adri
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Fwiw Engels wrote about this topic in the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. I’m not really sure how all of his anthropological/historical arguments stack up to our modern understandings, but there is still a lot of useful info in it. Engels also notably praised indigenous peoples like the Iroquois and described them as an example of early communism/socialism. The Iroquois’ mastery over their production (i.e. the fact that they were not dominated by their own products/commodities like in bourgeois society) and the greater social position of women in such societies greatly impressed him. He essentially described the socialism/communism of the future as being like this “primitive” communism but on a more advanced technological basis.
“At least in the swing states. Under the undemocratic US election system, where it is not the candidate who obtains the most votes who wins but the candidate who wins the most seats in a “electoral college” made up of representatives of the various states who vote as a bloc, this makes sense.
This system also means that the candidates base their campaign on appealing to electors in these ten or so states. Thus, since he has no chance of winning there anyway, Trump can deliberately alienate electors in California (“lefty liberals”) and New York (“Wall Street versus Main Street”) in order to win votes in the swing states.”
Yep, as Ira Katznelson and co note in their critical introduction to American political economy The Politics of Power, which is worth a read, the electoral college system itself was actually invented and favored by the “Founding Fathers” due to their fears of an excess of democracy:
After creating an executive independent of Congress, delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were not about to propose selecting the president through direct election, which would reflect the same popular opinion they saw lurking in legislatures. Instead, the convention delegates devised a plan by which a majority of members of the newly created electoral college would elect the president.
The electoral college system was created because the Founding Fathers feared direct democracy and the southern slaveholding interests thought this would help protect them from the demands of more populated northern states. (182)
Here’s a list of some of the groups participating in the “2024 March on the DNC” in Chicago, https://www.marchondnc2024.org/join. There are loads of Trotskyist and other bourgeois-“progressive” organizations that I don’t particularly care for.
I should maybe also mention that the Yippies’ politics were also quite bad in many respects (e.g. their often uncritical support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front). There was certainly much to critique in the ideas of Abbie Hoffman and (the later yuppie-turncoat) Jerry Rubin, two of the co-founders of the Youth International Party.
No Festival of Life this time around, like there was at the infamous 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention, but it seems that there are some pro-Palestinian protesters as the DNC starts up in Chicago. It’s sort of unfortunate, though understandable when one compares the different circumstances, how many of them are only pushing for the “freeing of Palestine,” for whatever each person means by that. While such anti-war (or anti-genocide) protests are important, they’re sort of a step back from 1968 when people, such as the Yippies and others, were talking about both ending American aggression in Indochina and implementing far more radical societal transformations. At any rate, a one- or two-state “solution” will never “liberate” Palestinians from capitalist hegemony or solve the innumerable environmental and other problems stemming from global capitalist production.
There’s also a great deal of irony in the fact that the far-right use terms like “red-pilled” (a Matrix reference) when the creators of the Matrix are both trans women who have repeatedly told their far-right fans to fuck off…
I don’t have much sympathy for Christian fundamentalism or religion in general, but it is interesting to note how religion and communistic/socialistic thinking often went hand in hand in the past. Many workers in nineteenth-century New England (e.g. textile workers) often attacked the developing capitalist system through a religious lens, noting how capitalists were idlers who, among other things, failed to “earn their bread by the sweat of their brow” as stated in Genesis. Here is one example from the labor newspaper The Voice of Industry, in which the editor (William Young) was commenting precisely on this issue:
If man is a laboring being by nature, what kind of philosophy is that which exempts a portion from fulfilling this law of their natures and allows them to live upon the products of others’ labor, while they lounge about in idleness or waste their energies in unproductive amusements? If labor is honorable and ennobling, should not all become honest and noble by becoming its votaries? and is it not dishonest and degrading to live upon the fruits of others? If labor is a Christian duty, are those Christians, who live without it, or are engaged in vocations useless and injurious to society? (Vol. 1 No. 13, 21 August 1845)
The same was also the case for many workers and intellectuals in Europe, most notably the utopian socialists. Similarly usury, or the act of obtaining interest from a loan, was for a long time condemned in medieval European Christendom as a sin (see for example Jacques Le Goff’s work Your Money or Your Life). Some might even say that Engels was slightly off the mark when he echoed the description of Das Kapital as the “Bible of the working class”; the working class had already been invoking the actual Bible to argue against capitalism for quite some time prior to the publication of Marx’s magnum opus. Unfortunately many of the Christians today are the obnoxious, right-wing sorts who haven’t carried on this anti-capitalist tradition and instead often worship capitalists and entrepreneurialism.
A communist classic, “9 to 5” from Comrade Dolly Parton:
“Nine to five, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life and you think about it don’t you
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet”It’s sort of funny how Harris’ father was an economist who had sympathies for Marx. I’m sure the Trump camp will not overlook that when they go around denouncing the Harris campaign and the Democrats as (“Cultural”) “Marxists,” as they usually do.
Article’s from nine years ago? This is where we’re at now.
I’m personally pinning my hopes on Pigasus, the people’s pig and the only honest candidate… Vance claiming to have the interests of the working class at heart is also about as ludicrous as billionaire Trump claiming the same. They’ll fool millions of working-class voters nonetheless, partly due to the dearth of genuine working-class organizations and groups to counter them.
The current situation in the US is also sort of reminiscent of the ’60s and ’70s in certain respects. The protests against the American-backed Israeli war on Palestinians (which is what it is) have their counterparts in the protests against the American war against the Vietnamese. There are also countless people on the left currently cheerleading for Hamas, who are anything but the liberators of Palestinians, just like people threw their support behind the National Liberation Front (the so-called “Viet Cong”) back in the day.
I don’t think you can really tell how Trump will handle the Russo-Ukrainian War, seeing as how he’s an unpredictable right-wing demagogue who is guided more by self-interest than any kind of consistent principles or world view. During his presidency from 2017 to 2021, he was not particularly close to Ukraine amid the Ukrainian Civil War, in which Russia was of course supporting the separatists. He notably withheld aid from Ukraine as part of the quid pro quo to get Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son. Since the invasion, Trump has also claimed that he could end the war on day one if re-elected, but he has never really spelled out any kind of actual plan, with the exception of hinting at possibly cutting off aid to Ukraine if Zelensky does not agree to negotiate with Russia. Cutting off aid or pressuring Ukraine to negotiate could be effective considering how continuing to arm Ukraine until they expel Russia, which is very unlikely to happen, would not solve the underlying issues that created the tensions in the first place. One could also note that Trump did little to de-escalate the civil war or to improve relations between Russia and Ukraine during his presidency, so his claims that he could quickly resolve the matter seem slightly dubious.
It is also probably a good thing that Trump, by his own admission, had originally not been too familiar with what NATO actually was and has not really shown much commitment to it. It is an organization/alliance that should have dissolved following the end of the Cold War (when it was originally aimed at the Soviet Union), and preferably should have never existed to begin with.
Whatever settlement emerges, I think it is important in the short-term for the Ukrainian government to recognize that they live in a pluralistic society and to stop discriminating against Russian speakers (e.g. the various discriminatory language laws that Ukraine has enacted, or attempted to enact, following the 2014 overthrow of Yanukovych). The Ukrainian government also needs to give up on its efforts at joining NATO, which is simply a hostile act that Russia (or any other “sane” country) would never allow at their doorsteps. Similarly, the Ukrainian government should give up on its ambitions at recapturing Crimea and the other Russophilic regions of Ukraine, especially considering how the ethnic-Russian majority in Crimea do not even desire “liberation” to begin with. The idea of Ukraine recapturing Crimea, which Putin has described as one of his “red lines,” is simply madness, and something Ukraine and the West should try taking a bit more seriously. (It is also amazing how so many people in the West are unaware of the substantial support for Russia within Crimea, mostly because they’re only fed Ukrainian war propaganda. Here’s a rare video by NBC reporters in Crimea, for instance, which captures some of the residents’ Russophilic views. Crimea has in fact always been closer to Russia, and was originally transferred over to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954, so it is not simply a matter of interviewees merely feeling pressured to express favorable opinions towards Moscow, though that is certainly a factor in many surveys and interviews.)
While it might not be socialism, both the Ukrainian and Russian governments should listen to and respect whatever the people in the contested regions actually want. Following the overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014, for example, a Ukrainian—not a Russian—survey indicated that people in the Donbas were in favor of different forms of greater independence or regional autonomy, though were mostly against being outright absorbed by Russia.[1] Ukraine and Russia should hold similar surveys or referendums today, and, if the bourgeois leaderships of these countries actually care about democracy, attempt to fulfill those results.
1. To be precise, 25.7% wanted to maintain the current status in a unitary Ukraine with extended authority, 23.5% wanted autonomy within a federal Ukraine, 8.4% wanted separation from Ukraine and the formation of an independent state, and 22.5% wanted separation from Ukraine and to join another state (i.e. Russia). See the table for the other percentages. See also Richard Sakwa’s scholarly book Frontline Ukraine, pp. 153-154.
Incredibly lucky, and yeah, this botched assassination will probably win him quite a bit of sympathy by making him appear “tough” and willing to “sacrifice his life for the American people.” You also couldn’t ask for a better series of photos, with the orange (or red?) idiot standing bloodied with a raised fist (for whatever reason) behind a flag, etc. Joe’s been toast. Sadly another Trump presidency will likely be even worse for Palestinians (with the former Trump administration having been one of the most pro-Israeli administrations throughout Israel’s existence), as well as for countless others.
