You will not be able to stay home, comrade.

The men abusing women have names and badge numbers

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

Clown Fucka Boyz : Applications are now closed for the season.

Stop hiding behind really good and excellent music threads and Some badas but sarcastic flamewars

With Lent almost upon us and the day of the Lord's resurrection only slightly further ahead, I think it's a fitting time to discuss liberation theology.

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.

Leftwing intellectualism and the bourgeois cult of words.

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.

In another two villages in Homs, Al-Shumaryiah and Teldo, the Free Syrian Army committed a massacre against many families. The Al-Qaeda linked terrorist Free Syrian Army kidnaps, tortures, and holds massive rallies declaring their intention to cleanse Syria of Christians and Alawites. One of the most popular protest chants is “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave”.

I went to a speech about the "Arab Spring" at the LSE last year and stood up to ask why Bahrain was never talked about. Why is it that Bahrain is unworthy of mention? I think this is why it's important to accept that on one hand, yes, the Arab Spring is legitimate and comes from people's desires to shrug off the yoke of oppression. On the other hand, it is a media narrative that has been utilized to push neoliberal policies in the region. This media narrative is subject to power interests. This explains very well why Bahrain has been "forgotten".

while following this book, or the conversation so far, a question may be beginning to appear in your darling heads - "well, blinkandwheeze, this is all very well and good. but how, if at all, does this pertain to the immortal science and shining path of marxism-leninism-mao tse tung thought?"

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.

lately i've been interested in the idea that the lumpenproletariat (or the unemployables as huey p newton called them) should be the focus of radical organizing. this week, i'm going to post different actions, programs, and writings of the young lords and other organizations that took this analysis.

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.

We have arrived, as a species, at a peculiar juncture in the development of our shared world-system. An interdigitating set of political-economic and ecological crises looms large, threatening centuries of deprivation for our descendants, if not outright extinction. An absurdly unjust system of global capitalism, benefitting a tiny minority of kleptocrats and criminals, staggers mindlessly toward oblivion. As unrest grows and these crises intensify, it has become painfully obvious that no reform of this revolutionary state-capitalist machine is possible. It will destroy itself, and us with it, plunging us into debt-serf neofeudalism or worse, if we do not stop it.

Notions of broad American populism are popular on the white “left”, but nearly all the gains from broad American populism go to a privileged strata of white people. When radicals divorce the 99% rhetoric from the history of American populism, they are ignoring how that broad rhetoric has been used to exclude the needs of the disenfranchised. Without a POC-centered strategy, nothing is stopping the ruling class from using the same tools to reduce class tensions.

For advocates of social justice the problem of postmodernity is generally seen in terms of political impotence, specifically a subjective, individual impotence. The conditions of postmodernity are allegedly such that the pre-emptive co-option of social action into the reproduction of capital is assured. Capital, despite creating first and foremost its own gravediggers, has somehow 1. achieved hegemonic dominance, 2. circumvented the creation of alternative productive modes, and 3. completely subjugated the site of resistance, the working class, into its reproductive program.

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".

The world-historical consequence of the Occupy movement needs to be put in this perspective. This is the same world and involves one of the same powers. So far, the Occupy movement has involved a tiny minority of Americans, and at very little expense for these people. There are attacks with irritants on protestors, but most violence has been one-sided and limited. Importantly, what are the changes in business-as-usual that this movement seeks to put into place?

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.

“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.

This has been brought up before and undoubtedly a lot of you are familiar with the now infamous Wikipedia article about the Cultural Revolution that delves into a hilariously sickening level of anti-communist blood libel. However, what I find deeply interesting are the sources quoted in the article and academic articles written that treat such absolutely ludicrous accusations as fact without batting an eye.

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.

If history is the alchemy of theory, then communists turned gold into lead in Palestine. When I first arrived in 2009, I was one of those hand-wringing well-meaning comrades who shed tears over the absence of a progressive political left in Palestine. No doubt, there exists in Palestine some of the strongest and bravest leftists in the region, but their work is for naught and their books (printed with French, German, and Canadian money) get used to warm hovels in Askar refugee camp.