionate influence over policy. However, "the managerial stratum appears to be significantly closer to the manual working class than is the scientific-technical intelligentsia". "Socialism Betrayed" by Keeran and Kennan noticed that this intelligentsia was dominated by right-opportunists who wanted to introduce capitalist "reforms".

In this way, one could see great potential in Cybersyn, at least on the surface, in that the aim of regulating value is essentially an exercise of trying to bias the system, i.e. society, towards some goal by the system controller, and that could theoretically be done by a true democratic vote. We could have our cake and eat it too... In contrast, the market is an autonomous entity, a beast prone to roam wild until it is attacked and consumed by some other beast, more vicious and powerful. However, it is also precisely because of that potential for control that Cybersyn suffers a fatal flaw: it will never be able to maintain itself in balance while maintaining an accurate representation of the underlying economy it seeks to model.

the working class is under attack worldwide and will not gather around one flag because the one flag concept is what is attacking them. leftist protesters in the united states have the wherewithal to wave flags. they don't mind. they understand the forces at work against them are flagless, and we count on footage of pigs trampling the flag while they beat your ass to stir that kernal of patriotism still embedded deep in every american thanks to years of pledging the damn thing in grade school. it's a smart move and very practical at this juncture. globalization depends on a fake front of dissolution of nation states to get by.

right wing parties worldwide point to this migrant labor as the cause of many ills. crime, disease, increased cost of services, depression of wages, whatever. while some might argue we need to drop the "PC" pretenses and man up to these challenges, generally approaching the subject in this way results in passing laws about giving water to "Illegal Humans" dying of thirst in the desert.

A strong point made by Peter Hallward is simply that "waiting" has never made a revolution happen. If you consider capitalism a transformation of slavery, and existing capitalist society to be unjust, then it doesn't matter if the legal paperwork has been done. John Brown didn't leaflet for abolitionism, he tried to arm the people and destroy the institution he despised. "Waiting" for a parliamentary majority, or a well established consensus around some economic alternative, seems like it concedes all the ground to the opposition.

Post 1970's abandonment of the Bretton Woods system there came about a fantastic chain of events that threw the entire world on the fast track to destruction. Neoliberalism had been incubating at the University of Chicago for some years, but they were suddenly tapped to provide answers for where a sudden glut of gulf oil revenue should go. Their answer: To The Third World! After all, Mr. Woods was no longer around to lend a helping hand, the Soviet Union was lolling around like fat idiots getting ready to melt, and there's no better time like the present to introduce finance into every market available.

At the end of March 2011, the Bloc Quebecois polled at 36.8% of the Quebec vote, which would give it about 45 seats in an election if it were held that day. Alas, the vote was held just over a month later: in the May 2011 election, the Bloc Quebecois won just four (4) of Quebec's 75 seats. It received 23.4% of the Quebec vote. With Bloc Quebecois fading from relevance, the future direction of the Quebec Sovereignty Movement is up for grabs.

“Every country has the government it deserves.” Or, at least, they will eventually, for only the form of government suited to that nations specific circumstances will endure more than a few years. Anything else is an aberration. This all seems like common sense, of course, but becomes problematic when applied specifically, which is to say critically. For example, let us consider the “long counter-revolution” to borrow a phrase, of American social-politics: that is, the last 40 years.

The Center for American progress recently released a report entitled "Fear, Inc." that regards and examines the institutional and mainstream phenomenon of Islamophobia in the United States. This 138 page report outlines the major donors of the movement, the pseudo-scholars, the activists, the enablers, the grassroots networks, and the elected officials that are part of this highly-organized and effective movement. I read the whole thing so you don't have to...

Over the past 10 years, it has become all too common to see more and more Western intervention in the countries of the world, specifically against countries which happen to be inhabited by Muslims. The Imperialist nations now occupy Afghanistan, Iraq and continue a bombing campaign either directly or indirectly via proxies in Libya, Somalia and Palestine. Imperialism aims itself like a gun at Libya at present, that being its apparent priority. As MP Ali Qanso of Lebanon stated, it seems that if their actions in Libya are a success, that Syria seems to be next on the hit list. Why Libya then? Why has Libya been chosen to be the target of the Imperial powers of the world including the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Netherlands amongst others?

In 2003, in the wake of massive protests against austerity, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said, "The street must express itself, but the street does not govern." This encapsulates the bourgeois view of democracy, with a passive public that is governed by an elite. Its negation is quite simple: Rule of the street. That is, communist-oriented democracy is the public governing itself through direct action. The emerging democracy must be best thought of as insurgent, as interrupting the normal flows. Importantly, insurgent democracy seeks to end the state's monopoly on regulating flows, pulling these tasks down to affected communities and to a restored commons.

I take no issue with the toppling of the regime per se, but the question is what happens afterwards? There’s no clear leadership, the US and its allies have no real ability to co-opt the uprising as they have in Libya. I am optimistic. I would hope to see something along the lines of the Egyptian situation (in fact Egypt is undergoing something strongly parallel to Syria at the moment: repression from the dictatorship and attempted co-option from Saudi-aligned MB agitators). I'm interested in unpacking the present reality and examining the interests and weight of the various players involved, because this really has become a central factor to neocolonialism in the Middle East.

The rich of this Gilded Age are isolated and live in jets and fortresses. They don’t just hire security – they hire media firms and think tanks and create a culture of docile security. Our prisons are overflowing and our heads are empty. We elected a man who ran on “change” and he delivered us more of the same but in the way of a grotesque pornographic minstrel show for the rich. Do we see how tight the noose gets before we start thinking how to get out of this?